Author: Henrike Lähnemann

Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies.

The Seven Deadly Sins and Their Antidotes

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08/10/2020

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By Florence Eccleston

Reblogged from Introducing Medieval Christianity.

Personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins in a fourteenth-century manuscript (British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 21, f. 165

The motif of the Seven Deadly Sins was extremely popular in the late medieval period, featuring in everything from literature, hymns, sermons, and manuals to wall paintings, manuscripts, and morality plays. The sins were Superbia, Avaritia, Luxuria, Ira, Gula, Invidia, and Acedia, now generally understood as Pride, Avarice (or Covetousness), Lust, Wrath (Anger), Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth (Laziness). They followed a loose hierarchy. Pride, the most demonic sin from which sprung the rest, came first. It was followed by the ‘spiritual’ vices, envy and wrath. Then came the vices related to the flesh: sloth, then gluttony, avarice, and lust. All were believed to fatally affect the individual’s spiritual health. As Dan Jon Gaytrygge’s mid-fourteenth century sermon expressed it, ‘For als the venym of the neddire slaas manes body, swa the venym of syn slaas manes saule’ (‘for as the venom of the adder slays man’s body, so the venom of sin slays man’s soul.’)

The idea of enumerating sins in this way originated in the early medieval period, and the motif of the Seven Deadly Sins in particular relies on a list made by Pope Gregory I in 590. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Gregory’s list was being defended, deliberated, and extensively explained. A rationale was evolved to explain why seven (a number of great religious significance) and why those specific sins (a tricky matter to prove), and subsets of vices were added to each sin. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 advised annual confession and gave the church greater authority for the remittance of sins, this definition of sin began to appear more frequently in popular literature, sermons, and guides for confessors. The Council stated that the worshippers should ‘faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own (parish) priest and perform to the best of their ability the penance imposed’, the priest ‘carefully inquiring into the circumstances of the sinner and sin’. The Council added ‘let this salutary decree be published frequently in the churches, that no one may find in the plea of ignorance a shadow of excuse’. Clearly it was extremely important for every member of the laity and clergy to protect both themselves and/ or their parishioners from spiritual death and eternal damnation.

Lay people and clergy alike needed tools for recalling and identifying the sins to be confessed, and the numerical device of the Seven Deadly Sins proved very popular. The sins were so frequently expounded and depicted in art that it is likely everyone would understand them. By confessing their Deadly Sins, the perpetrator could achieve complete absolution and a penance to perform as atonement. (More minor sins, called venial sins, could be forgiven without the sacrament of confession, as long as the sinner had made a sincere resolution to reform their behaviour.) Confessing sins was not just about punishment: it encouraged regular self-reflection, and the act of penance and the provocation of shame was believed to bring the soul closer to God and reclaim individuals from a life of sin.

A tree of the Seven Deadly Sins and their fruits (BL Arundel MS. 83, f. 128). For discussion of such images, see this article

The Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century seems to have increased the prevalence of the Seven Deadly Sins motif, as preparing for death and the afterlife became a primary concern. Dying without fully confessing one’s sins was greatly feared, since it would lead straight to hell. The scale and suddenness of the pandemic, with its estimated 30-60% mortality rate, made this fear a very pressing issue. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ever-present threat of death and subsequent fear for the fate of one’s soul became a widespread theme in art and literature.

Paintings of the Seven Deadly Sins in churches would warn the worshipper of the danger and help them to gain protection against Purgatory and Hell. A famous example is found at Trotton in West Sussex, where the Last Judgement mural on the west (back) wall of the church, dating to the last two decades of the fourteenth century, presents the Seven Deadly Sins leading directly to damnation. Christ is depicted at the highest point, atop a cloud, performing judgement from the heavens. Below him to his right are the Seven Deadly Sins, personified by a naked man surrounded by scenes of each sin emerging from the mouths of dragons. Above, an angel sends a soul to hell on Christ’s command. The painting instructs the parishioner on the key behaviours to avoid in life to escape eternal damnation in the afterlife.

Trotton Seven Deadly Sins (Medieval Wall Painting in the English Church)

Antidotes to the Seven Deadly Sins

Increasing cultural emphasis on death and the afterlife in the second half of the fourteenth century did not just respond to a fear of hell, but also led to a greater interest in codes of morality and virtuous behaviour. The ‘remedies’ to the Seven Deadly Sins were cited in art and literature, and were also classified into Sevens: the Seven Heavenly Virtues and the Seven Works of Mercy. The Seven Virtues combined the four cardinal virtues (Justice, Temperance, Prudence, and Courage) and the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity), and were thought to protect against the temptation to sin.

The Seven Works of Mercy referred to actions rather than attitudes, but were also thought to enhance the ability to avoid sin. They are divided into two groups of seven: corporeal (‘bodily’) works, which deal with physical and material needs, and spiritual works, which concern the needs of the soul. The corporeal works are:

  • To feed the hungry
  • To give water to the thirsty
  • To clothe the naked
  • To shelter the homeless
  • To visit the sick
  • To visit the imprisoned or ransom the captive
  • To bury the dead

Unlike the Seven Deadly Sins, this enumeration is based directly on a list in the Bible. The first six works are listed in Christ’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats as acts of charity which will lead to salvation. The last was added in the early medieval period to bring the number up to seven, influenced by the emphasis in the Book of Tobit on giving proper burial to the dead. In the Trotton wall-painting, the antithesis to ‘sinful’ man, surrounded by the Seven Deadly Sins, is ‘good’ man personified as a Franciscan friar, surrounded by the corporeal Works of Mercy. These behaviours are therefore sharply classified into good and bad, moral and immoral. Depictions of the Seven Works of Mercy are also frequently found in medieval art, as in the example below:

The Works of Mercy in a fourteenth-century manuscript (British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 31, f. 110v)

The spiritual Works of Mercy are:

  • To instruct the ignorant
  • To counsel the doubtful
  • To admonish sinners
  • To bear patiently with those who wrong us
  • To forgive offences
  • To comfort the afflicted
  • To pray for the living and the dead

Neither of these groupings are in direct opposition to the Seven Deadly Sins, and treatises looking exclusively at both the Seven Heavenly Virtues and the Sins are rare. In other words, the sins and virtues do not mirror each other as positive and negative moral positions: for example, the opposite of lust, chastity, is not found among the Seven Virtues, or in any of the actions recommended by the Seven Works of Mercy. Thus although the Seven Deadly Sins is a very common motif in medieval art, it was not usually paired with the moralities, and it was even rarer for them to be directly opposed. More often they formed two separate codes of morality – what to do, and what not to do.

However, performing – or not performing – the Seven Works of Mercy was also a question of sinful behaviour, and so could also be used for confession. A late fifteenth-century instruction for priests, published by Wynkyn de Worde, lists the numerical devices to work through during confession: ‘Synnes be confession of the sevene dedly synnes, […] and thanne in not fulyllyng the seven werkes of mercy’ (‘Sins are confession of the Seven Deadly Sins… and then in not performing the Seven Works of Mercy’). This emphasises that sin is defined not only by sinful action but also neglect of moral duties. It is possible to sin by omission (failing to perform a duty) as well as by commission (committing an actively sinful deed).

