For a large number of years now, there has been a website entitled Secrets of the Norman Invasion. The site has grown and developed over the years as the author, Nick Austin, has developed his arguments, firstly, that the army of William the Conqueror did not actually land at Pevensey but at another site, and secondly, that the site of the Battle of Hastings is not the same as the site of Battle Abbey. Many of his arguments are quite persuasive, but there have been problems with getting the kind of historical proof that is required to convince heritage authorities and to fend off local councils which want to build roads all over the place.
The game now appears to be getting hotter, with protesters and roadworkers facing off at what he believes is the site of the battle. You can read about it on his blog The Secrets of the Norman Invasion Blog. It has gone from historical detective work to political activism. Nick has produced a mass of material to read on the subject, should you want to get up to speed with it before joining the blockade.
It leads me to a little philosophical rumination about what is history and what is mythology, and how the mythology is developed from history to serve various purposes. If William the Conqueror built the abbey that he had promised on a different site to that of the battle, despite his stated intention, he must have done it for a reason, but one that is lost to history. It could have involved suitability of terrain, or some political machinations involving landholding, of which there were many in the middle ages, or some shenanigans involving relations with the church, of which ditto. However, once a site of pilgrimage is established, and this is a kind of secular pilgrimage site, there are many interests in preserving the mythology. I mean, if Nick is right, the producers of commemorative crockery and teaspoons in Battle may suffer a severe economic downturn.
To look at some other examples, Did the abbots of Cluny really believe that the remains of St James were miraculously transported to a remote spot in Spain called Compostella, or did they just think they were on to a good thing in setting up a lucrative network of pilgrimage routes? Perhaps the fact that the general pilgrimaging public fell for this ruse was considered a miracle in its own right.
One of my favourite bits of historical mythology involves the Strasbourg Oath, as sworn by the grandsons of Charlemagne and their respective armies. It is solemnly represented as the earliest written evidence for the proto-French and Proto-German languages, based on having been written down in a Latin chronicle, the only extant copy of which is from several hundred years after the event. So how accurate is the transcription of these bits of proto-language, and how did the original chronicler acquire them? If he was there, how accurately did he hear them? If he was given an official transcript, how accurate was it given that these were non-literate languages? How accurately was it transcribed over the centuries? It all reminds you of the Sermon on the Mount scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Nevertheless, it is supposed to be a foundation charter for French and German linguistic identity.
If you think it is important to separate historical fact from historical mythology, perhaps you need to be sitting down there on a roadworks site in Sussex. Right or wrong, if it is all dug up and tarmacked, we will never know. Mythology will win again.
It's been a long time between drinks, But hopefully I can get back on the airwaves again. Well sometimes reality interferes with your cyberlife.
I was intrigued by the latest newsletter from e-codices, the totally fantastic and amazing manuscript website from Switzerland which not only lets you look at a vast array of medieval manuscripts in great detail, but allows others to use them through a Creative Commons licence. Truly sharing our cultural heritage. But this item was a little intriguing.
The ultimate iconic image of a manuscript researcher has long involved a pair of white gloves. This is supposed to show how much we care for the conservation of the precious artifacts that we are handling. Valuable manuscripts and white gloves; like bread and butter, horse and cart, love and marriage (well, perhaps that last is a dated reference). Now the conservators of Switzerland are telling us that it is actually a bad thing to wear gloves while handling manuscripts, as it reduces the sensitivity of the fingers, thereby making it more likely that the manuscript might be damaged. As well, dirt and muck from manuscripts is actually transferred to the white gloves and can be spread to other items. Just regularly wash your hands, they say - just like doctors and nurses.
This opinion is corroborated by no less an institution than the British Library, as described in a blog posting. It seems the white gloves thing is just a bit of spin. Mind you, I have experienced the difficulties of this many years ago, when attempting to photograph a medieval manuscript in a library where they insisted on white gloves, but I was unable to work the camera with them on. A compromise deal had to be worked out in which one person wore the white gloves and turned the pages and I took the pictures, promising not to touch the manuscript. Funny thing is, it was a book of hours, which had probably been handled every day with naked fingers in the course of somebody's daily devotions.
Those people who work with the less luxurious class of manuscripts, such as legal documents, often prefer to wear white gloves because the things are so filthy that otherwise they get muck all over their hands. There is something a little bit worrying about medieval grime.
Anyway, having broken the ice, I will see if I can get back to some work on Medieval Writing. A diligent user has found a couple of minor typos in my transcripts, so I had better start with those and then progress to something new.
There has been recent interest in the concept as books as objects of material culture. For years academics have concentrated on the texts, but they are now seeing them as objects with coded meanings beyond the texts. They have whole conferences about the subject. To buy a book on the subject of such meanings in early printed works, from a recent academic conference, click here. All proceeds go to Lifeline, a charity providing telephone counselling, particularly in relation to suicide.
And yes, such matters have been distracting me lately from updating Medieval Writing, but the job is still in hand. Hopefully there will be some more updates soon.
One of the adjuncts to Medieval Writing was The Elephant Book, a guide to medieval resources on the web, originally designed for students at the Australian National University. It first appeared in paper form around 1995, when there were about twelve good medieval resource sites on the web, and had pictures of a medieval elephant on the cover. You can meet this elephant here, as part of a paleography exercise. The students, naturally referred to the guide as The Elephant Book.
