Matthew James Driscoll

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Primary fields of research

• Icelandic saga literature, in particular the late medieval mythical-heroic sagas (fornaldarsögur) and chivalric romances (riddarasögur).
• Popular literature in post-Reformation Iceland, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. This includes both prose sagas and metrical romances (rímur).
• Manuscript and textual studies.
• Text encoding and digital humanities.

Fields of interest

Icelandic language and literature in general, textual scholarship, book history, manuscript studies.

Current research

My research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of Old and Early-Modern Icelandic.

In addition to my work with manuscripts copied by ordinary people in 18th- and 19th-century Iceland I have recently recieved funding for a research project devoted to the study of one of the Spanish manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan Collection, AM 377 fol., recently identified as El libro de los epítomes, one of the catalogues or inventories from the great library of Hernando Colón (1488-1539), son of the famous navigator Christopher Columbus. The project's chief deliverables are a bilingual (Latin-English) critical edition of the Libro, to be published by Oxford Univeristy Press, and a database of the books summarised in the Libro hosted by the Consortium of European Research Libraries..