by Professor Marion Turner (English). All images by Ian Wallman.
Chaucer Here and Now, a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, was opened on December 7th by Sir Ben Okri, and it runs until April 28th. I’ve curated this exhibition about Chaucer across time; about inspiration, creativity, and readers. It brings extraordinary medieval manuscripts and early printed books together with modern film, animation, cartoons, and contemporary poetry. Across time, Chaucer has been re-imagined in many different ‘heres and nows,’ made to fit changing expectations and tastes. The show is accompanied by a lavishly-illustrated book of essays about the ideas and themes of the exhibition.
The exhibition includes the oldest Canterbury Tales manuscript, the Hengwrt Chaucer, on loan from the National Library of Wales. It also showcases some of the most beautiful illuminated Chaucer manuscripts, alongside particularly gorgeous manuscripts of Dante and Boccaccio’s work. The first and second editions of the Canterbury Tales, printed by William Caxton in 1476 and 1483 are some of the most important early printed books in existence. William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer, perhaps the loveliest of all Victorian books, is another jewel, and there are also collections of Victorian children’s Chaucers, eighteenth-century Chaucerian ballads, and a cluster of translations into languages such as Ukrainian, Japanese, Farsi, Esperanto, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, French, and Korean.
The exhibition reveals that readers have always been actively responding to Chaucer’s texts. In the first case, three manuscripts are open at the same tale, Chaucer’s unfinished Cook’s Tale. While one scribe simply says that Chaucer did not finish the tale, another finishes it off for him, while a third adds a completely different tale (not by Chaucer) calling it a second Cook’s Tale. Early scribes and editors did not treat the text with reverence – indeed they had to make decisions about what to do with the unfinished texts that Chaucer had left behind.
In later centuries, translators and adaptors became concerned about Chaucer’s discussions of sex and the body, and censored his texts heavily. Pope’s translation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue cuts out all the references to sex, the genitals, desire, and the body, leaving a short and fairly unrecognisable text. In the nineteenth century, the popular tales included the Clerk’s (about female submissiveness), the Knight’s (about chivalry and courtly love), the Nun’s Priest’s (an animal fable), and the Man of Law’s (female suffering again). The tales about farting, adultery, and sex in trees, were less popular. In contrast, in the twentieth-century, many readers focused exclusively on those fabliaux tales – the prime example being Pasolini’s film.
While in the nineteenth-century, Chaucer was seen as a poet of empire, whose texts should be sent out around the world to promote a certain kind of Englishness, in more recent decades, Chaucer has been reimagined as a poet of diaspora and refugees. The exhibition brings together the Refugee Tales volumes (from 2016 onwards), the records of a project whereby refugees and writers walk the pilgrimage route and tell their stories. Other texts that link Chaucer’s focus on travel and giving voice to diverse storytellers to modern diasporas include Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s translation of part of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue into Jamaican English, Marilyn Nelson’s Cachoeira Tales, which uses the Canterbury Tales as an inspiration for writing about the forced migration of enslaved people, and Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden which transposes the Wife of Bath’s Tale from Arthurian Britain to a community of Maroons (the descendants of formerly enslaved people) in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
This exhibition shows how the idea of Chaucer as the Father of English Literature developed, and became firmly established in sixteenth century printed editions, which featured dominating portraits of father Chaucer, positioned in such a way as to construct him as the Father of the Nation. This authoritative idea of Englishness elides the multilingual background of Chaucer’s own texts and life: the exhibition showcases Chaucer’s multilingual sources, his own translations, and his use of different languages in his texts. The global author of today – translated into many languages, and inspiring many writers from diverse backgrounds – is not so far away from the fourteenth-century traveller and diplomat.
The exhibition offers various ways to engage with Chaucer’s texts. You can put on headphones and watch some of the BBC animated Canterbury Tales. On the back wall, the opening couplet of the Tales is projected in multiple languages. Every seven minutes, a one-minute monologue is projected onto one wall: the Knight, Miller, or Wife of Bath, talks about themselves in modern English. And just outside the main exhibition, in the transept, there is a pilgrimage wall, with graphics of the pilgrimage route, onto which visitors are encouraged to stick their own pilgrim creations. Craft materials are provided, along with video tutorials by artists about how to draw Chaucer cartoons or make Chaucer puppets.
Students have been involved in various aspects of the exhibition: the review in the Times opened with discussing the area of the exhibition which features photos of current Oxford students and quotations about what Chaucer means to them. The journalist singled out the student who has a Chaucer tattoo on her forearm.
In his opening speech, Sir Ben Okri talked about the fundamental importance of Chaucer, saying that his work and ideas were like a river running underneath world literary culture. He walked on to the podium to the song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ which faded after the line ‘as the Miller told his tale.’ It was a great example of how Chaucer seeps into people’s consciousness, and continues to inspire poets, playwrights, artists, students, and all kinds of other people, from all over the world, in many different heres and nows. I hope people have fun in the exhibition, and that it surprises them.
Friday 2 February 2024: Chaucer Now: an event to celebrate recent rewritings of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (click here to find out more)
Saturday 27 April 2024: Creating Chaucer: join us to explore Chaucer’s world through creative activities, talks and discussion. (click here to find out more)
Elliot Vale will be exploring the translation of Genesis B in more detail at the first OCCT discussion group of Hilary Term: Monday 22nd February, 12.45–14.00, Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Lunch provided.