Both the Sins and Works gained popularity in the Middle Ages as practical tools to analyse moral behaviour. These lists were aids to the memory and the conscience, helping Christians to interpret and reflect on their own actions and providing simple, memorable guidelines on how to behave more virtuously.

Further reading

For a survey of the Seven Deadly Sins from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, see Morton W. Bloomfield, Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing, Michigan, 1952).

Richard Newhauser, The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions Series, No. 123 (Brill, 2007).

Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard, eds., Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins (York Medieval Press, 2012).

A great online resource is Miriam Gill, ‘The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Corporal Works of Mercy in English Medieval Wall Painting: Imperfect Parallels’ (University of Leicester), available at https://www.le.ac.uk/arthistory/seedcorn/imperf.html

A Note From Florence:

I began writing for Introducing Medieval Christianity in the second year of my undergraduate degree in History of Art after seeing a call for articles open to anyone at any stage of their academic career. I wanted to broaden my interests and knowledge of other disciplines, and I thought researching and writing would be a good place to start. I emailed Eleanor with some possible topics, and wrote my first article ‘Light and Colour in Medieval Christianity’. Since then, I’ve written three more articles, as and when I had the time and inspiration! It has been really great being able to communicate my interests and research to a wider audience. 

Where Do Myths, Legends and Folktales Come From?

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08/10/2020

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By Carolyne Larrington

Reblogged from March 2019.

The British Isles have a very long history, stretching back well before written records began. Much of what we might think of as early history is really legend – tales about the Druids, the story of Cædmon (the ‘father of English poetry’, who lived at Whitby Abbey) and the exploits of King Arthur for example. Interwoven with our understanding of history are the threads of myth, legend and folklore; these shape and colour our understanding of both our past and our present.

WHAT ARE MYTHS, LEGENDS AND FOLKLORE?

Myths are usually understood as stories about gods or divine figures. They answer big questions such as: how was the world created? Where do humans come from? How did we learn to make fire, or to smith metal? What is the origin of the gods? The term ‘myth’ may be used more loosely to cover whole cycles of tales, like the stories of the Irish gods or the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, dealing with Welsh semi-divine characters. Stories that explain where certain peoples come from are known as ‘origin myths’; the most important and enduring origin myth for Britain is the legend of Brutus, a refugee from Troy who sailed to these shores and slew all the giants who were then the only inhabitants, giving his name to the British Isles.

Legends deal with heroes, imagined as human or superhuman, such as St George, Robin Hood, or Hereward the Wake. Sometimes there is a semi-historical basis for these stories. Hereward was a real person, descended from Viking lords on the one hand and English nobility on the other, who led a resistance movement to the Normans after the Conquest. Legends usually have a close connection with a particular place, such as Sherwood Forest, home of Robin Hood, or Tintagel, where King Arthur is said to have been conceived, Stonehenge, or Dover Castle, where the skull of Arthur’s famous knight, Sir Gawain, was long preserved.

Folklore covers a range of beliefs, from the existence of fairies who dance in certain places when the moon is full, to the habits of the Loch Ness Monster, to the belief that witches can turn into hares and steal milk from cows. Many of our most familiar stories, of dragons, black dogs, kelpies or hobs, are folkloric; they contain motifs which are commonly found in other stories told across Europe, or they tap into beliefs that are widely held across the British Isles.

Myths and legends have the remarkable property of often being rooted in particular places, and yet their general outlines tend to be surprisingly universal. Similar stories occur all over the world, varying only in particular details. So, versions of Cinderella or the Three Men who went to Search for Death can be found in places as far apart as China, India, Britain and North America. Sometimes it’s clear that these stories spread through migration, and were then passed down by word of mouth across the generations – thus, quite a few English folktales and ballads made it to North America and are still in circulation to this day.

WHY ARE THEY SHARED?

The explanation for these internationally shared tales may be that they are rooted in general human experience. Our shared biology and universally similar life-cycles, from birth, marriage, child-rearing, ageing and death, may generate broadly similar stories: about true love or the perils of raising children, or futile attempts to surmount the barrier between life and death. Such dilemmas and difficulties are common to humans wherever they live, giving rise to universal patterns in the world’s store of traditional tales.

Experts are divided about exactly how stories develop and spread from place to place, but it is clear that myths and legends have always had important roles in our culture. Short tales are crucial in imparting vital information or life lessons in a memorable form – think of The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”, for example. Useful lore is transmitted from generation to generation in a brief and comprehensible form. They explain why small children shouldn’t be allowed to stray near a dangerous body of water or why it may be a bad idea to go up into the mountains alone. Groups that know how to pass on such stories improve the life-chances of those who hear them, and those folk in turn pass on the stories to their children.

Traditional tales often hinge on ethical or moral issues, or they permit insight into the way other people think. So they insist that you should keep your promises – and should avoid making rash ones; that courage and perseverance will be rewarded and that the wicked do not prevail in the end. It’s not always the big, beefy hero that is lauded in such tales; cunning and quick-wittedness, associated very often with the youngest child, or with a poor person can solve the immediate problem and win the day for the hero.

The arrival of Uther Pendragon and Merlin at Tintagel (© Bibliothèque nationale de France)

FAMOUS BRITISH MYTHS

The British Isles have their myths and legends, preserved in some of our earliest written records. The story of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who battled monsters and a dragon, probably originated in eighth-century Northumbria, although it was not written down until the early eleventh century. Irish legends of gods and heroes were also written down in the twelfth century or later. In Welsh there are heroic poems from as early as the sixth century; one such poem contains the first ever reference to the hero Arthur.

England’s most famous heroes are probably King Arthur and Robin Hood.

KING ARTHUR

Arthur is a blended type of heroic figure. Some of his characteristics stem from a legendary Welsh hero who fought monster-cats and dog-headed men and who went off to the Underworld to steal a magic cauldron. Yet Arthur also takes inspiration from a British war-leader, mentioned in early chronicles, who led his people against the invading Saxons. Arthur’s first full biography was related by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1138, but elements of the story were already widely known across Europe. In the mid-fifteenth-century, Sir Thomas Malory who was confined as a prisoner in the Tower of London, wrote down the best-known version of the Arthur story, incorporating into it tales of the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. Malory included the ancient mythic ending, in which Arthur does not die after his last battle, but rather is borne away by boat to the Isle of Avalon. He will return to come to the country’s aid in Britain’s darkest hour.

ROBIN HOOD

There are references to various men called Robin Hood in thirteenth-century records, though it is not until 1377 that we hear of tales of ‘Robin the Outlaw’ being told in the tavern. Legends about Robin and his men, clad in Lincoln Green, who haunt Sherwood Forest, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, are first printed in the late fifteenth century. Later still, Robin is transformed from a thuggish and immoral thief to a dispossessed nobleman in exile in the greenwood.

These two myths became very popular once again in the Victorian period. Both stories were mobilised for political and ideological purposes. Arthur, the great king who ruled over much of the west and whose knights battled evil, rescued maidens and sought the Holy Grail, served as a model for Britain’s imperial and enlightened rule. Wherever the British went, the myth suggested, they tried to behave nobly, to establish law and order, and to bring Christian values to ‘less civilised’ peoples. Robin Hood and his Merry Men spoke to ideas of a peculiarly English democratic tradition and independence of mind. Robin stood for fairness and justice, for a certain amount of distribution of wealth, and he hated the hypocrisy and corruption of the establishment: the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the bloated and greedy churchmen whose treasures Robin regularly stole. Robin came to stand for the sturdy average Englishman, mistrustful of authority, but loyal to his rightful king, gallant towards women and with a marked sense of humour. Both these mythic figures had important work to do in the contemporary culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT THESE STORIES?

