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Sending Letters and a Unicorn: How Medieval Nuns Coped with Social Distancing

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20/11/2020

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by Lena Vosding

Three nuns hand a letter to a messenger. Illumination in the Matutinale of Scheyern, Germany, 13th century. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 17401 (1), fol. 16r (61r) (BSB).

The current pandemic, as horrible as it is, seems to have heightened public awareness of pre-modern solutions to modern problems. Blog posts have looked, for example, at St Corona, the Black Death and precedent lock downs, or the strategies medieval anchoresses used to cope with the loneliness of their cells.

Medieval anchoresses and nuns in enclosure also provide a good example of how to maintain relationships without meeting in person. Despite digital communication tools we all have experienced that it can be quite difficult to feel a real sense of community without in-person encounters. So which strategies for coping with social distancing can nuns who only had pen and paper at hand teach us?

Symbolic communication

Conversation also was considered a risk for enclosure: A window, once probably covered with fabric, that allows visitors to speak to the nuns (speaking window). Convent of the Poor Clares in Pfullingen, Germany (Wikipedia commons).

Medieval nuns who chose enclosure to approach the divine through contemplation, developed ways to ensure that families and friends would not forget them – and to show that their prayers benefited society. One of the most effective ways was to develop letter writing to an art form, and overcome distance by imbuing the words with transcendent symbolic meaning. This involved a balancing act: Theologians frequently warned that letters could be disruptive and let the loud, mundane world into the convent. After all, letters were always associated with secrecy, individuality, physical presence, and material goods. St Jerome, for example, carried letters with him and talked to them like to his friend,[1] and St Augustine considered letters to enable greater intimacy than would be possible when the person was physically present but silent.[2]

Many sources reveal how nuns crafted letters in conformity with their rules. Important evidence can be found in the letter books from the Benedictine nuns of Lüne, the largest cache of female writing from late medieval northern Germany.

First Strategy: Virtual Encounters
The passage about gold and silver in letter book Hs 15, Convents Archive Lüne, quire 27, fol. 8r (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel / Kloster Lüne)

The nuns drew on the imaginative potential of letters to overcome distance and to build a sense of community with their families, friends, and other convents, for example, by sending saints as envoys: “Since we are related, it would be appropriate to come to your wedding feast. […] Yet God has chosen me to my own wedding, and he planted me in this earthly garden of paradise. […] So, I wandered around the heavenly fortress of Jerusalem and asked all the dear saints to come out for you.”(Lüne Hs 15, quire 28, fol. 2v). Depending on the recipient, these can be different saints: Mother Mary shall be the merciful host; St Michael shall ensure that only the best things happen to bride, groom, and their guests; St Matthew shall help them to keep their worldly wealth without striving for it too much; St John shall bring their offspring blessing; and St Anne, St Catherine and St Ursula with her 11.000 handmaidens shall always be companions in time of need (Lüne Hs 15, quire 27, fol. 6r-8r). These imaginary envoys could also carry elaborately described symbolic gifts: e.g. pearls and gemstones of a golden necklace, described and interpreted as the virtues and blessings that shall adorn the recipient’s soul (Lüne Hs 15, quire 28, fol. 14r-quire 29, fol. 1v). The nuns argue that, because of their vow of poverty, they cannot afford those expensive gifts, but send a letter instead: “We wish to ask from you that you receive it with the same love as that with which we have written it. If we could have written it in gold and silver, we would certainly have done so. Therefore accept our goodwill as a token” (Lüne Hs 15, quire 27,fol. 8r).

Second Strategy: Sending Gifts (and Unicorns!)
A little unicorn depicted on the so-called Christmas Tapestry, one of the impressive tapestries the nuns of Lüne embroidered in the 15th century (Restaurierungswerkstatt, Klosterkammer Hannover).

A little unicorn depicted on the so-called Christmas Tapestry, one of the impressive tapestries the nuns of Lüne embroidered in the 15th century (Restaurierungswerkstatt, Klosterkammer Hannover).

In other letters, real gifts became metaphors as the nuns interpreted and explained the details. Such gifts ranged from books and devotional pictures to little jugs, dresses, or even two young unicorns. The sender advices the recipient to build a fence around the pasture and to heighten it soon, because “the unicorns jump around so merrily” (Lüne Hs 31, fol. 82r). While it remains unclear what the real gift might have been, the unicorn was a symbol of purity, virtue, and of chaste love, which could only be tamed by a virgin. Thus it became an allegory of the incarnation, in which the virgin was equated with Mary and the unicorn with Christ. The gift for the nun could have been toys, an animal shaped gingerbread, a pastry model, or an embroidery of the creatures.