The Old English poem Genesis B is unique as the only verifiable example of a vernacular-to-vernacular translation during the Anglo-Saxon period. Interestingly, its source language Old Saxon and target language Old English were closely related and mutually intelligible. John Hines argues that the residual ‘Old Saxon’ nature of the Old English poem ‘displays the cultural connexions of a now Saxon-dominated England with the Christian Continent’. In this, Genesis B epitomizes the Anglo-Saxons’ continued and evolving relationship with the continental Saxons, exhibiting both the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
In this blogpost, I will survey the historical and linguistic interrelation of the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Saxons to understand what might have motivated the translation of Genesis B.
Let’s begin before the beginning with the pre-migration linguistic situation of Germanic Europe. The Germanic dialects spoken in north and north-west Europe around the 5th century are known as the ‘West Germanic’ languages. They consisted of three main groups, the ‘Irminonic’ (which became modern High German), ‘Istvaeonic’ (which became modern Dutch), and ‘Ingvaenoic’ (which became modern Frisian, Low German, and English). This last group, also known as ‘North Sea Germanic’, divides further into Anglo-Frisian (a branch including both Old English and Old Frisian) and Low German (which includes Old Saxon). During the Age of Migration from the 4th to the 6th century, peoples whose languages were closely related and mutually intelligible migrated in groups and merged. This seems to have happened with the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century.
This migration made a distinction as well as highlighted a commonality between what would become the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Old Saxons on the continent. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian scholar Bede names three Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He has this to say about them:
‘The people of Kent and the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight are of Jutish origin […] From the Saxon country, that is, the district now known as Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. Besides this, from the country of the Angles, […] which is called Angulus, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrian race […] Angulus is said to have remained deserted from that day to this.’ (Bede 51)
The peninsular Jutes seem have been absorbed by Danish expansion westward into the apparently deserted homeland of the Angles (thought to be Angeln in Schleswig Holstein). Only the Saxons became distinguishable as two peoples, the insular Anglo-Saxons in the southern English Kingdoms of Wessex, Essex, and Sussex and the continental Old Saxons in Old Saxony. Consequently, the Germanic inhabitants of Britain could maintain a connection with the continent they had migrated from, defining themselves both in relation to and in opposition to it.
After their own Christianisation, the Anglo-Saxons pursued missionary activity on the continent among related Germanic tribes, primarily the Frisians and the Saxons. Missionary work was conducted among these groups because they spoke languages (namely Old Frisian and Old Saxon) that were closely related to and mutually intelligible with Old English. In the early 8th century, St. Boniface, a Northumbrian monk, established an important abbey for the Saxons at Fulda in Germany. In a letter, Boniface implored the Anglo-Saxon bishops in England to ‘Take pity upon them [the Saxons]; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and one bone with you”’ (75). Clearly, it was recognized that the insular and continental Saxons were connected historically, linguistically, as well as ethnically.
With Christianity came literacy, and the Saxons seemed to define their nascent literary culture in the light of the Anglo-Saxons who converted them. This is exemplified in a pair of Latin texts, the Praefatio and Versus, which are thought to have once prefaced an edition of Heliand, an Old Saxon gospel poem. Among other points touching on Saxon poetry, these texts describe a Saxon shepherd who was divinely inspired to compose vernacular biblical poetry. This is clearly modelled on the Cædmon legend as narrated in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a text Anglo-Saxon missionaries took with them to the continent. In Bede’s account, a lay brother at Whitby Abbey abandons a feast in shame at his inability to perform a secular song. Nevertheless, he is visited by an angel and divinely inspired to create religious alliterative poetry, thereby fusing the traditional Germanic verse form with Christian subject matter. A Saxon scribe seems to have borrowed this legend to provide a similar ‘origin story’ for Saxon religious alliterative poetry.
Cultural influence seems to have been mutual, however. For example, Barbara Raw has shown how the illustrations in the Junius 11 manuscript cohere more with Genesis B than Genesis A. From this observation, she argues that the illustrations must derive from an illustrated edition of the complete Old Saxon Genesis. This now lost manuscript was likely given as a wedding gift to King Æthelwulf (Alfred’s father), who married the daughter of the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald in 856. Furthermore, King Alfred’s educational reforms drew many scholars from the continent, such as a man known as ‘John the Old Saxon’. Alfred’s biographer Asser describes him as ‘a man of most acute intelligence, immensely learned in all fields of literary endeavour’ (93). Alfred’s prioritization of the translation of Latin texts into English also strongly suggests that Genesis B was translated at his court. Thus, Anglo-Saxons helped to establish a Saxon literary culture that consequently influenced the further development of their own.
An important text Alfred commissioned to be translated was the fifth-century Latin History Against the Pagans by the Spanish theologian Paulus Orosius. The Old English version of this work contains an interpolated pair of texts, editorially named ‘Ohthere and Wulfstan’. These texts detail anecdotally the passage of two seafarers all around Scandinavia and the Baltics. An editorial aside as Wulfstan approaches his native Hedeby on Jutland remarks that ‘[t]he English lived in that region before they came to this country’ (Orosius 43–5). So we have come full-circle: the Anglo-Saxons’ continued sense of themselves as a migrant nation only strengthened their ties to their ancestral homelands on the continent.
The Anglo-Saxons never forgot their origins on the continent nor played down their continued relations with it but used it in the formation of their own identity. Genesis B is an Old English poem in language and style but retains enough Old Saxon features to nevertheless convey a deliberate ‘feeling of foreignness’. Lawrence Venuti argues that ‘translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures’ (‘Regimes’ 209). As a translation, Genesis B constructs a foreign identity for a national culture, containing in its hybrid language and literary style the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
Elliot Vale holds a BA in English from the University of York and an MSt in English 650–1550 from the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in applying modern translation theory to medieval texts and the reception of Old English poetry from the 19th to the 21st century, especially through translation. He has written on translational ‘bias’ in the Old English poem Exodus and the Old English Hexateuch and on the stylistic analysis of metrically imitative translations of Beowulf. He translates from Old English and Swedish.