British myths, legends and folktales have survived in all kinds of different contexts. Some – like the stories of Brutus or Hereward the Wake – are recorded in medieval chronicles that purport to be ‘actual’ history. Others were written down as entertaining tales in early manuscripts, and from there were put into book form once the printing press was invented. Still other stories were not written down until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when people captured legends and folktales that were on the verge of dying out; many of our best sources for traditional stories are to be found in late eighteenth-century books of ballads or in Victorian folk-tale compilations.

Myths and legends began to be recorded just as soon as humans mastered the technology of writing. Often the very first texts were hymns to the go

King Arthur book sculpture



ds or collections of mythological stories that became organised into cycles, explaining how the world was created, how humans came into existence or why Death is necessary. Such stories are recorded in the Bible – the Fall, Noah’s Flood, for example – and in Greek myth. Hero-tales are also among the most ancient of story-types.

In contrast to these very ancient written sources, most of the world’s myths and legends have been preserved in oral versions, passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. The recording of these tales began only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when explorers, scholars and anthropologists became interested in tradition, and were motivated to learn tribal languages and to record with pen and ink (and subsequently electronically) the vivid and unfamiliar tales they were told.

MYTHS AND THE MODERN WORLD

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries myths, legends and folktales began to be seen as the province of children. They could be retold in simple and wholesome ways, shaped in order to point up important morals and to recommend particular models of behaviour. The King Arthur myth became a staple of children’s literature, and the Knights of the Round Table, in particular such figures as Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot, were held up as exemplifying the ideal of chivalry.

In the twentieth century, writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and after them, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling seized on the myths and legends of the British Isles to inspire new fantasy worlds for both children and adults. The Old English epic of Beowulf, the first dragon-fighter in our tradition, inspired Tolkien’s Smaug in The Hobbit. The legend of King Arthur and the Sleeping Knights features in Garner’s stories about Alderley Edge; he also transposes a story from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi to contemporary Wales in The Owl Service. Susan Cooper melds together Welsh legend, Arthurian myth and the tradition of Herne the Hunter. Pullman and Rowling appropriate both English and wider European folk-tradition in the worlds of their novels: house-elves and black dogs jostle with giants, witches and fairies, talking bears and hippogriffs.

The detailed fountain at Witley Court portrays the Ancient Greek  hero Perseus saving a maiden, Andromeda, from a deadly sea monster. This tale may be the original example of the ‘hero saving a maiden in distress’ theme that frequently occurs in myth and legend.

These authors wrote initially for a young adult audience, but the children and teenagers that learned to love this kind of story-telling grew up to appreciate – and to write their own – fantasy of various kinds. From the Star Wars films, which depend on classic models of the hero and the princess, good and evil, quests and family identity, to the powerful mythological elements that underlie the work of George R. R. Martin and the hit HBO TV series ‘Game of Thrones’, the elements of traditional story have crossed over into popular culture. ‘Game of Thrones’ contains elements of Old Norse myth – the ravens and direwolves, the Long Winter and the wights. The tale of Atlantis is reflected in the history of Valyria, and Westeros has its very own King Arthur, the lost heir who must reclaim his kingdom, in the form of Jon Snow.

Vampires and werewolves, creatures from European tradition symbolise contrasting elements in human nature: violence and desire, beauty and horror, featuring in titles such as the Twilight series and Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. Also drawing on myth from Scandinavia is the Thor franchise, while other superhero series use similar tropes of hero and monster, re-tooling and modernising many of the characters, themes and stereotypes of myth and legend. They are staples of video games that are often set in fantasy universes and structured around the quest as a framework.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE IN MYTH

Alongside the grand figures of gods, demi-gods, heroes and monsters that feature in the great myths and legends of the British Isles, there are many less well-known stories that often adhere to particular landscapes and places. One such is the story of how Merlin came to magic the Giant’s Dance stone circle away from Ireland across the sea to form Stonehenge as a monument to the great Romano-British battle leader Ambrosius Aurelius.

Many famous historic sites of the British Isles have long and fascinating pasts, and have played their part in the events that have shaped the nation. But just as many – perhaps even more – are linked to myths, legends and folktales, from the great legendary cycles of Arthur or Robin Hood, to figures such as Wayland of Wayland’s Smithy on the Ridgeway. He was a legendary smith, the most skilled craftsman of all, whose brutal story of maiming and cruel vengeance is retold in Anglo-Saxon sculpture and poetry, and in Old Norse legend. Britain’s landscapes and historic buildings form the backdrop to the vivid and exciting myths, legends and folktales of our spoken and written heritage; stories that fascinate, astonish and move us still today.

Carolyne Larrington teaches medieval literature at the University of Oxford and researches widely into myths, legends and folklore, in particular in Old Norse-Icelandic and Arthurian literature. She is the author of The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles (2015); Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), and The Norse Myths (2017).

Running the Dark Archives

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30/09/2020

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30 September 2020 Tom Revell Llewelyn Hopwood Sophie Jordan

How to bring light into hidden corners of medieval manuscript studies? “Dark Archives 20.20” provided the opportunity to approach the topic in an innovative, digital-born way. Here two of the Oxford Graduate students who took an active part in the conference reflect on their experience.

Running the Conference Events

Tom Revell, the new Oxford Medieval Studies Events Organiser, writes about his experience of the conference:

“Dark Archives 20/20 was the first entirely-virtual conference I’d ever taken a role in running, but the groundwork Dr Pink had already put in organising the programme on the darkarchiv.es site, uploading the recorded papers to YouTube, and using Eventbrite to register attendees, made the day-to-day running of the keynotes, panels, debates and competitions much easier. Zoom’s Webinar functionalities allowed us to schedule all the sessions in advance, as well as implement a captioning software that worked very well. The Webinar’s Host and Co-hosts promoted  necessary speakers for a given session to ‘Panelist’ from the ‘Attendees’ list, and then (alongside a number of other organisers and graduate students from Oxford and from the University of Colorado) we formed a team of moderators who made sure the right people were on screen at the right time, supplemented the questions collected from social media by Llewelyn with questions from the Zoom chat, and generally ensured the smooth running of the live portion of the conference. The Chairs found the role of the moderators to be a great help in allowing them and their panelists to enjoy an as-normal-as-possible experience, complete with question and answer interaction (text and voice) with attendees. Streaming the Compline was a trickier part of my assignment. Zoom has a plug-in that allows impromptu streaming to YouTube, but providing a link to the stream before we went live required a little more preparation. However, the amazing performance of all involved was transmitted live without a hitch, and is now available publicly on the Dark Archives YouTube channel.”