Third Strategy: Showing Empathy

The empathy palpable in those exchanges is also expressed directly whenever the nuns ask about the wellbeing of a friend in another convent: “I would like you to tell me that you are feeling better. Otherwise I cannot find peace”(Lüne Hs 15, quire 9, fol. 5v). This is also manifest in their deep sympathy for a mourning mother: “I understand that you are in pain and distress, because love is always deep between mother and Child.” The recipient shall soothe her heart to prevent “falling ill with excessive melancholy and tears”, and think of Mother Mary, who had to witness the cruel death of her son. To her she may confide her suffering, for Mary “knows from experience how a grieving mother feels” and will comfort her (Lüne Hs 30, fol. 39v). The nuns also do not hide yearning for their fellow sisters in neighbouring convents: “Give my greetings to the crows and ravens. When I sit here in my cell and hear the crows sing and see the ravens hopping in the snow, I think of my beloved sisters in Lüne” (Lüne Hs 31, fol. 158r). By verbalizing their empathy, the nuns connected emotionally to their social network, and this connectedness enabled them to resist in times of crisis. The nuns survived the Black Death as a community – and the Reformation, for them an even deadlier threat, alive and kicking now in the 21st century.

Fourth Strategy: Crafting words
A nun (sister Elspeth Stagel) writing at a lectern. Illumination in the sisterbook of Töss, Germany, 15th century. Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg, Cod. cent. V, 10a, 3ra (Wikipedia commons).

A nun (sister Elspeth Stagel) writing at a lectern. Illumination in the sisterbook of Töss, Germany, 15th century. Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg, Cod. cent. V, 10a, 3ra (Wikipedia commons).

The nuns in Lüne valued their letters to such a degree that they copied and kept them in their convent’s archive. In this way, they served for continuous edification, to encourage remembering the social network, and to provide examples for teaching the novices how to write. The skill of conveying not only information but also emotion is one that can only be acquired by continuous practice; it was, and still is, an art to write letters that are clear and do not allow for misunderstanding. When communicating through written words alone, appropriate wording is of vital importance. Not surprisingly, the twelfth century saw the invention of letter writing manuals, when societal structures were becoming increasingly complex and demanded expert networking skills. These manuals offer  examples of wording for all sorts of situations, so that the message is understood as expected and a close relationship can be established, even if you do not see or hear each other.

Therefore, when we feel lonely in the enclosure of our homes, a carefully written letter can comfort us. The search for the right words can bring order to one’s thoughts. It sends the mind on a journey to another person in a different place, and also provides the recipient with an individual, physical sign of company. So, why not make the effort for a friend and go on a journey of the mind yourself?

Dr Lena Vosding is a postdoctoral researcher working at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. In her book, she examined the Lüne letter books in terms of form and function. To learn more about the project, the letters, the nuns and their current counterparts in the convent, see the six L.I.S.A. episodes about Lüne Abbey:

Episode 1: Lüne Abbey (the history of the convent and its current inhabitants), 08/19/2020

dark portrait of 1500s woman

Founded in 1172, Lüne Abbey developed into a prosperous religious centre for the Lüneburg region. The Benedictine nuns formed a strong network with other convents in Northern Germany and joined an influential reform movement in 1481. In the 16th century, they transformed into a Protestant community after a prolonged struggle with the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The project ‘The Nuns’ Network’ explores this phase of change and reform in the 15th and 16th centuries, examining the significance of the Abbey and the communication strategies of the nuns based on letter books. These contain almost 1800 letters providing information about pastoral care, debating devotion and theology, and giving insight into daily life in the convent. The letters also highlight the role of rhetoric and learning for women living in strict enclosure.

Episode 2: The Letter Books (the materiality and content of the manuscripts), 08/26/2020

person paging through an old book about A5 sized

Among the numerous treasures of Lüne Abbey, the three letter-books are one of the most significant holdings. Into the three hefty tomes, the nuns copied nearly 1,800 letters and accounts from their correspondence during the 15th and 16th centuries. They offer an insight into the nuns’ lives from their own perspective. Particularly revealing are the arguments surrounding the Lutheran Reformation; the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg finally succeeded in nominally turning the convent into a Protestant community – but the women documented their arguments and preserved the record of it to this day in their Abbey.