Title image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, p. 31.
Works cited
Asser. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, edited and translated by Michael Lapidge and Simon Keynes, Penguin Books, 1983.
Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Betram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Boniface. The Letters of Saint Boniface, translated by Ephraim Emerton, Norton, 1976.
Hines, John. ‘Attitude Problems? The Old Saxon and Old English Genesis Poems’. Language Structure and Variation: A Festschrift for Gunnel Melchers, edited by Magnus Ljung, Stockholm Studies in English 92, 2000, pp. 69–90.
Magoun, Francis P., Jr. ‘The Praefatio and Versus Associated with some Old Saxon Biblical Poems’. Medieval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, edited by Urban T. Holmes, Jr. and Alex J. Denomy, Harvard University Press, 1948, pp. 107–136.
Orosius, Paulus. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, translated and edited by Malcolm Godden, Harvard University Press, 2016.
Raw, Barbara. ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius II from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’. Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 133–148.
Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Translation as cultural politics: Regimes of domestication in English’. Textual Practice, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 208–223.
Poetry in the Medieval World is a network that explores premodern literature from a global perspective. Its aim is to address broad questions and seek answers building on contemporary discussions in comparative and world literature through a cross-disciplinary approach.
Our case study is currently poetry between c. 600 and c. 1250 CE. Poetry is a multifaceted phenomenon: it answers to different needs, travels across communities, and undergoes continuous changes. It is rooted in shared culture and knowledge; its intercultural communication or its appreciation by posterity can, at times, fail. There are recurring features: vivid images, complex words and rhythm, but also recitation music and singing. It is an expression of beauty and harmony. Even if poetry requires specialised experts to be scrutinised, yet its study should be easily approachable and crucial to the understanding of premodern literature, but also of literature as a whole. This – and way more – is the realm of poetry the Network will explore.
The Network creates an infrastructure for an open dialogue on medieval poetry with reading groups every two weeks, lectures by national and international scholars, and two annual meetings. The focus of our discussion is the production and transmission of poetry, its historical reception, and the challenges of translating it into modern languages, with a particular emphasis on English.
The Network connects people driven by scholarly curiosity. Therefore, we are extremely keen on receiving expressions of interest for collaboration from people at any phase of their career. If you are interested in this project and want to contribute to it actively, please email Ugo Mondini. The first events in Hillary 2024 will be shared in the coming weeks on the TORCH Networks website and the network’s X account (@PoetryMedieval), both of which are currently under development.
Images:
Fujiwara no Yukinari (Kōzei), Excerpt from Bai Juyi’s “Autobiography of a Master of Drunken Poetry Recitation”
Hinksey Meadow is first on record in a grant by Henry I to Abingdon Abbey 1102 x 1110, and it’s still there, in West Oxford in walking distance of Oxford Railway Station, one of the rarest, most species-rich meadows in Britain. But it’s threatened with destruction – by the Environment Agency. The EA is insisting that it should build only the most destructive version of its Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme, scooping out a 5 km channel through the Oxford green corridor from Botley to Sandford Lock, through Hinksey Meadow.
The UK has lost 97% of its meadows since World War II, including so many floodmeadows that the Thames Valley contains a quarter of those remaining. Hinksey Meadow is even rarer than that: it is a wildflower floodplain meadow with type MG43a grassland, of which only four square miles survive in the UK as a whole. It’s of much higher diversity than, for instance, Port Meadow.
Hinksey Meadow has survived for the best part of a thousand years because it’s part of a sustainable agricultural collaboration between humans and their environment: managed grazing fertilizes the meadow, and the meadow’s hay cut provides food for stock with no need for industrial fertilizer. Hinksey is also an invaluable seedbank for the future of regenerative farming.
Image1. Part of the scheme area, showing the direction floodwater takes and the location of the EA’s channel (up to 200 metres wide). Red arrow marks site of Hinksey Meadow
The channel requires
digging out c.400,000 cubic metres (700,000 tonnes) of soil and gravel
removing 3780 mature trees and 11 kms hedgerows
destroying habitat for many species of insects, birds and animals
destroying existing braided floodplain streams and wild life corridor
compulsory purchase of some 1000 parcels of land in and around the scheme area
release of sequestered carbon: grassland is second only to peat in its capacity
Hinksey Meadow cannot survive digging up and hydrological interference.
Landscape artist Elaine Kazimierczuk painted the Meadow for a charity auction to raise funds for its defence: see her at work and hear why, even on the grey windy English summer’s day the weather gave her, she feels so passionately about the Meadow
The EA’s channel offers
a small increase in alleviation to a few dozen houses and shops at massive financial and environmental cost
a big ticket scheme that will ultimately enable more development in and around the floodplain
And it is not needed:
up to 85-90% of the scheme’s protection is offered by much smaller localised flood defences such as bunds and earthworks
independent experts in hydrology and cost/benefits have shown that no channel works very nearly as well, without the enormous environmental destruction, and have also proposed several other alternative strategies.
Why does the EA insist on the channel?
It won’t say. In the absence of clear reasons, we can only speculate that it decided on the channel (its characteristic response in twentieth-century flood schemes) in advance and then worked backwards to try to find mitigations. Independent experts pointed out that the EA used the wrong DEFRA metric for the area’s biodiversity in its application. In its revised application the proper metric turned the EA’s claimed 10% increase in biodiversity into a biodiversity loss.