Running the Conference Social Media

Social Media Officer Llewelyn Hopwood, the Social Media Convenor, wrote about his experience:

“Early on, Dr. Pink delegated tasks astutely. I was made an administrator on all platforms used by Dark Archives about a week before the conference began, which meant I could use the full functionality of each platform and see exactly what was going on before and during the conference. As well as being able to manage the discussions over Zoom, we could also oversee everything that was happen on the conference’s Discord channel (which was more popular than I expected) and on Dark Archives’ YouTube channel (I was made a manager, using my own account, as was Tom, using the OMS account). However, as social media officer, most of my work happened before the conference started in earnest. The week beforehand, I galvanized excitement by tweeting out screenshots of some of the pre-recorded talks, and giving countdowns for the registration deadline, for talks going live, and for the beginning of the conference proper. Another task I was given was to administer the questions asked to speakers so that they could be discussed in a smooth and orderly fashion during the live sessions (we prioritised questions that were asked beforehand before going on to questions asked live in the Zoom Q&A or chat function). This involved scouring all the different platforms which participants could use to ask questions (YouTube comments, direct emails, the Discord channel, and, most of all, #DarkArchives on Twitter). I compiled these into separate word documents according to the sessions and sent them to the hosts of those sessions at least a day before their session, with updates every few hours when more came in. During the conference itself, each morning, I would send out a tweet outlining which talks registrants would need to (re)watch before the live sessions that day, and tag the relevant speakers – I also did this, in a slightly longer format, on our brand new Facebook page – and these summarizing tweets proved to be our most popular that week. Indeed, our Twitter account grew a fair amount during the build-up to Dark Archives, allowing us to pass the 3,000 followers mark!

Performing at Compline 

Sophie Jordan, Master student and member of the St Edmund Hall Chapel choir, writes: 

Of the many challenges encountered during the preparation of the Compline service, connecting the ancient crypt of St Peter in the East to reasonably steady wi-fi turned out to be one of the easiest to overcome. After having solved some other technical issues, like the overwhelming echoes coming from the chapel, and having practised singing in split cohorts, the choir had to decide which convention to follow when chanting the Latin text. Any minor disagreement on whether a ‘c’ should be pronounced ‘k’ or like the Italian ‘ch’ became more audible when only a few singers were performing. Then again, if the service had taken place in medieval Oxford, would the words have been heavily anglicised instead? We opted for the more familiar pronunciation and things fell into place in the heat of the musical action. 

I joined Henrike Lähnemann to form the Schola, and together we opened the service. With the few tealights we had lit purely for the purpose of creating a solemn image, our gowned figures cast enormous shadows on the grey stones behind us. Not quite gloomy, though a little on the chilly side, the atmosphere down in the crypt made my last service in Oxford a memorable one. And when our microphone was muted so that the other groups could sing their allocated parts, who could tell whether we were humming along? 

Performing Medieval Studies

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30/09/2020

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By Konstantin Winters

One year in the Medieval Germanosphere, or: Reflections on the strange, yet fitting relationship between language studies and performance art

When I arrived in Oxford one year ago, as an Erasmus intern taken in by Henrike Lähnemann, professor of Medieval German, I couldn’t have imagined how my weekly schedule and the work habits associated with it would turn out to be in the end.

The languages and dialects associated with the term Medieval German are dead, obviously. They are hypostatized as written text, unchanging and lifeless, and your relationship with them will only ever be a one-sided one, as you silently consult the bulky manuscripts in the depths of a library or their digital counterparts somewhere on a badly programmed web page. That was the way I had always treated Medieval Latin – as a fixed and atemporal entity, being a mere tool to express the lofty and otherworldly conceptual reality of theologians and scholars alike.

This began to change, however, when the acting started. There were only small gestures in the beginning, such as reading out loud the texts you were about to discuss in the Medieval German graduate colloquium. That was the ritual to be done at the beginning of each session, and one would have to just go along with the text to make it work. The relationship between language and acting became clearer when it subtly pervaded social events among medievalists, too. Celebrating a medieval compline in the crypt of Teddy Hall’s own St Peter in the East might not be an intuitive choice, – it is dusty, has the narrowest stairway imaginable and there are spiders everywhere! – but it is an authentic choice. And traditionally having one person dress up as St Nicholas at a get-together on the eve of the fifth of December to moderate the performance of the Christmas carols – while at the same time getting a bit tipsy himself from the good German Glühwein – seems to be rather a symptom of a more general phenomenon than just some spontaneous whim at this point. But: why exactly are we doing this?

Performance art is a new means of expression that literature scholars bring to the academic world. Their objection to the old mode of textual reception is that it doesn’t go beyond the abstract, or better: mediated. They want to put the text to action, to act it out, to take from it its mediate status and make it immediate. It doesn’t do, therefore, to just employ a categorial scheme to analyze a given text because every analysis has always already taken away the immediacy of its content. To perform something is the attempt at a mode of presentation capable of transcending the abstract and affecting its recipients in an immediate manner. It is in this theatrical setting that the scholar becomes a director. Of course it is not an academic theatre in the sense of a replacement of the old, but rather a theatre within academia, coexisting with and complementing the old.

Screenshot of a lecture capture of the Easterplay recordings

Screenshot of a lecture capture of the Easterplay recordings

My year in Oxford continued into January, and Henrike had already planned the next staging. Her Hilary lecture on medieval Easter plays were to be complemented by a two-person performance of the historical screenplay at the end of each session, and I was chosen as the second performer. (Watch the lecture series Easterplays recorded via the university lecture capture system panopto). I didn’t understand most of the textual content as they were written in some long-dead dialects of German I had no idea had even ever existed. Acting it out, however, this changed over the course of the term, as I gradually understood more of it, although in a more intuitive way. Most of the acting dynamics, I felt, didn’t go according to any preconceived plan, but were rather a matter of intuitively playing along. Towards the end of the term I learned about Oxford’s annual Easter play tradition and looked into some of the older performances from earlier years. Guess who was at the forefront every time? Language students. (Watch the Harrowing of Hell in Middle High German on the Mystery Cycle website)

The drama was at the artistic apex of ancient Greece, and no one captured its significance better than Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche, academically raised as a classical philologist, deliberately chose the novel as his genre of philosophical expression. His radical break with classical philosophy was less motivated by its contents, but more by the means of expression used to convey them. Only a gay science, the old organon of poetry-writing, of literary and dramatic art, would be able to express the human condition, the mode of us humans being in the world, without reducing us to the technical language of ossified metaphysics and morals. Fittingly, Nietzsche’s biggest and best known dispute didn’t involve another philosopher or academic in general, but Richard Wagner, the great German opera composer, for the allegedly heavy and exhausting atmosphere the latter created in his operas. Nietzsche himself prefers the light-hearted comedy, visualizing and detailed staging everything in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra to not only convey his philosophical message – which one may not entirely agree with – but also how it should be presented on stage. Sometimes Nietzsche even creates actor-characters within his literature, overtly hinting at its performative nature and complexifying the actor-character-relationship in the process.

Unfortunately, the real Easter play performance was cancelled due to the COVID19-pandemic steamrolling into each and every corner of society. But performance art as a means of exploration didn’t die then. The performances resumed, albeit in a much smaller fashion, by the end of July when it became possible again to meet up in small groups. By then, the very small performances were all recorded, without any live audience. The recording of the Hans Sachs dialogue between a catholic priest and a protestant cobbler involved a genuine medieval text and was recorded in one take over 45 minutes, though, without any warm-up. Performance art doesn’t need much preparation; it is just a matter of spontaneously going with the flow.