Episode 3: The Role of Women (on the high esteem in which nuns were held), 09/02/2020

tapestry showing lions with wigs

The Lüne letters give in-depth insight into the special role of women in religious orders. In medieval society, women were subordinate to men, being in the munt (under the guardianship) of their fathers and then of their husbands, only as widows gaining full control over their legal affairs. This was different in female religious houses. The prioress and other office holders took on a variety of significant roles for the community, and it was a high responsibility to lead the monastic community consisting of several hundred people. The esteem for religious women was based particularly on their status as brides of Christ (sponsae Christi), at the side of the highest king, leading to a elevated rank in the medieval hierarchy. This position was an obligation but also a source of pride for the women as many of the letters show.

Episode 4: The Editing (on the complex process of making the letters accessible), 09/09/2020

close up of black manuscript writing

Editing the letter books from Lüne Abbey is a complex process which relies on the regular exchange between the team members in Düsseldorf, Oxford and Wolfenbüttel: the letters need to be deciphered, structured, commented upon and encoded to make the networks of the nuns accessible again. The edition allows full and fascinating insights into the knowledge structure, the communication and the rhetoric of the nuns. But the letters reach beyond that: private and personal aspects of the life of the women in the convent become visible and relatable, 500 years after they were first written down.

Episode 5: A Key Finding (on the learning of the nuns), 09/16/2020

person reading notes ad looking at a manuscript in soft lamp light

An important part of the editing process is the commentary contextualising the style and content of the letters. A key finding is how scholarly learning and oral culture meet and mix in the letters, showing how the nuns operated on an equal footing with the learned male clergy. In a letter accompanying a gift of wine for the Provost, the young nuns for example show off their Latin learning – with more than a bit of self-deprecating humour. Such a letter could be read out aloud e.g. at a convent feast and thus re-enter the oral sphere of the monastic setting.

Episode 6: The General Interview (on the international collaboration), 09/23/2020

book pages yellowed, book opened half way

The last part of the series the two Principal Investigators, Eva Schlotheuber (Düsseldorf, History) und Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford, German Literature), in form of an interview talk about the genesis, challenges and perspectives of the Lüne letters project. What is the knowledge basis required to work with medieval letters and what challenges does the interdisciplinary collaboration between history and German Studies face; how is the project charting new territory? The exchange between the two investigators also focuses on new methodological approaches, the fascination of the letter books and the important question whether the letters could be considered private. And above all – what is the message of the letters for us today?

What Happens When We Expand the Chronology and Geography of Plague’s History?

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10/11/2020

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(Or Why Yersinia pestis is a Good ‘Model Organism’ in These Pandemic Times)

By Monica H. Green

This short essay is a companion to, and summary of, a lecture of the same title given by Monica H. Green in Oxford on 16 March 2020. You can now watch the video of the lecture on the Oxford Medieval Studies YouTube Channel.

Planning for the following presentation was done in early January 2020, before almost anyone had a clue that the world was about to be immersed in a new pandemic event. Originally meant as a presentation to Byzantinists, the talk was reframed to capture the essence of the larger work I have been doing the past 24 years to reframe the history of infectious diseases in a global framework of analysis. Although still focused on the history of plague (the main disease I’m working on at the moment), my central argument is that an evolutionary approach to the history of infectious diseases gives a powerful new way to understand pandemics past and present, and hopefully a way to avert similar events in the future.

The linchpin of all this work are new ways the biological sciences are contributing to the investigation of disease history. These contributions are of several kinds, but the most important have come from genetics. These function at two levels. First is phylogeny, the work of constructing “family trees” showing the evolutionary development—the “familial” relations—of microorganisms. Everyone will likely have noticed the phylogenetic trees published almost daily for the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Here’s the one from 9 February, showing genomes just sequenced in England:

SARS-CoV-2 has only been around since about November 2019, so far as we know right now. But prior to its arrival, there have been major diseases circulating around the globe for centuries. Tuberculosis, for example, although almost certainly originating in the eastern hemisphere, was present in the western hemisphere (the Americas) for at least the past 1000 years.

The present talk focuses on the story of plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The talk focuses on summarizing the ways in which genetics—by reconstructing the evolutionary history of the pathogen—has told us things about plague’s history that we never previously had an inkling of. It has told us how deep plague’s history with human populations has been (back to the Late Neolithic). It has suggested how broadly plague may have spread in the past (across the Eurasian steppe in the Bronze Age; throughout east, central, and western Eurasia and even into Africa in Antiquity and the Middle Ages). Here’s the latest phylogenetic tree of Yersinia pestis, with the major pandemic events marked:

Source: Zhemin Zhou, Nabil-Fareed Alikhan, Khaled Mohamed, Yulei Fan, the Agama Study Group, and Mark Achtman, “The EnteroBase use’s guide, with case studies on Salmonella transmissions, Yersinia pestis phylogeny, and Escherichia core genomic diversity, Genome Research 30 (2020), 138-152, fig. 5. Labeling: M. H. Green, 2020.