The EA now claims it will
translocate MG4a grassland. This cannot be done according to independent experts: such grassland takes hundreds of years to create.
create wetlands and plant saplings onsite and offsite (in unspecified locations somewhere in Oxfordshire)
secure environmental partners and get landowners to help with the costs of monitoring and maintenance
This leads to absolute loss of irreplaceable bio-diversity and interlocking mature eco-systems at least 30 years to wait before saplings become mature trees – if they are maintained. (For the effects of a riverine EA scheme in 2022 see this BBC Interview)
Some of the trees that will be lost within and beside the Oxford meadowsThe Willow Walk, the path by Hinksey MeadowThe EA’s proposed replacement for Willow Walk
What can be done? Objectors have secured a Public Enquiry into the scheme. The Enquiry opens 10 am on Tuesday 14 November 2023 for a month at The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford OX2 0ES (walkable from the railway station). FIND US | The King’s Centre (kingscentre.co.uk)
You can
1. Support the Public Enquiry by joining a peaceful demonstration 10am on 14th November outside the King’s Centre entrance. Feel free to bring your own signs and banners. Please do get in contact at the email below if you would like to come on the 14th.
3. Spread the word! And if you know people who might be able and willing to contribute to the defence of the meadow, direct them to the Go fund me page
References and more information
Chance, E., Colvin, C., Cooper, J., Day, C.J., Hassell, T.G., Jessup, M., Selwyn, N.,1979. A History of the County of Oxford London (Victoria County History: London, 1979)Volume 4, The City of Oxford, ‘Other Meadows’: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/pp265-283#h3-0021
Hanson, W.J. A Thousand Years : A Study of the Interaction between People and their Environment in the Cumnor, Wytham and North Hinksey Area of Oxfordshire, formerly Berkshire, vol. 2 (privately printed, 1996: copies held by Bodleian and Oxfordshire History Centre).
Any questions to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, FMAA SCR Associate St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford Thomas F. X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature (Emerita), Fordham University olim Professor of Medieval Literature, University of York
The last three talks will be of special interest to medieval graduates working in Old English (or Old Norse): Grace Khuri (Nov. 8) will look at compound personal names starting with Ælf- (‘Elf’) that Tolkien encountered in his set texts as an undergraduate (c. 1913-1915) and how these contributed to building (what Tolkien himself later called) his ‘Elf-centric’ mythology for The Book of Lost Tales (c. 1917-1919) — the earliest version of what would later become The Silmarillion (1977), the epic, mythic-legendary prehistory of Middle-earth. The following week is Dr. Laura Varnam’s lecture on ‘Tolkien and Beowulf’ (Nov. 15), and the last lecture of the term will be given by Dr. Simon Horobin on ‘Tolkien the Philologist’ (Nov. 22).
Although there is an online booking system that now states that all these lectures are full, there have been many no-shows at these seminars and the organizers have said that anyone can come along now (without booking) and there should be room to fit everyone in. For those who cannot make it (due to teaching commitments, lectures, tutorials etc.), the talks will be recorded on a case-by-case basis (depending on the permission of each speaker). If there are any questions about this, contact Dr. Stuart Lee at stuart.lee@ell.ox.ac.uk.
(By Sophie Bacchus-Waterman, Special Collections Photographer, St John’s College)
As Special Collections Photographer for the Digitization Project at St John’s College, I photograph the manuscripts and early printed books from our Special Collections. Given that we have over 20,000 early printed books and over 300 manuscripts, and it would be impossible for one person to digitize them all, we have devised a shortlist of items which will be made available online during this project. These might be manuscripts with significant cultural or historic value, interesting provenance, unique texts, or items that are regularly requested by researchers. Several items have already been made available on Digital Bodleian, and more are being added regularly.
Grazer Conservation Cradle
Books being photographed are placed onto the Grazer Conservation Cradle. The cradle is set to a 120° opening angle. If a book is not able to be opened at that angle, it is supported with foam wedges. Along the side of the cradle is a vacuum bar, on which the page being photographed is placed. Each page of the book being photographed is placed onto the vacuum bar, which, when switched on, acts like a vacuum and gently pulls the page into place. Along the vacuum bar is a ruler, which allows anyone viewing the book on Digital Bodleian to see its size. The colour swatch lets me keep the lighting and colour accurate from page to page.
Vacuum bar, ruler, and colour swatch on the cradle
Images are taken with a PhaseOne camera, which is directly parallel to the page being photographed. The camera can be moved closer or further away using a control panel on the side of the cradle. If I’m working with a smaller book, for instance, the camera might need to be closer to the cradle than if I’m working with a larger book. The cradle can also be adjusted with the control panel, and moved up or down as necessary, or left and right with a small dial. As I move through a book, the cradle might need be adjusted accordingly.
Control panel and dial for adjusting the cradle
Besides photographing the internals of our books, I also photograph the externals, using a flatbed and a wall-mounted Canon camera, in the setup seen in the photograph below.
MS 164, a 14th century French manuscript with a velvet binding, on the flatbed
The book is placed on the flatbed, and I photograph its front and back covers. It is also placed on its fore edge and spine, carefully supported with small towers of foam blocks on either side, which are covered with black cloth. I also include a ruler and colour swatch in photos of the externals, for the same reason as they are included in the internal shots.
Photographing MS 61
MS 61 was always high on our priority list for items to be digitized. A 13th century bestiary made in York, richly illuminated, MS 61 is one of the jewels of our Special Collections. If you would like to read more about it, you can see its catalogue description on Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries, encoded by my colleague, Sian Witherden.