Fictional literature is never completely fixed. It think this lesson can be learned from all that. Every new reading creates its object anew; it is never just a bland repetition of something preexisting. Accordingly, performance art is not a scholarly method, let alone a scientific one. It is a reminder of this very incommensurability of all individual readings if you tried to grasp their essence in an abstract sense. In this eternal recurrence of new and unique readings and performances we do not seek to understand, but rather capitulate before the realization that in the end you can only choose to play along.

***

Konstantin Winters is a doctoral student in medieval history and philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf, editing part of the Commentary of the Sentences by William of Ware, a former Oxford student. During the academic year 2019/20, he worked as an Erasmus+ and DAAD funded intern at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

Listen to Konstantin Winters…

Exemplary difference: examples in historic music theory

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07/09/2020

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By Adam Whittaker

Reblogged from The Conveyor.

‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’, or so the famous phrase goes. And yet, we have been writing about music for centuries. We are fortunate to have such a range of medieval and Renaissance writings on music that survive, from luxurious presentation volumes to scrappy single sheets pasted into miscellaneous collection. Although we often see quite stable transmission of texts across multiple sources (sometimes across centuries), we see much greater variation in the examples and diagrams. These, it seems, were fair game for change, revision, and emendation for specific readerships and local contexts, or simply at the whim of the scribe. My research explores why these differences matter.

In the autumn of 2019 I was in Oxford as the Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellow in Music at the Bodleian Libraries. During my fellowship, I consulted a number of music theory manuscripts, including MS. Bodley 515 and MS. Digby 90. These manuscripts contain the famous Quatuor principalia musice [Four Fundamentals of Music], most likely authored and/or compiled by the English friar John of Tewkesbury in the late fourteenth century.

First, let’s look at one similarity. Early in the text, the theorist uses a monochord (a theoretical instrument of a single string) to explain the interval of a tone; a musical step in layman’s terms, as though moving from G to A on a piano. Both sources have a functionally similar diagram, even if there are some subtle visual differences.

Trumpet-like diagram of scales of one stringed instrument

Bodleian MS. Bodl. 515, fol. 10r (detail)

cone like diagram showing scales of one stringed instrument

Bodleian MS. Digby 90, fol. 11v (detail)

We can see that both manuscripts show a monochord (horizontal line representing a string); both indicate the interval of a tone between G (low G) and A with an arc labelled ‘tonus’; and both have the indication ‘monochordu[m]’ at the left-hand edge of the diagram. Bodl. 515 shows a more artistic approach to this diagram, with its coloured labels and decorative circles, whilst MS. Digby 90 favours equal tonal spacing with notches. Despite these differences, which might be attributed to scribal taste more than anything else, the reading experience across the two sources is near identical.

However, such similarity isn’t always present. If we look at the depiction of the Guidonian hand – a kind of conceptual map for musical space that is commonplace in music theory texts – we see both similarities and differences. The Guidonian Hand mapped the six-note intervallic pattern (ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la) onto physical locations on the body which a singer could use as a memory aid while they sang. To think about how the Hand works in practice, The Sound of Music’s ‘Do-Re-Mi’ is especially helpful. Let’s consider the diagrams presented in the two sources.

Diagram of a hand, each section of fingers labelled in latin

Bodleian MS. Digby 90, fol. 21r (detail)

Diagram of a hand in red, squiggly lines to the right.

Bodleian MS. Bodl. 515, fol. 23r (detail)

There are some important differences here. You’ll notice that MS. Bodl. 515 is missing labels on joints, whilst these are clearly visible in MS. Digby 90. These are crucial! Without the syllabic markings on the joints of the thumb and fingers, this diagram serves little demonstrative function, beautiful as it is. Such a scenario poses some interesting questions and might have left fifteenth-century readers scratching their heads. Is this just a scribal error? Was this aspect of the diagram to be entered in a different layer? Did the scribe not understand the diagram they copied? Was there an error in the exemplar copy that a scribe couldn’t resolve? What use is the diagram when it is missing such key information?

This last question is of particular importance for the final comparison I want to make here. The relationship between musical durational values is a fundamental building block of music notation. Early musical notations were more context-dependent, with the same note shape being worth two or three counts depending upon the context. Theorists found many intriguing ways to discuss this phenomenon, but the most interesting for the present discussion is the idea of a note value tree.

Some contemporaneous musical treatises refer to the ‘arbor’ of Johannes de Burgundia, a figure about whom we know nothing except for a passing reference to his ‘arbor’ in a musical treatise by Petrus de Picardia (fl. 1250). Both our sources include a diagram of this type, though we see some divergence in approach. In MS. Digby 90, we see the relationships made clear in a quasi-tabular format (largest values at the bottom), with lines connecting the related mensural levels. Working from the bottom up we see that the largest note value divides into three parts, which itself is divided into three smaller parts etc.:

Diagram of upside down family tree like structure

Bodleian MS. Digby 90, fol. 45r (detail)

By comparison, we see something which takes the tree much more to heart in MS. Bodl. 515:

Red family tree in a tree-lile shape

Bodleian MS. Bodl. 515, fol. 49v

The visual appeal of this is important. MS. Bodl. 515 offers hatched details on the trunk of the diagram, with additional coloured detailing which has faded over time. In this way, the longest note becomes the ‘root’ of the tree, and its subdivisions into smaller notes become represented as branches, themselves with sub-branches. Although both sources adequately demonstrate the theoretical point, the subtly different diagrams change the nature of the text–image relationship. The tree-like construction of MS. Bodl. 515 creates a sharp mental picture for a reader to recall. MS. Digby 90, though equally clear, establishes a different mensural picture. These diagrams demand different reading practices and present theoretical material in divergent ways.

My point here is not to assign greater value to either source, but to demonstrate that what might be dismissed as ‘minor scribal variants’ really matter when we consider how a reader might engage with a text in a specific manuscript source. If a diagram containing such foundational information that was common knowledge to expert readers, then why did a scribe go such significant effort to present this in a visually appealing manner? The reader’s experience of the same text in these two sources would have been quite different. Through this lens we begin to see the way that the materiality of music theory texts is at least as important as the contents of the texts themselves, and that the diagrams and examples give us an unparalleled insight into this. These theoretical ideas are alive in the manuscripts that preserve them.

Adam Whittaker is Head of Pedagogy and Lecturer in Music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Glopes, Pransawtes and Twyfyls: The Edge of Language in Middle English Drama

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29/07/2020

22:21

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By Jenni Nuttall

Five dragonflies and four mayflies. Coloured engraving by J. Newton, ca. 1780, after J. Barbut. Wellcome Trust Collection

Like mayflies which live only for a day, some words have a single attestation in the surviving written records of English (at least as far as current searches can ascertain). The Middle English Dictionary is careful to record these one-off words in medieval English. It gives entries, albeit very brief ones, to the rarest words, allocating them the same status (at least in one way) as the most common words which have very full entries. So why are we so fastidious about, and why should we be interested in, this most ephemeral of language?

Sometimes these one-off words come about by chance – a word might have been widely used in day-to-day speech but only got snagged in writing once. Sometimes the opposite happens: a word is deliberately invented by someone at a particular moment for a particular purpose. This latter kind are called nonce words, named by the Victorian lexicographer James Murray after the phrase ‘for the nonce’ (i.e. for a specific, one-off purpose).