Note the shaded areas: the Neolithic transition; the Justinianic Plague; and the Black Death. Historians have known for generations of the latter two events, of course, because we have eye-witness testimony of both events, as well as many other kinds of evidence. What is stunning, however, is that we also now also have aDNA for those events. “aDNA”—the other new kind of evidence genetics has put on the table—is short for “ancient DNA,” molecular fragments that have been retrieved from people who died of the plague. This has been pieced together fragment-by-fragment, allowing us to understand how those strains of Y. pestis compare to modern strains (all the non-shaded circles on the tree). That comparison, in turns, allows us to make inferences about where the different historical strains circulated, and begin to investigate what animal species hosted them.

But telling the story of a one-celled bacterium is only part of the history we need to reconstruct. How was the disease transmitted over such long distances? Why at particular times, but not others? Getting the “human” part of these stories connected to the history of the pathogen is the work that historians now need to do. The present talk, therefore, gives a sketch of what we know about plague’s history and what questions are currently being investigated. In the question-and-answer session at the end, we covered a variety of topics, some having to do with the specifics of plague’s history (especially the many questions we still have about the Justinianic Plague of Antiquity) but also the urgent questions we face in the present day, faced with a pandemic event that gives every sign of being as cataclysmic for its implications on world history as the Black Death of the later Middle Ages.

Humankind has faced pandemics before. We don’t know nearly as much as we should about them, however. There is much to do in making better sense of pandemic events of the past and in better understanding what they might teach us to better face an uncertain future.

Sources for more information:

I’ve written up a teaching guide about the “new genetics paradigm” which explains in more detail what has happened in genetics in the past couple of decades and why it has been so transformational for our “pandemic thinking.” This and information on my other publications on plague can be found at the following link: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Plague-Studies.

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine and health. Follow her on Twitter @monicaMedHist and get in touch at mhgreen@asu.edu.

Online Resources for Medievalists

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03/11/2020

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By Caroline Batten

What’s a medievalist to read, watch, and listen to in lockdown? What resources can the Internet offer us to brighten our days, teach us new things, and keep us in touch with one another and our work? This is a crowdsourced list of podcasts, videos, blogs, and websites for your delectation and edification, first written up by Karl Kinsella in March and updated for the autumn.

Podcasts

Blogs and Websites

Videos

Exploring Oxford’s nature through medieval eyes

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22/10/2020

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By Andrew Dunning

You won’t see them in a typical tourist guide, but Oxford is home to several fabulous nature spots within walking distance of the city centre. Among my favourite discoveries during this year’s lockdown were a circuit through Wytham Woods, Godstow Abbey, and Port Meadow and a cross-country route along the Thames River to the Harcourt Arboretum (the fields can be mucky, but perseverance gives a prize of peacocks and piglets). When it was announced that the Oxford Open Doors festival would be online this year, I set out to present Oxford’s nature with a medieval twist.

Fans of Fantastic Beasts may know about bestiaries: collections describing both local and exotic animals, given a moral or allegorical interpretation and sometimes sumptuously illustrated. The Bodleian Library’s MS. Bodley 764 is one example, made in thirteenth-century England. Such writings reflect a desire to harmonize research on the natural world from classical and biblical texts with lived experience.

These excerpts feature geese, bees, sheep, and peacocks at Port Meadow, the Botanic Garden, Wytham Woods, and University Parks. If David Attenborough had lived in the Middle Ages, Planet Earth might have sounded something like this.

The goose calls its night watch to witness by its persevering noise. No animal senses a human’s smell like a goose. The Gauls’ assault on the Capitol was detected by its noise. Thus Rabanus says: ‘This bird can symbolize foreseeing people, keeping a good watch over their guard.’ [Rabanus Maurus, De uniuerso 8.6.46]

Now there are two kinds of geese: domestic and wild. Wild geese fly high and in a row, and they symbolize those who live far removed from earthly status by living well. But domestic geese live together in villages, often calling out; they wound one another with their beaks. They symbolize those who, although they love a gathering, spend their time on gossip and back-biting.

All wild geese are ash-grey in colour, and I have never seen one that was multicoloured or white. But in domestic geese, there is not only the ash-grey colour but also multicoloured and white. Wild geese have the ash-grey colour because those who are far from the world take a low garb of repentance. But those who dwell in cities or in villages wear clothing of a more beautiful colour.