As medieval resources on the web increased and students became a bit more savvy about using it, The Elephant Book migrated to the web itself, with a terrible tacky elephant skin background, big gold star ratings for websites and a different elephant on the cover due to the university's anxiety about copyright issues. As resources and search facilities grew again, the site changed focus from being a listing of useful and reliable medieval sites, to how to find and evaluate them for yourselves, with a listing of some of our favourites. But still time marches on. It is hard enough to keep up a reasonable list of sites on even a specialised corner of the medieval cyberverse, such as manuscripts and paleography, and the issue with using the web for research is not so much how to find things, as how to evaluate them. So the elephant got very elderly and tired, and has had to be put down.
They knew about elephants in medieval Europe, but not many people had seen one. That's why so many depictions of elephants in medieval art don't look terribly much like elephants. Matthew Paris, the famous monk-chronicler of St Albans in the 13th century, had seen one that was given to King Henry III of England by Louis IX of France and was occasionally paraded through the streets of London. These two were great competitors in present giving and also in the acquisition of dodgy holy relics. The chapel and shrine for the Crown of Thorns still stands in Paris. The original elephant from the cover of our book, and which appears in the paleography exercise for a 13th century bestiary, looks like an elephant and the artist may have seen the same elephant. On the other hand, Matthew Paris drew another elephant, bearing on its back the town band of Cremona, rather as our bestiary elephant has a band of musicians on its back rather than the traditional castle. As Matthew Paris had never been to Cremona, he was probably basing that elephant on the one he had seen in London. Maybe our bestiary illustrator copied the Cremona elephant drawing. Medieval scribes, illuminators and sculptors had no qualms about nicking designs from each other.
Our Elephant Book website actually lasted longer than the hapless elephant that was given to Henry III and kept in the Tower of London. Unfortunately they didn't know too much about elephant husbandry in 13th century London. I'm not too sure what happened to the drops of blood of Jesus that the Templars brought back for Henry. You could flog anything to a Templar.
So farewell to all departed elephants. Vale.
Our giant bookfair has come and gone, quashing the idea that the printed book has had its day. $430,000 dollars made for Lifeline in one three day weekend flogging secondhand books, CDs, records and games and puzzles. Some kinds of books are less alive than others. It seems that fewer people want to buy paper dictionaries these days. Well, why would they I guess? They seem to be following in the wake of encyclopaedias, which plenty of people want to give away, but nobody wants to buy. It's all on the internet.
They do want to buy lots of other kinds of books to hold in their hands and turn the pages. Kindle editions and other e-books might be making some inroads, but people still want something to put on the shelf. Classic English literature sold well, even though all the titles are available in e-books for free. Apart from the touchy feely thing, I wonder if the deficiencies in the capability to properly reference cheap e-book editions is keeping student of Eng. Lit. still hunting for cheap paper versions.
Meanwhile, back in the land of pixelated manuscripts, I have recommenced updating graphics and reformatting pages. Yawn!!! When I get totally bored with this, I will reveal to you a tantalising scrap of bookbinder's waste which shows just how bad legal Latin was becoming by the 16th century.
Well there I was, chugging through updating the graphics and formatting in the script samples, when I came upon a section where I had no master graphic files in any format known to modern computing. They must have been some of the earliest examples that I had done, probably from before Medieval Writing was even a website. So there has been a slight delay while I rescanned a whole bunch of images of protogothic and Gothic documents and catalogued them. All done now, so the Gothic documents are now being updated again. The fact that it is raining like Noah's fludde this weekend might mean some more progress gets made. Can't do any gardening without a boat. To think that with fancy modern technology, images become unreadable in a few years, but those original 500 year old scratches on parchment are still there and legible.
I have mentioned in the past that I do some voluntary work in a large warehouse that processes secondhand books for several bookfairs a year to raise funds for the charity Lifeline, a telephone counselling service. All the books are donated by members of the public in Canberra (which is, of course, the capital city of Australia). Naturally, current changes to the way books are published and read is a perennial topic of discussion among the volunteers, as this affects our bottom line. It has occurred to me that there is a distinct time lag between technological changes to books and the concept of a book.
Because we receive unselected donations, we cannot sell all the books. Some are too decrepit or damaged, too out of date or simply appear in too many duplicates, so some books have to go to paper recycling. This upsets some people, as it seems that they still have a mindset that a modern printed book is like a medieval manuscript; a unique artifact and repository of knowledge. Most, in fact, are mass produced items of the industrial age. Everybody does keep a look out for books that are rare or especially interesting, so that they get special treatment.
Now that e-books are infiltrating the world of reading, we wonder what effect this will have on the buying public. There are those among us who use our e-book readers for certain purposes, in my personal case for recreational reading, but who are definitely not abandoning our reference libraries of real books any time soon. The likes of Amazon.com and ABE books have increased our personal reference libraries of real books through online sales. On the other hand, Google books and The Internet Archive have expanded our reference collections to include old and rare titles that we would otherwise find very difficult to acquire. Some folks feel that a book should have a cover and pages, just like a medieval manuscript. Others are coming to the idea of a book as a concept; a bounded body of information or themes or ideas, even if it does not exist as a thing.
Our bookfair is moving with the times by introducing online sales of real books (Lifeline Canberra Online Bookstore). It is just at the beginning of operations so far and the number of books is currently limited, but we hope it will grow to cater for the internet savvy crowd who still like real pages. That might keep us going until somebody works out how to sell used conceptual books in the form of secondhand e-books.
We also sell music in the form of records and CDs. One lady dropped us off a whole box full of CDs, saying her husband didn't need them any more as he had ripped them all to his iPod. My first thought was, hang on, don't you keep the CDs as backups? I guess I think of musical performances as objects rather than concepts, and musical performance objects have only been around for about one hundred years, unlike reading objects. Now there is a thought for further philosophical rumination.