I knew that MS 61 would initially pose challenges, due to its extensive use of gold leaf. Each illumination is backed with a thick ground of gold leaf, which reflects light when photographed. Given the amount of gold on certain folios, the light reflected in such a way that the gold looked white, an effect known as “specular highlights”, as seen in the below left photograph. In order to photograph a manuscript with extensive gold leaf, the lamps in the Photography Studio must be pointed upwards, away from the cradle. The light then bounces off the ceiling and onto the gold leaf, as seen in the below right photograph.
St John’s College, MS 61, fol. 9r
Once the issue of lighting the gold leaf was resolved, MS 61 was a dream to work with. For an 800-year-old manuscript, it was incredibly easy to handle. Written on high quality vellum, it was sturdy, its pages turned easily, and its modern binding meant that it was happy to open to the 120° angle of the cradle. As with the other books I’ve worked with so far, MS 61 was placed onto the cradle – it opened easily, and was handled with the usual care I handle the Special Collections items, but it didn’t need any extra support while out.
As I moved through the manuscript, I was struck by the incredible illuminations throughout it. Even after centuries, it is in a stunning condition, almost as if it had been made yesterday. In order to accommodate the manuscript, I moved the cradle left and right, and up and down, as needed, so that it was resting comfortably on the cradle. Above everything else, the preservation of whatever book I am working with is paramount to the project. Luckily, MS 61 didn’t require any extra support, or prove difficult at all.
The social media response to MS 61 being digitized was astounding, but also hardly surprising. MS 61 is one of the most beautiful and treasured items in our collection, and a lot of people have been excited to see it online. Not only is it a privilege to work with such stunning and rare books in my role, but knowing that the Digitization Project is facilitating research and introducing people to our collection online makes it all the more rewarding.
If you would like to see more of our collection, please visit our Digital Library, where you can read more about our collection, and see what has already been made available to view online. If you would like to read more about MS 61, take a look at this Book of the Month blog post here.
Jewish languages are essential and incorporeal parts of Jewish history, creativity, culture and identity. Most of them are currently in danger of extinction while others are already dead, known only from early writing. Various research programmes stress the immense role of vernacular languages in Jewish life and culture as well as point to their fragility, yet universities offer very few learning opportunities for most of these rare Jewish languages.
Created in August 2021 by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies (OCHJS) in collaboration with the Institut des Langues Rares (ILARA) at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), Paris, the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages (OSRJL) offers free, online teaching of rare Jewish languages and their cultural-historical contexts—along with a public lecture series, academic blog, Visiting Fellows programme, Jewish music classes (this year focusing on the history of Yiddish music!) and language Cafés—accessible at no cost to accepted students and members of the general public around the globe. By doing so, the OSRJL aims to preserve, spark interest in, enable access to and reflect on the nature and role of Jewish languages as rich linguistic facets of Jewish life and history. It is the first school of its kind globally.
You can read about the OSRJL’s second year, 2022–23, in our recently published Impact Report:
Already, 2023–24 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the OSRJL! We received 671 applications for language classes beginning in Michaelmas Term 2023 alone—more applications than we received in total across all 3 terms in 2021–22 and 2022–23. Clearly, interest in rare Jewish languages is on the rise, and we greatly look forward to facilitating access to and engagement with them in the coming year and beyond.
We are expanding our language offerings this year to include classes on 3 languages new to the programme—Haketia, Judeo-Hamadani and Kivruli. Doing so means we will be teaching a record 18 languages (listed below) alongside continuing our many other activities!
Languages to be taught through the OSRJL in 2023–24 include:
Haketia (Dr Carlos Yebra López, University College London)
Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic (Dr Assaf Bar Moshe, Freie Universität Berlin)
Judeo-Greek (Dr Julia G. Krivoruchko, University of Cambridge)
Judeo-Hamadani (Professor Dr Saloumeh Gholami, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Judeo-Italian (Dr Marilena Colasuonno, University of Naples)
Judeo-Moroccan (Haviva Fenton)
Judeo-Neo-Aramaic (Dr Dorota Molin, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge)
Judeo-Persian (Dr Ofir Haim, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, & Maximilian Kinzler)
Judeo-Provençal (Dr Peter Nahon, Université de Neuchâtel)
Judeo-Tat (Professor Gilles Authier & Dr Murad Suleymanov, EPHE, Paris)
Judeo-Turkish (Professor Laurent Mignon, University of Oxford)
Karaim (Professor Henryk Jankowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Kivruli (Dr Hélène Gérardin, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales/EPHE)
Ladino (Dr Carlos Yebra López, University College London)
Old Yiddish (Dr Diana Matut)
Yiddish (Dr Beruriah Wiegand, OCHJS, University of Oxford)
Some of the languages we teach—such as Classical Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Greek—are extinct, and our teaching is therefore based, at least in part, on medieval texts and manuscripts written in these languages.
While applications for classes beginning in Michaelmas Term 2023 are now closed, applications for language classes beginning in Hilary Term 2024—including Advanced Beginners Judeo-French, Beginners Judeo-Greek, Beginners Judeo-Tat and Advanced Judeo-Turkish—will open in November 2023. To receive notifications about these and future application opportunities, as well as other activities of the OSRJL, follow the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies on social media (X: @OCHJSnews, Facebook: Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies, LinkedIn: Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies and Vimeo: OCHJS) and/or sign up to its Activities Email List by emailing academic.administrator@ochjs.ac.uk. To learn more about the OSRJL programme as a whole, please visit our website or email us at osrjl@ochjs.ac.uk.