Some of the most deliciously odd nonce words in the Middle English Dictionary — words like ‘glope’, ‘pransawte’ or ‘twyfyls’ — are preserved in the late medieval Towneley Plays, named not for their place of performance but for the owners of the manuscript in which they are collected. Once thought to be a cycle of pageants performed in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, it’s now recognised as ‘a disparate collection of plays, of varied origin and production requirements’.

A quilt by B J Elvgren depicting the Chester Mystery Plays

Wherever the plays came from, their authors had to meet the demands of writing verse drama in long stanzas requiring lots of rhymes. While many poets nowadays veer away from full rhymes as a matter of style, medieval verse-dramatists bend words or invent words to arrive at rhyme no matter what. So in ‘Herod the Great’, the invented adjective ‘myghtyus’ (i.e. mighty-ous), rather than the usual ‘mighty’, is formed to rhyme with ‘gracious’. Or in the ‘Judgement’ play, the compound adjective ‘ill-dedy’ (i.e. ‘ill-deed-y’), describing those who are sinful, is coined to rhyme with ‘greedy’ and ‘needy’.

What would an audience think about these coinages? Would they notice them as new or unusual? These plays were written before the first dictionaries, so perhaps anything goes. Yet the playwrights seem to bend language for oddity and amusement’s sake. Can one be ‘deed-y’ in the same way that you are ‘greed-y’ and ‘need-y’? ‘Mightious’ isn’t exactly like ‘gracious’ because we have ‘mighty’ already. Like a grotesque on a misericord or a weird scene in a manuscript margin, we might think of nonce words as ornamental deformations at the edges of verse and vocabulary, not accidental ‘error’ but wilfully ‘wrong’ invention.

My hunch is that medieval dramatists and audiences appreciated the very peculiar qualities of one-off words. When Herod is presented with the plan to slaughter the Innocents, he narrates his reaction with a one-off word rhyming with ‘hope’ and ‘pope’: ‘my hart is rysand / Now in a glope’ (meaning that his heart is aflutter). Middle English already has the verbs ‘glopnen’ and (much rarer) ‘glopen’, both meaning ‘to be afraid’. A number of Towneley’s one-off words are, like these verbs, derived from Old Norse, being Northern dialect words which don’t get recorded elsewhere in Middle English. But even allowing for that, I think this word is strange. Did you hear what he said? A glope! But what’s a glope? Is he emboldened or afraid? Herod becomes a rambling double-talker in a play that sits uneasily between humour and horror.
Folios 5v and 6r from Huntington Library MS HM 1, the manuscript of the Towneley Plays’

In the Doomsday play, the devil Titivillus (famous for collecting up mumbled prayers and chatter in church, and for making scribes make mistakes) helps other devils conduct an appraisal of the bad souls come for judgement. One devil mocks a sinner’s ‘pransawte’, a blend of ‘prance’ and ‘saut’ (meaning a leap or tumble) which describes quite perfectly those twirls of delight we make in a fancy new outfit. Tutivillus calls out a woman who wears ‘twyfyls’, which might be a lispingly pronounced ‘trifles’ or a mix of ‘twice’ and ‘trifle’, some adornment that comes in a pair. Nonce words like this represent the devilish abuse of language, and also the fashion and artifice which distracts us from what really matters and the ease of error. Yet, at the same time, they are highly evocative.

Towneley’s nonce words don’t get picked up and used elsewhere. Are they thus ultimately failures? My research on poetic neologisms suggests uniqueness was consciously preserved: poets often invent neologisms modelled on earlier examples but don’t so often repeat an earlier poet’s own nonce words. Remaining a mayfly is thus a mark of success. And maybe nonce words can have meaning in their near-meaninglessness, as revealed centuries later in Seamus Heaney’s lovely poem ‘Nonce Words’ (which you can read at the foot of this page).

Heaney’s speaker takes a wrong turn on a drive which leads to a snatched moment of contemplation parked up on a freezing day. In the cold, he seems to apprehend his own mortality. Shivering, he blesses himself in the name of ‘the nonce / and happenstance’, the chance that has brought him here. The title nudges us to spot Heaney’s own nonce creations. He, like the Towneley dramatists, exercises his right to personalise language, to invent words which live as briefly as mayflies or, as the poem tempts us to think, as briefly as humans and their creations, unique and ephemeral.  Yet thanks to the careful custody of lexicographers, nonce words can outlast their brief moment — how, Heaney asks, might we do the same?

Jenni Nuttall is a Lecturer in English at Exeter College, University of Oxford. She tweets and blogs about medieval literature at @Stylisticienne and stylisticienne.com, and has recently written about the history of gibberish for Aeon.co and History Today.

15th Century Booktrade and Learning in the time of Lockdown

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23/07/2020

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By Aoife Ní Chroidheáin

Reblogged from The Conveyor 

The community gathers for story telling. Opening woodcut in the Bodleian copy of the Decameron printed in Venice 1492 (Bodleian Library, S. Seld. c.2, fol. a1r); the digitisation was financed by the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project. Permalink: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/03e61008-693a-40f8-af0e-96661b22a6d2 – Catalogue Record: http://incunables.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/record/B-364

How have our reading practices changed during Lockdown? As somebody working with 20th century samizdat material for my doctoral thesis, I was surprised to find some of the most revealing answers to this question at an event centred round the 15th century booktrade project which took place in the Italian Embassy, London. In this blogpost I will reflect on the links between the printing and reading practices associated with 15th century booktrade and those of the later years of the GDR.

Over the last three months, we have seen the spirit of resilience and comradery fostered in communities across the world, supporting people through the adversity of the coronavirus pandemic. It would seem that the life advice Boccaccio imparted to us in the wake of the Black Death in his Decameron (1354), is still as apt as it ever was: “in our communities we can find solace”.

Written between 1348 and 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron contains stories told by a gathering of ten young people who had escaped to a villa outside Florence in order to flee the Black Death. Boccaccio’s frame story comprises a miscellany of tales: romantic, tragic and comedic, and ultimately offers a literary retreat from the pain and hardship of life in a time of plague. However, what emerges specifically from Boccaccio’s work is not just the importance of community, but also the curative power of literature.

For the characters in the Decameron, storytelling offered a moment of welcome reprieve from the difficulty of their life circumstances:

It behoveth us live merrily, nor hath any other occasion caused us flee from yonder miseries […] we shall pass away this sultry part of the day, not in gaming,–wherein the mind of one of the players must of necessity be troubled, without any great pleasure of the other or of those who look on, but in telling stories, which, one telling, may afford diversion to all the company who hearken. (Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. by John Payne (New York: Walter. J Black, 1886), pp 13-15)

Just as the characters in the Decameron came to each other and began storytelling in order to keep up morale, many members of the public today have turned to the creative arts once more to seek solace in this time of crisis. In the academic community, open-access online events have widened the scholastic community and created inclusive, virtual learning groups open to the public. Speaking at a recent webinar, Professor Cristina Dondi (Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities, Lincoln College, Oxford) noted that this movement towards wider educative inclusivity harkens back to key moments in the 15th century with the democratisation of learning through the era’s burgeoning international book. However, Dondi also reminded webinar attendees of how much further we must go in order to facilitate wider access to scholarly materials in archives.

