The sub-group NON-MED MATERIALS consists of material relating to the Early Modern English Dictionary (EMED), in three series: the EMED Up to Its Official Postponement in 1939; Manuscript Concordances and Collections by Charles Crawford; and Subsequent Work on the EMED Materials during the 1960s and 1970s.
As noted earlier in this Finding Aid, work on the EMED began at the University of Michigan under the direction of Charles C. Fries in 1928 and was carried out in earnest until 1939, but was then officially postponed in favor of the MED, though some work was carried on informally until 1943. An opportunity to resume work on the EMED presented itself in 1965 when R. C. Alston of the University of Leeds proposed to make use of the Michigan materials to prepare a dictionary of Tudor English (1475-1640; see details in box 13: Non-MED Materials: EMED 1962-1973). Faculty members in the Department of English concluded that the University was not prepared at that time to engage in a project as large as this, but local interest in the EMED materials was renewed, beginning with correspondence among interested lexicographers and scholars and followed by a Conference on Lexicography, held in Ann Arbor in July 1967, whose purpose was to review the history, resources, and editorial policy of the EMED and to assess the prospects for continuing it.
Early in 1968 plans were drawn up to evaluate the EMED citation file, using computer techniques for information storage and retrieval wherever possible. Significant progress was made that summer and the two years following, and beginning in 1971, thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Richard W. Bailey, James W. Downer, Jay L. Robinson, and their research associates were able to continue their work, which resulted in the publication of Michigan Early Modern English Materials in 1975, a print handbook and bibliography with a collection of microfiche containing over 38,000 citations from Early Modern English texts (for a total collection of some one million words). Further work was carried out between 1975 and 1977, adding roughly 9,000 citations (and another half a million words) and collecting data for a volume of additions and antedatings to the corpus of Early Modern English. It was hoped at that time that work on a full-fledged EMED could begin after the MED was completed, but that hope was abandoned, and in 1994 the Early Modern English quotation slips (both those originally donated by Oxford University Press and those collected here) were sent to the Press for use in its third edition (in progress) of the OED.
At the time of the creation of the first Finding Aid for the MED records in 2010, it was thought that all that remained of the EMED records (except for a few EMED materials in boxes 7 and 13) were some bibliographical records on 3" x 5" cards primarily from the 1930s, and these were arranged in seven files: Master Bibliography of Early Modern English Texts; Early Modern English Texts and Reference Works in the Former EMED Library; Clements Library Early Modern English Holdings; Law Library Early Modern English Holdings; Books Housed in the Former MED Library for the Use of the EMED; and General Bibliography in the Former EMED Library; plus a fragmentary eighth file, a Selective List of Early Modern English Suffixes, on paper slips.
In 2012 the Manuscript Concordances and Collections by Charles Crawford, which had been part of the collection of books in the former EMED Library, was added as a second series, now boxes 88-91. Then in 2015 a large number of original EMED records and files was discovered in a storeroom in the basement of Angell Hall at the University of Michigan. These were incomplete and may not have been looked at since the end of the project in the late 1970s. They were examined, winnowed out, and tentatively sorted into categories, with some distributed according to whether they belonged to the MED, the Dictionary of Old English in Toronto, or the OED in Oxford. The remaining records were added to the EMED records here. These new records have replaced the old files for the first series, now entitled the EMED Up to Its Official Postponement in 1939 (boxes 92 through 95, boxes 79 through 87), and they provide a completely new third series, now entitled Subsequent Work on the EMED Materials during the 1960s and 1970s (boxes 96 through 98).
