[Bibulus-users] entry type for medievalists

[Jesse Billett]

Dear Bibulus users and developers,

I have just been made aware of your exciting project after spending a 
couple of weeks snooping around BibTeX .bst files to see if there's 
anything suitable for my research, and have found nothing.  Zero.  
Therefore, I thought you might like some input from a hopeful user of 
your software who has, it's sad to say, no training as a developer.

I study medieval history and liturgy.  Like all medievalists, many of 
the sources with which I work are medieval manuscripts.  These are 
referenced in bibliographies in forms similar to this:

City, Library, Shelfmark
e.g. London, British Library, MS Royal 2.A.10

For citations within the text, sometimes more information is necessary, 
such as referring to a folio number, taking the form "fol. 221", or 
"fols. i--x, 12--27."  (Medieval books are rarely numbered with pages, 
though this sometimes happens and would require an option.)

The first citation in a chapter would need to indicate the date of the 
manuscript, its place of origin, and often a standard reference work in 
which it is cited, and perhaps books where the manuscript might be 
edited, reproduced in facsimile, or discussed in detail:

Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Amiatino I, {\em CLA} III, 299: s. 
vii--viii (before A.D. 716), Jarrow or Wearmouth, Northumbria; see E. 
A. Lowe, {\em English Uncial} (Oxford, 1960), pp. 11--12, nn. 12--13, 
Plates VIII and IX; B. Bischoff, {\em Latin Paleography: Antiquity to 
the Middle Ages}, tr. D. \'{O} Cr\'{o}in\'{\i}n and D. Ganz (Cambridge, 
1999), pp. 71 and 199.

So this would require the following traditional BibTeX-style fields:

Address:                Florence
Library:                Biblioteca Laurenziana
Shelfmark:	Amiatino I (the MS prefix doesn't apply to all styles... 
needs to be optional)
Pagerange:      [empty if all]
Date:		s. vii--viii (before A.D. 716) [ "s" here is for the Latin 
"saecula", and refers
                        to the centuries when the book might have been made]
Origin:         Jarrow or Wearmouth, Northumbria
Standardref:	\CLA III, 299 % (use a macro for abbreviated names.  This 
one is
                        "Codices   Latini Antiquiories", a standard ref. work)
Edition:                [citation key for an edition of the manuscript]
Seealso:                [pp.~11--12, nn.~12--13, Plates VIII, IX]{Lowe:1960}
                        [pp. 71, 199]{Bischoff:1999}

I hope you might find this an appropriate entry type.  It would 
certainly broaden the appeal of Bibulus.  I am in touch with an 
expanding circle of medieval researchers who have found LaTeX to be 
very useful.  This would help them a lot.  In the meantime, I'm looking 
into modifying the jurabib style to see if it might work.

Best wishes,

Jesse Billett

Faculty of History
King's College
Cambridge University
Cambridge, UK CB2 1ST