As the Principal Investigator for the ‘15cBOOKTRADE Project’ at Oxford, Dondi was in the unique position of being able to offer insight into importance of the digitisation of historical texts. The aim of the project was to use the material evidence from thousands of surviving books from the 15th century to address five fundamental questions relating to the introduction of printing in the West. These questions included investigation of reading practices, the evaluation of the books’ contemporary market, the dissemination and visualisation of these texts, and finally, the use of illustrations.

For Dondi, and indeed many other academics, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the absolute necessity of digitisation of historical texts in order to create open-access learning communities befitting the social and academic developments of the 21st century.

‘The Dawn of Printing to Digital Access’

Circumnavigating current lockdown restrictions, the Italian embassy in London recently facilitated a webinar on ‘The Dawn of Printing to Digital Access: the benefits of making books available to everybody’. The event, hosted by Ambassador Trombetta and moderated by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, brought together international experts engaged in promoting wider accessibility to books of historical and cultural significance (to read more about this project, follow the hashtag #ItalyRestArt).

Image of #ItalyRestArt showing manuscripts

The webinar was focused on highlighting the progress of the digitisation of Italian incunables, while also looking to the future of digital access to historical books more generally. Organised into four main parts, the webinar opened with words of welcome from Jon Snow and His Excellency Ambassador Trombetta. This was followed by the introduction of previously recorded video statements from major players in the recent cultural preservation movement in Italy, featuring recorded messages from Anna Laura Orrico, Italian Minister of State for Culture and Tourism, and Andrea De Pasquale of the National Central Library of Rome. The third part of the webinar consisted of brief individual lectures from the panel in regard to their engagement with and promotion of digital access in their own fields. Among these panellists were Don Fabrizio Cicchetti, Antonio Padoa Schioppa and Prof. Cristina Dondi, who each offered insight into various aspects of digital preservation and access.

Representing the private foundation supporting this vital digitization of these texts, Marc Polonsky, of The Polonsky Foundation, shed light on the Foundation’s commitment to cultural preservation and wide dissemination. Polonsky credited the collaborative nature of the digitization project for fostering unique partnerships between project stakeholders from both the public and private sectors. According to Polonsky, this collaboration facilitated the establishment of high standards of best practice (both academically and technologically) which could be adopted as a developmental framework for future projects.

While each of these leaders related fascinating thoughts, it was Dondi’s lecture, however, that resonated with me the most. This was due to her inspiring engagement with the study of Material Culture, bringing the riches of cultural treasures not just to those in academia but also to the wider public.

Dondi began her talk by referencing the importance of developing resources that facilitate online access to research materials for precisely the moments in time when researchers cannot travel to archives and research libraries. Indeed, the current climate of the global pandemic is evidence for the necessity of accessible, transnational online learning resources.

In the last two years, the digitisation project of the Incunables of the Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco, the first printing place in Italy, a collaboration between the National Central Library in Rome and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) of which Dondi is the Secretary, however, made these Italian cultural treasures available online anywhere in the world at the push of a button. In doing as much, Dondi noted in her talk that for scholars of the incunables, the restrictions placed on archival research due to Lockdown have in this way been surmounted. For many undoubtedly grateful scholars, the online access to these materials will allow them to continue their research projects unhampered by the social and political upheaval around them. If this outcome were not applaudable enough, then the popularity of Dondi’s recent exhibition ‘Printing R-evolution and Society, 1450-1500. Fifty Years that changed Europe’ at the Museo Correr, Venice (September 2018-April 2019) has demonstrated just how vital  digitisation work is for the wider public as for academia. This exhibition documented the impact of the printing revolution on the economic and social development of early modern Europe using hundreds of freely available digitizations from many European and American libraries.

‘Printing R-evolution’

A journey of discovery which used digital tools and innovative methods of communication, the exhibition presented data gathered by the 15c Booktrade project (University of Oxford) about the History of the Book. The exhibition highlighted how, already by the year 1500, millions of books circulated in Europe, not only for the elite, as often claimed, but for everyone, including a large production of schoolbooks. In those, first, decades, printing coincided with experimentation and enterprise. Printed books were the product of a new collaboration between various sectors of society: knowledge, technology, and commerce, with ideas spreading widely and quickly as never before.

Dondi’s close engagement with the study of material culture was of particular interest to me, as my doctoral project investigates the ‘unofficial’ literary scene of the GDR in the 1980s, specifically through in-depth case studies of magazines printed in a samizdat capacity.

By researching each of the magazines’ diverse literary content, the different ways in which these magazines were produced, and the readership practices that surrounded them, my thesis will offer insights into the creative self-expression of the East Berlin literary scene and examine whether this phenomenon can be understood as part of the wider samizdat movement seen in many Eastern bloc countries. My thesis explores what these magazines tell us about the function, possibilities and limitations associated with publication beyond print in a totalitarian regime. Although my topic of research differs greatly from Dondi’s work in terms of historical era and social circumstances, in essence both areas of research are fundamentally preoccupied with the same investigative question: what can the physical form of the book reveal about the people behind its printing?

In the scholarly community, as in many other sectors in society, academics have had to adjust their ordinary methods of research in order to continue with their projects. Working From Home and using online learning tools have helped educators create an academic space (albeit, a virtual one) in this time of crisis. Attending webinars such as Dondi’s ‘The Dawn of Printing to Digital Access’, where international experts shared their knowledge and supported each other and the wider scholastic community allowed myself, and doubtless many other academics, to use our time in isolation fruitfully and thoughtfully. It would seem, therefore, that despite all changes and disruptions, many of us, like in the time of Boccaccio, have taken refuge in our communities, the stories and studies that we hold dear, as we continue to go on learning in the time of Lockdown.

***

Aoife Ní Chroidheáin BA (Hons) MSt (Oxon) is DPhil Candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and holds a scholarship in the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre Publication Beyond Print. Aoife’s doctoral research entitled Dangerous Creations: Power and Autonomy in East Berlin’s Samizdat examines the unofficial literary scene in East Berlin from 1980-1990.

Reaching out with medieval manuscripts

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22/07/2020

22:30

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By Tuija Ainonen

The first of three Blogging with Manuscripts sessions started with insights from #PolonskyGerman project. For full video, see link below.

What do you get when you put together an excited group of medieval manuscript specialists and ask them to discuss blogging and teaching with digitized manuscripts? The answer: trumpets, drapes, marginal animal appearances, fake back-drops, cries of agony, laughter and lots of good advice.

A worldwide audience (from California to New Zealand!) gathered in three online sessions that were organized as additional evening events for the International Medieval Congress (IMC) at Leeds, 6–9 July 2020. The organisers were very pleased to see that each session had well over 100 participants. Our speakers shared their experiences on using digitized medieval manuscripts for teaching, and for reaching out to various audiences via social media, mainly through blogging and tweeting. 

Blogging manuscripts with #PolonskyGerman

Tuija Ainonen, Andrew Dunning and Henrike Lähnemann (all of University of Oxford) opened the sessions by discussing their experiences on blogging for Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands – A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project. The project is in the middle of a three-year collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the project seeks to open up the medieval German manuscript collections of two world-class libraries for research and reuse. The two libraries will digitize c. 600 medieval manuscripts of Germanic origin between 2019 and 2021.