We hope to see you in one of our classes and/or at one of our events soon!
The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) is a research group based at The Queen’s College in the University of Oxford. We are scholars working in different fields of the humanities with a common interest in pre- and early modern texts, their materiality, transmission, and dissemination. For further information please visit our website: https://cmtc.queens.ox.ac.uk/. Most of our research talks are recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel CMTC Media: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNAJFkc6gzBVgseJ_IRrpLw. If you like CMTC Media please subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications to receive regular updates on the new content available.
There are two CMTC events in Michaelmas term:
Michaelmas Term Lecture: 25 October 5.15pm (week 3), Memorial Room, The Queen’s College
Prof. Mary Carruthers (NYU and St Hilda’s, Oxford): Understanding Solid Figures in Early Medieval Manuscripts: how Rhetoric and Geometry interact
Work in Progress Seminar: 7 November 3.30pm (week 5), Memorial Room, The Queen’s College
Dr Anthony Ellis (University of Bern): ‘Greek’ in the Medieval Latin manuscripts of Josephus: reconstructing the philological workings of a late antique translator Dr Sara de Martin (Oxford): Reassessing the transmission of Strato com. fr. 1 K. A.
Archive Michaelmas 2022
(1) “Work in Progress” colloquium Tuesday 8th November 2022, 3,30–5,00pm UK timeMemorial Room, The Queen’s College (and Zoom)(please register through the link provided below: Zoom links will be sent by email by 9,00am UK time on the day of the talk) Benedetta Bessi (Venice/Stanford): ‘Towards a Digital Edition of the Liber insularum by Cristoforo Buondelmonti’ Joseph Mason (New College, Oxford): ‘Oral and Written Transmission in Old French Song: a reassessment’
Please register here (whether you are planning to attend in person or online)
(2) Michaelmas Term Lecture Wednesday 23rd November 2022, 5,15–6,45pm UK timeMemorial Room, The Queen’s College (and Zoom)(please register through the link provided below: Zoom links will be sent by email by 9,00am UK time on the day of the talk) Nikolay Tarasenko (Kyiv/Pembroke College, Oxford): ‘What Can the “Greenfield Papyrus” (pLondon BM EA 10554) Tell Us about Its Owner?’ Please register here (whether you are planning to attend in person or online)
In Michaelmas 2023, Dr Nikolaus Ruge (Universität Trier) returned to Oxford as Visiting Lecturer in German Historical Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and delivered an updated lecture series on Middle High German. This was mainly designed as an introductory course for students of the German Paper IV ‘Historical Linguistics’ but the recordings are available to a general audience interested in medieval languages. The first two lectures were recorded by Dr Ruge in person in the Taylor Institution Library, Room 2, lectures 3, 4, and 7 were recorded by him, lectures 5, 6 and 8 from his script on his behalf by the Oxford tutors for Paper IV. The first lecture also saw the launch of the 11th edition of the popular study guide ‘Old and Middle High German’ (utb Sept 2023).
I. Teaching Middle High German: time, space, language (panopto recording, handout), 13 Oct 2023 II. Early Middle High German (1050-1170) (panopto recording, handout), live on 20 Oct 2023 III. ‘Classical’ Middle High German (1170-1250) (panopto recording, handout) recorded on 14 Oct 2023 IV. Late Middle High German (1250-1350) (panopto recording, handout) recorded on 14 Oct 2023 V. Graphemics and Phonology (panopto recording, handout), recorded on 9 November 2023 by William Thurlwell VI. Morphology (panopto recording, handout), recorded on 9 November 2023 by William Thurlwell VII. Word formation and Lexis (panopto recording, handout), recorded on 19 October 2023 VIII. Morphosyntax and Syntax (panopto recording, handout), recorded on 9 November 2023 by Joshua Booth
The textbook for this lecture course is The Oxford Guide to Middle High German. The set text for Middle High German is Helmbrecht in the edition by Karl-Heinz Göttert (2015). Oxford students can access further resources such as reading lists and essay topics via the Canvas page.
Consummatum est, inclinato capite tradidit spiritum. ‘”It is accomplished”, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’
(Homiliae XL in euangelia, homily 37.9, Gregory the Great)
These were the last words of bishop Cassius of Narnia as recorded in Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 429. The manuscript contains Homiliae XL in euangelia by Gregory the Great (see Bodleian online). Cassius of course quoted from the Bible, Jesus’ last words according to John 19.30. The quotation appears at the end of folio 149v which also contains two scratched glosses in the upper margin, barely visible to the naked eye: ‘[…] braht’ and ‘upbraht’. At first glance, the glosses and the quote have no obvious connection. They stand on opposite sides of the folio (fig. 1) and, semantically, the two similar glosses do not seem to relate to any Latin on the page. It was only when the glosses were captured in a detailed image with the Selene scanner of the ARCHiOx project (ARCHiOx: research and development in imaging) that it was possible to learn more about their origin and meaning.
Fig. 1: Folio 149v of MS. Laud. Misc. 429 (Oxford, Bodleian Library). The position of the scratched glosses is marked in red, the quote by Cassius of Narnia is marked in green.
With the Selene scanner, a clear image of the 3D surface of the object can be created. This is particularly useful for scratched glosses, translations and comments not written with a pen but impressed into the parchment with a stylus. Scratched glosses can usually only be seen by shining a torch onto the parchment at a very shallow angle. But with the new recording system the glosses can be made visible within the context of ink glosses and the main text. Corrections in the main text also become much clearer. Suddenly a sequence of short horizontal scratches become visible, showing where the scribe erased ink with a small knife (fig. 2), apparently to adjust word endings and punctuation. Furthermore, there are longer, finer lines crossing the page that stem from preparing the parchment.
