Provenances that should be acquisitions?

[andrew-morrison]

There seem to be quite a few Medieval TEI files in which the last provenance element in a history contains a description of how the manuscript entered the holding institution. Presumably they are from before the point when the use of acquisition was adopted?

You can find them using Oxygen's Find/Replace in Files tool, by searching for Bodleian, restricted to this XPath: //provenance[not(following-sibling::acquisition)]

Here's an example (in MS. Ashmole 304):

<history>
  <origin>
     <origDate calendar="Gregorian" notAfter="1259" notBefore="1240" cert="high">13th century, middle (before 1259)</origDate>
     <origPlace>
        <country key="place_7002445">English</country>, <orgName key="org_148894515" role="formerOwner">St. Albans, Benedictine abbey</orgName>
        <!--ORIGINAL: English, St. Albans-->
     </origPlace>
  </origin>
  <provenance>Written at St Albans Abbey, mostly by Matthew Paris (d. 1259).</provenance>
  <provenance>A copy was made from the MS. in the third quarter of the fourteenth century (MS. Digby 46).</provenance>
  <provenance>The Middle English annotations, which probably date from the second half of the fifteenth century, perhaps suggest that the MS. was no longer in monastic ownership.</provenance>
  <provenance>'<persName role="formerOwner" key="person_2859">Thomas West</persName> writt this same anno domini 1602': otherwise unidentified (fol. 67v, cf. fol. 1r).</provenance>
  <!-- fol. 1,  Marmaduke B[?l]oiiiiii...-->
  <!-- fol. 15, 25 erased inscription(s)? -->
  <provenance>A copy was made from the MS. in the seventeenth century (British Library MS. Sloane 3857)</provenance>
  <provenance>'Ex dono <persName role="formerOwner" key="person_2860">-- Vaughan</persName> coll. En. nasi schol.' (note in the hand of Edward Lhuyd, d. 1709, fol. 1r). Not in the 1697 catalogue, so presumably entered the Ashmolean Museum between 1697 and 1709 (<title>Summary Catalogue</title> V.82).</provenance>
  <provenance>Transferred to the Bodleian Library in 1860.</provenance>
</history>

[holfordm]

Yes. The explanation is that not all the records with provenance info. included info. about when Bodleian acquired the MSS.; so, everything had to go in <provenance>. These records should be fixed now, however.