Matthew J. Driscoll

Email: mjd@hum.ku.dk

Short Biography

M. J. Driscoll is Professor of Old Norse Philology at the Arnamagnæan Institute, a research centre

within the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He holds

degrees from the University of Stirling (BA (Hons.) 1979), Háskóli Íslands (Cand.mag. 1988) and

Oxford University (DPhil 1994).

His research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of late pre-

modern Icelandic. He also has a long-standing interest in the Digital Humanities, and served for

many years on the technical council of the Text Encoding Initiative. In this capacity he chaired the

TEI Task Force on Manuscript Description (2003-5), whose job was the definition of a module for

the description of text-bearing artefacts.

His publications include over 50 articles on various aspects of pre-modern Icelandic literature,

editions and translations of a number of medieval and post-medieval Icelandic works, as well as

the monograph The unwashed children of Eve: The production, dissemination and reception of

popular literature in post-Reformation Iceland (Enfield Lock, 1997).

He has for years been involved in the organisation of the international conference on “The care

and conservation of manuscripts”, held every two years in Copenhagen, and has edited the last

eight volumes of the conference's proceedings, published by Museum Tusculanum Press.

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