Fig. 2: 3D‑render of the scratches on folio 149v recorded with the Selene scanner. In the top margin, the lexical scratched glosses are visible. On the bottom of the picture are scratches which stem from text erasures.
In the recording, the lexical scratched glosses on folio 149v are clearly visible, except for the first letters. They read (1) ‘[…] braht’ and (2) ‘upbraht’. The words appear right next to each other but are divided by a clear gap. These are not the only lexical glosses in the manuscript. Throughout the text, there are Latin and Old High German glosses, for example the Old High German word ‘agaleizor’ in the right margin of folio 159r and the Latin ‘lapidem’, a few lines below and interlinear (see the digitised manuscript and Hofmann 1963, p. 144). As for the glosses on folio 149v, the second half of the words gives clues as to their language. ‘‑braht’ is the past participle of the Old High German verb ‘bringan’ (see AWB 1,1384), with the basic meaning ‘to bring’ (or in case of the participle, ‘brought’). The first part of the words should therefore be a prepositional prefix which modifies the basic verb. The first part of gloss (2), ‘up’, is known as a prefix – but not in Old High German. The Old High German equivalent of the word is ‘ûf’, with the ‘‑p’ undergoing the Second Consonant Shift (up > uf). That the gloss still has the ‘‑p’ shows that it must belong to a language which did not go through this sound change. To explain this mix of linguistic features, it is necessary to consider the history of the manuscript.
MS. Laud Misc. 429 was written in a German writing centre, possibly Fulda, at the beginning of the ninth century (Bischoff & Hofmann 1952, p. 58; Mairhofer 2014, p. 680). It was in Würzburg from the fifteenth century at the latest and was given to the Bodleian in 1637 (Mairhofer 2014, p. 680). However, it is not unlikely that the manuscript came to Würzburg much earlier because of the intertwined history of the two monasteries. In the eighth century, Saint Boniface and his missionaries came from England and founded several monasteries, including the Würzburg cathedral chapter and Fulda as part of its diocese (Bischoff & Hofmann 1952, p. 5). As they were closely related, the monasteries frequently exchanged manuscripts in the eighth and ninth centuries, or would order manuscripts from each other’s scriptoria (see Bischoff & Hofmann 1952, pp. 142, 168). Fulda was therefore subject to the same Anglo-Saxon influence that has been widely researched for the Würzburg monastery. Anglo-Saxon traces can be seen palaeographically and linguistically in the manuscripts created during that time (Bischoff & Hofmann 1952, pp. 5ff.; Hofmann 1963, pp. 33–4). Written long after Saint Boniface’s death, when the main impact of the Anglo-Saxon mission had already waned, MS. Laud Misc. 429 still shows signs of Anglo-Saxon script (‘Symptome dafür sind die leicht spachtelförmigen Oberlängen, die mit dreieckigem Ansatz beginnenden, tiefgespaltenen r der rcc-Ligatur.’, Bischoff & Hofmann 1952, p. 58). Ties between early medieval scriptoria of the Würzburg diocese and Anglo-Saxon writing tradition remained strong over the centuries and MS. Laud Misc. 429 is evidence for that.
Fig. 3: Close‑up of gloss (2) ‘upbraht’.
On a different note, there is another, though rather minor possibility for the origin of the scratched glosses. Apparently, there have been exchanges between the Low German and East Franconian region since the Old Saxon Heliand was written under consideration of texts which stem originally from Fulda (Schubert 2013, p. 213). Linguistically, the scratched glosses are acceptable Old Saxon forms. Old Saxon did not undergo the second consonant shift, hence the ‘up‑’, and ‘braht’ is the past participle of ‘brengian’, the Old Saxon equivalent of Old High German ‘bringan’ (Gallée 1993, §408). Even though there is no evidence of an Old Saxon verb ‘upp‑brengian’, ‘upp‑’ is known as verbal prefix (Tiefenbach 2010, p. 431). It is similar with the possible prefixes of gloss (1) which will be considered later. Arguably, these could be two Old Saxon hapax legomena (words which are only evidenced once), however, connections between the scriptorium of Fulda and Old Saxon scribes are hardly documented. On the other hand, the link to Anglo‑Saxon writing is not only supported by other manuscripts from Fulda and by the palaeographical characteristics of the script of MS. Laud Misc. 429 but also matches the linguistic evidence seen in gloss (2): ‘up’ (fig. 3) can very well be an Old English form (predecessor of modern English ‘up’) and the combination of an Old English prefix with an Old High German verb stem is a typical result of Anglo-Saxon influence in German writing centres. Since none of the ink glosses show Old English features (see Hofmann 1963, pp. 114–5) it could be that ink and scratched glosses stem from different scribes who followed different writing traditions.
Fig. 4: Close‑up of gloss (1) ‘[…] braht’. The prefix could be read as ‘hu’, but note the difference between the first letter and the penultimate letter ‘h’.
The prefix of gloss (1) is not as easy to decipher. The first letter could be an ‘h’, even though it looks quite different from the ‘h’ in the second half of the word (fig. 4). The latter has a very round curve, while the former shows a sharp bend. And neither in Old English nor Old High German is ‘hu’ a documented verbal prefix.
Fig. 5: Prefix of gloss (1) ‘[…] braht’ with the possible reading ‘zu’ in comparison with the ‘z’ in an ink gloss on fol. 159r (image was rotated to align the letters).