Watch to hear some thoughts on writing project based blogs on a variety of topics.

In the first session each presenter highlighted a blog post they had written. By opening up their writing processes they provided some useful tips for what to do, and what they would do differently. Even with specialized projects the aim is to write to non-specialists, so using approachable language and sentence structures is essential. As illustrative images are taken from digitized copies, it is crucial to provide readers with the manuscript shelfmark, folio reference and a link to the digital copy. It is important to follow the libraries’ attribution and guidance for terms of use that are provided in the meta-data of the images. However, the best place of the shelfmark is perhaps not on the title of the blog post. 

Teaching the digital codex 

In our second session Mary Boyle (University of Oxford), Julia Walworth (Merton College, Oxford) and Leonor Zozoya-Montes (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) continued the theme of manuscript outreach. Discussions considered teachable features and pedagogical approaches to teaching with digital codices. Teaching the Codex was launched at Merton College, Oxford with a colloquium in February 2016, and it has since published formidable blogs on teachable features and links to paleographical and codicological training resources.

Listen to great insights into how to approach teaching the digital codex.

Their individual and collective insights provided the listeners with lots of new ideas and thoughts. Perhaps the not-so-pretty manuscripts also deserve more time in the limelight provided by blogs. Various teachable features and manuscripts that cover multiple texts provide fertile ground for highlighting medieval manuscripts from various different viewpoints.

Blogging manuscripts for the general public

In our final session Alison Hudson (University of Central Florida) and Alison Ray (Canterbury Cathedral Archives) took us through a whirlwind of images and advice on good social media practices as they showed us examples of their twitter and blog behaviour.  

An excellent brief introduction to successful tweeting and blogging practices with medieval manuscripts

With a handy and useful group of guidelines for continuing our journey on blogging and tweeting with medieval manuscripts, one particular thought is worth repeating here. We as manuscript researchers and readers are in the best position to showcase and promote the work we do. Blogs provide us a handy way of showing ways in which medieval books are still relevant today, and how the old authors, compilers, scribes and readers of old continue to speak to current audiences.  

Blog writing challenge

In preparing for these three sessions we encouraged our readers to submit blog proposals for potential future blog posts in the participating platforms. A good initial crop of intriguing proposals were discussed during the sessions, and we anticipate to publish several of them in the coming months. While the initial deadline of proposals was to ensure inclusion in our sessions, it is still not too late! 

Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands – A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project continues to accept proposals showcasing to a general readership manuscripts digitized within the project. From 257 manuscripts (and counting!) to choose from, which one would you highlight and why? Proposals for blogs should be sent in the first instance to Andrew Dunning (andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) or Matthew Holford (matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Blogs of 500-750 words submitted by 22 August will be eligible for the Polonsky German blogging challenge. A panel will select the most successful blogs and will award prizes at the Dark Archives Conference 8-10 September 2020.

The Blogging with Manuscripts sessions were organised in collaboration with Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands – A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, Oxford Medieval Studies, Teaching the Codex, and Dark Archives. 

Medieval Matters: Week 9, TT20

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25/06/2020

11:08

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Dear Medievalists,

As the Summer comes rolling in, the OMS wanted to send you a quick email about what was happening for the next little while.

First, don’t forget that the Leeds International Medieval Congress is gone online and there are still plenty of panels happening. Registration is free (not limited to the first 1,500 people), so you’ll get a chance to see plenty of exciting research next month. You can register on the IMC’s website. It closes at 5pm on Friday (26th).

Oxford’s Henrike Laehnemann and Andrew Dunning will be running a fringe event on ‘Blogging with Manuscripts’ which will run on the Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of the Congress (6th, 8th, 8th July). You can find out more and register via the OMS website. Andrew will be uploading a blog with more details to the OMS website soon.

The Old English Work-in-Progress Seminar will be continuing over the summer after their huge online success this term. I have attached more information below, but you can keep up-to-date with them by joining them on their OMS channel.

Oxford Old English Work-in-Progress

Oxford Old English Work-in-Progress

The Medieval Book Club is thinking about continuing through the summer months, and is looking for reading suggestions. Send them on a postcard (oxfordmedievalbookclub@gmail.com) to Alex Peplow, Audrey Southgate and Henry Tann.

Our report from Tobias Capwell’s hugely successful online lecture will be uploaded soon, which Lestra Atlas has kindly written. Do keep checking back to OMS’s website for more blogs, and you can always keep up with what’s happening via Twitter (@OxMedStud).

Have a lovely and relaxing summer. You all deserve one.

Medieval Matters: Week 8 TT20

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15/06/2020

11:12

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Dear Medievalists,

What a strange term it has been. As we come to the final week of Trinity Term, I just wanted to thank everyone who worked so hard to make the seminars, reading groups, and lectures happen. You have all been kind, patient, and supportive. Hopefully next term, there will be some sense of normality and we can all be in the same room together with some tea and biscuits.

Seminars

  • First off today (15th), we have Helen Appleton speaking at the Old English Work-in-Progress Seminar. Unfortunately, I don’t have a title, but knowing Helen I have no doubt it’s going to be a fantastic paper. This takes place via their channel on OMS Teams.
  • Then at 5pm, Hannah Skodah will be speaking at the Medieval History Seminar and Hannah’s title is ‘“Things have changed a lot”: chivalric nostalgia in the later Middle Ages’. The talk will take place via the Seminar’s Teams. You can join the conversation by clicking on the link.
  • On Tuesday (16th) at 5pm, the Early Slavonic Seminar meets again when Robert Romanchuk tells us ‘How and Where the Old Slavonic Digenis Akritis was Made’. The seminar meets via Zoom and you can register here.
  • Also on Tuesday at 5pm, we have the final Medieval Church and Culture Seminar of the term, when three MSt students will discuss their work. Jenyth Evans’s talk is on ‘A Comparative Study of Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Takings of Ireland) and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Britonum (On the Deeds of the Britons)’. Lestra Atlas will discuss ‘Clerical Seduction and Construction of Sanctity in the Vita of Yvette of Huy’, and Evgenia Vorobeva will take us through ‘Of Purses and Noses: Proverb, Emotion and Power-Shifting in the Saga Narrative’. We will meet via OMS Teams.
  • The Graduate Seminar in Medieval German meet on Wednesday (17th) morning at 11.15am, where they conclude their discussion of Meister Eckhart’s sermons on Freedom. For more information, get in touch with Henrike.laehnamann@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk.

Reading Groups

  • The Old Norse Reading Group meets on Monday at 5.30pm, and you can join them via OMS Teams. For more information, get in touch with William.brockbank@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Book Club has their final meeting on the theme of Travel on Tuesday at 3.30pm. This week they focus on Diplomacy and the writing of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and the Embassy to Tamerlane. Meet up with them via OMS Teams.
  • The Anglo-Norman reading group meet on Friday (19th), when they continue their exploration of Marie de France’s ‘Fables’. To join them, get in contact with Andrew.lloyd@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk.

To keep you busy during the vacation the people at Kent, along with some help from our own Henrike Laehnemann have put together a list of digital resources. You can find it at http://memslib.co.uk/. They’ve done a great job, so I hope you find it useful.

Also, do get in touch if you have any blog ideas you’d like to run past us!

In the meantime, have a lovely summer vacation, keep safe and I will see you on the other side.