British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
English Episcopal Acta
Chairman: Professor W. M . Ormrod
Co-General Editor: Dr P Hoskin
Contact: ph19@york.ac.uk
Website: http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/cat/eea.html
In the late Middle Ages bishops’ registers form a resource, unique to this country, for the work of bishops, the management of sees and the whole structure of the English secular church; they illuminate a spectrum of activities from art and architecture to patronage and politics. But the registers only start in the thirteenth century, in some sees not until even later. For the period from 1066 to the beginning of the registers — at varying dates for each see — the gap can only be filled by patiently collecting episcopal acta, bishops’ charters, from widely scattered sources, editing them and studying their cumulative message. The acta survive in hitherto unappreciated numbers but are highly dispersed, in collections of charters and all manner of later copies, especially cartularies; occasionally in chronicles and letter collections; very frequently in the collections of antiquaries of the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries. EEA aims to publish a complete record.