A goose senses the smell of a person arriving before the rest of the animals; it does not cease to call out at night, because a prudent person recognizes others, however far away, through their evil or good reputation. Therefore, when a goose senses the smell of one arriving by night, it does not cease to call out, because when a prudent brother sees thoughtless offences of ignorance in others, he should call out. The noise of geese was once of use to the Romans on the Capitol, and in the chapter every day the noise of a prudent brother is useful when he sees thoughtless offences. The noise of a goose drove back the enemy Gauls from the Capitol; but the noise of a prudent brother drives the ancient enemy from the chapter. The noise of a goose saved the city of Rome unharmed from enemy attack; the noise of a prudent brother guards his attention from being disturbed by wicked people.

Perhaps divine providence would not have displayed the natures of birds to us – unless, it may be, he wished to make them useful to us in some way.

Bees (Botanic Garden)

Bees [apes] are so named either because they cling to one another with their feet [a (by) + pes], or because they are born without feet [a (without) + pes], for they develop both feet and wings afterwards. These are diligent in the task of creating honey. They live in assigned dwellings; they build their homes with indescribable skill; they compose their honeycombs from different flowers; and they fill up their beehives with innumerable offspring in wax cells. They have armies and kings, and they wage battles. They flee from smoke and are provoked by a disturbance.

Many people know from observation that bees are born from the corpses of cattle. For to create these bees, the flesh of slaughtered calves is beaten; worms are created from the rotten gore. Afterwards, the worms become bees. Strictly speaking, however, the ones called ‘bees’ come from oxen, just as hornets are from horses, drones from mules, and wasps from asses.

The Greeks call the larger bees created in the honeycomb’s outer cells ‘castros’. Some people think they are called kings, because they lead their beehives [castra].

Among all the kinds of animals, only bees have shared offspring. They all live in one house; they enclose the borders of a single country; all their work is shared; their food is shared; their tasks are shared; their custom and produce is shared; their flight is shared.

They ordain a king for themselves, they appoint people, and though placed under a king they are free. For they also maintain his privilege of judgement, and have affection for him by the fidelity of their devotion, since they choose him as king in the same way as a deputy for themselves, and they honour him with the entire swarm. But the king is not selected by lot, because a lot involves chance rather than judgement, and often the worse candidate is preferred to the better one by the irrational falling of the lot.

None of the bees dare to leave their homes, nor go out into any pastures, unless the king has gone out first and has claimed authority for himself with his flight. They go forth through fragrant fields where they inhale the odours of the flowers of the garden, where streams flow among fragrant grasses, where the banks are pleasant. There, lively youth play their games, there men take their athletic persuits, there they find release of cares. The first foundations of the hives are laid as a delightful labour among the flowers and sweet herbs.

Sheep (South Hinksey)

The sheep is a soft wooly domestic animal, with a vulnerable body, a gentle spirit. Its Latin name, ‘ovis’, is derived from ‘oblations’, because when the ancients first began sacrificing, they did not kill cattle but sheep. Some people call them two-toothed, because some have two upper teeth along with eight others. The gentiles used to offer these especially in sacrifice.

When winter comes, the sheep grazes insatiably and tears at the grass voraciously, because it senses the coming sharpness of winter. It first stuffs itself with grass for food, since all the grass is destroyed by the freezing cold.

Sheep, as we said, represent innocent and simple people among Christians. Furthermore, at times the sheep also allegorically displays the mildness and patience of the Lord himself. A passage of Isaiah on the innocent Saviour’s death says, ‘as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ [Isaiah 53.7] In the Gospel, sheep are the faithful people: ‘The sheep hear his voice’. [John 10.3] And in a psalm: ‘Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet: sheep and oxen’. [Psalm 8.6–7] Two sheep represent the peoples of the nations that a man nourishes, that is Christ, on which it is read in the prophet, ‘in those days a man shall nourish a young cow and two sheep; and because of the abundance of milk he shall eat butter’. [Isaiah 7.21–22]

Peacocks (Harcourt Arboretum)

The peacock’s name comes from the sound of its call; its flesh is so tough that it hardly suffers decay, and it is not easy to cook. Concerning it, someone once said: ‘Do you admire him whenever he spreads out his jewelled wings, and can you hand him over, hard-hearted man, to the cruel cook?’ [Martial 13.70]

Because Solomon carried a peacock from distant lands, and it has different colours in its feathers, it is a sign of the gentile people, coming to Christ from remote parts of the earth, who also shine brightly, adorned with the grace of many virtues.

Andrew Dunning is the R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and Supernumerary Fellow in Book History at Jesus College.

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

09:22

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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

22:26

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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.