Another possible reading is palaeographically less clear but would make sense lexically: ‘zu’. The lines of the first letter could be a crooked ‘z’ (compare the ‘z’ of ‘agaleizor’ on folio 159r), which, to be fair, would miss some strokes (fig. 5). But an Old High German prefix ‘zu‑’ (or ‘zuo‑’) is indeed recorded in combination with ‘bringan’ (AWB 1,1405; the Old English equivalent would be ‘tó‑’, see Bosworth‑Toller online). Both readings assume that the second part of the prefix is a ‘u’. However, the curves of the letters in ‘braht‑’ are very round and those of the potential ‘u’ are not. Because scratched glosses had to be scratched into the parchment with a stylus which was not a very reliable writing instrument, letter shapes could be distorted (Glaser & Nievergelt 2009, p. 207). Differences between the letters within a gloss could therefore happen and could have a number of reasons. The gap after the prefix, for example, could mean that the scribe paused and then held the stylus differently. But it is curious that the letters of the second part are all very neatly rounded and the first ones are not.
Fig. 6: Prefix of gloss (1) ‘[…] braht’ The image on the right shows the same prefix with mark‑up that illustrates the possible reading ‘vul’, excluding the strokes that connect the letters.
A reading which would take the sharp bends of the beginning a bit more into account would be ‘vul’. Just as in gloss (2), this prefix would be Old English, the Old High German equivalent being ‘fol’. Old English ‘full’ is recorded as a verbal prefix (e.g. ‘fullbétan’, Bosworth-Toller online) and the Old High German variant even exists in combination with ‘bringan’ (‘fol(la)bringan’, AWB 3,1049). However, this reading would assume a ‘v’ with an ascender and an ‘l’ which is missing one (fig. 6). Just as ‘zu braht’, it is palaeographically odd but seems lexically sensible.
The meaning of gloss (1) can be narrowed down by semantically interpreting gloss (2). Both glosses end in ‘braht’ which suggests that they relate to each other. Double glosses are often either synonymous and were meant to provide the reader with lexical variants, or they give alternative semantic interpretations of the lemma. This could be achieved by altering the prefix of a verb. Old English ‘up’ and ‘bringan’ together can have the meaning ‘bring it to pass’, in which ‘up’ is ‘marking effectual action’ (see Bosworth-Toller online; here as an adverb related to a verb, but also recorded as a prefix). In Old High German, only one instance is known in which ‘uf’ appears together with ‘bringan’, in the Muspilli: ‘die pringent sia sar uf in himilo rihi’ (Steinmeyer 1916, p. 66; see AWB 1,1391), and here it means ‘to take (someone) up (to somewhere)’. The form ‘upbraht’ is a past participle. Assuming that the gloss copies the grammatical form of its Latin lemma to translate it in context, it could correspond to Latin consummatum from the aforementioned bible quote. The Latin would fit the possible meaning ‘bring it to pass’, or rather ‘brought to pass’. Their position in relation to each other is rather unusual as they are at opposite ends of the page – glosses are mostly in direct proximity to the word they translate. However, the word summarises the whole tale of Cassius who awaited his death for years after hearing a vision from one of his priests. His last word, ‘accomplished’, could relate not only to his death but also to the long period of waiting. Glossing it on top of the page is similar to a headline.
In this regard, gloss (1) can be expected to have a similar meaning. Of the three presented readings, ‘hu braht’ is the least fitting one. The adverb exists only in Old English and is the predecessor of modern English ‘how’. It references the quality of a verb (Bosworth-Toller online) which does not fit very well in this context. The second variant, ‘zu braht’, works better. The Old High German verb ‘zuobringan’ can have the meaning ‘to bring about’ (AWB 1,1405) – even though the according Old English prefix does not match (‘a prefix denoting separation, division’, Bosworth-Toller online). And finally, the last reading ‘vul braht’ is semantically closest to ‘upbraht’. Old High German ‘fol(la)bringan’ means ‘to finish something, to accomplish something’ (AWB 3,1049). Old English ‘ful’ is a verbal prefix which ‘denotes the fulness, completeness or perfection of the meaning of the word with which it is joined’ (Bosworth-Toller online). Judging from these interpretations, the two glosses could have been designed to give lexical variants which are broadly synonymous for the Latin lemma.
Fig. 7: Profiles of the scratches of gloss (1) on the left and gloss (2) on the right as recorded with the Selene scanner. The line in the glosses marks where the profile was measured.
Again, the ARCHiOx recording reveals more information about the motivation behind the double glosses. Measuring the depth and width of the scratches of the two glosses in the 3D-image shows that their profiles do not match (fig. 7). That means that it is very likely that they were not written in one go. Either the scribe, the writing instrument or the date of writing changed, or possibly all three at once. Whatever the reason for the changing profile was, there was most definitely an interruption between writing the two glosses. Maybe one of the glosses seemed unsufficient to a glossator to translate the lemma, maybe someone working with the text wanted to give a variant of the translation – or maybe a later reader had the same problems in identifying the first gloss as I had and decided to add a more legible translation. With the help of the ARCHiOx recordings, it is possible to gain much more information about a fascinating linguistic phenomenon. The detailed images can paint a clearer picture of how people in the Middle Ages worked with texts. In the case of MS. Laud Misc. 429, the glosses can not only be linked to a rich history of language exchange, but we now have proof that that the manuscript was the subject of work processes that are much closer to today’s way of studying than one would think.
Fig. 6: John Barrett, ARCHiOx, with mark‑up by the author on the right image
Fig. 7: John Barrett, ARCHiOx
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