Everything in Boxes

  I hope you all had a good Easter. I did. I spent the whole time at a folk festival - great music and dancing, food and drink, and generally good fun. Somehow though, the talk at these events always gets round to "What is folk music?" or "Is this really folk music?". Frankly Scarlett, I couldn't give a damn. It's all music. Sing, dance, pluck, strum, blow, bang, whatever.
  This set us talking about how the chattering classes are always discussing the classification of things. Botanists in Australia have spent years of their lives arguing about how many species of Eucalyptus trees there are, but the trees grow in the forests just the same. Somebody who was singing a song about starfish claimed that zoologists now insist that they should not be called starfish as they are not fish. Instead they should be called sea stars. Trouble is, they are not in the sky and they don't twinkle. I personally have inflicted on the world a PhD thesis on the ethnic classification of the Dayaks of Borneo, and how it doesn't really work because people are not classified by their characteristics in common, but defined by their differences from others, and they usually have relationships with various different groups of others. Phew! It has taken me about sixteen years to reduce my PhD thesis to one sentence.
  We took one of our granddaughters to her favourite science museum, where we went to a presentation on dinosaurs. They explained that Brontosaurus did not exist, because it had previously been discovered and called something else. There were even suggestions of scientific fakery in order to create more classifications of dinosaurs. Some large critter left those bones behind, and he existed, and wasn't classified for millions of years. It must be very galling to be declassified if the corollary is that you didn't even exist. I shall insist on being cremated when I die so that they can't do it to me.
  I bought a chalumeau at the folk festival. That is a kind of proto-clarinet. On looking up the history of these instruments, there was great argumentation about the precise stage of the process of gradually modifying sound holes and adding levers which makes a chalumeau become a clarinet, and whether the person who is credited with inventing the clarinet really did so, or whether he merely modified a chalumeau. Well, I can blow notes on it now, so a big raspberry to that one. Just stop arguing and make the music.
  Language came into the discussion. There was a French singer who had lived for many years in northeast England and who spoke with a brilliant Geordie accent. She said she hadn't known that there were people in England who spoke other than "proper" English. She originally came from Nimes in the south of France. I went there once, and discovered that there were people who spoke French in a manner that my old French teachers would have thought was most incorrect. But we put all these things in boxes and write rules and fail to recognise that the rules don't always fit. In an earlier posting English 4 U I wrote something about the changing language and got emails from people effusively congratulating me on confirming their prejudices about the necessity to retain "proper" English, when I was saying the exact opposite.
  Paleography, of course, is not immune from this kind of discussion. Learned folks are always arguing about whether you can define a script by the funny little twiddle on the top of the s or whether you should define it by the slope of the ascenders or other minutiae, when we know that in the real world there is an endless range of variation which tends to clump into loosely defined patterns which we dignify with names. But then we talk as if the classifications were the reality, not simply something which we have made up in order to help us think. I have had numerous emails from people sending me pictures of bits of writing so that I can tell them the name of the script so that they can read it. (??!)
  I recently acquired a couple of books about medieval musical notation, and discovered that the same old story goes on there. There are names for the various evolving styles of musical notation, but no exact place where one turns into another. But somehow the emboxment becomes more important than understanding the process of evolution. So we are back where we started, with music, having got absolutely nowhere.

Scripts, Hands and Emails

  There is one particular type of email I get on a recurring basis. Somebody is trying to read a piece of medieval handwriting, but it doesn't look like any of the examples on Medieval Writing. The writer wants to know the name of the script so that they can read it. Alternatively, the writer knows the name of the script, but it doesn't look like the one on Medieval Writing.
  I have included a piece on Scripts and Hands to try and shed some light on this conundrum. Those of you who have been reading medieval handwriting for years know that every piece of writing does not look like its script prototype, and what to do about it. Those just starting out might need a few tips. But then it starts you thinking about the whole process of writing and why it looks like it does and ...........

Eeee! Books

  I have just read another article predicting the imminent demise of the printed book as we know it. E-books are about to rule the world and publishing houses of the traditional kind will plunge into the abyss of bankruptcy if they don't get a new idea. At the same time, our fair city of Canberra is in the middle of a regular twice a year secondhand book fair which is run to benefit a local charity. It is absolutely huge, and gets bigger every year. Are the buyers stockpiling against the paper book millennium? Are those who donate the books turfing out their libraries in order to replace them with a petite electronic gizmo or two?

  I recently acquired a Kindle; not the most sexy of electronic devices, monochrome with a little screen and lousy book navigation. In fact a tiny girl of about two who keeps coming to investigate it when I'm filling in time at my granddaughter's gym class thinks it is the most useless and boring Nintendo DS she has ever seen. Nevertheless it has its uses. I can download for free very imperfect scans of old books that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, or unobtainable. I can also download recreational reading without filling up my ever decreasing bookshelf space. It's great for reading in bed, because if you fall asleep, it does too, and it doesn't lose its place. It does have the unfortunate feature than when it goes to sleep it displays a grainy old picture of some defunct author. It is quite scary to wake up in the night and find Harriet Beecher Stowe glowering at you over the bedcovers.
   There are some books I think I would always prefer to be in paper form, such as dictionaries, reference material where you might want to have six books open at the same time, or highly illustrated material. I once wrote a review of an electronic dictionary for a journal of online and multimedia matters. The editor said she would never have believed a review of a dictionary could be so funny. A representative of the dictionary wrote an indignant letter with a long list of what he claimed were factual errors or unknowable things, for all of which I was able to prove him incorrect. The journal went belly up, but I don't think that was me. Hey, all I did was speculate on what kind of book you could write with a dictionary that included esoteric Australian slang and a rather peculiar assortment of proper nouns, including the names of French philosophers and nuclear physicists. Then I said I preferred a dictionary with pages.
  I suspect (Nostradamus moment!) that paper books and electronic books will co-exist for a long time yet. Publishing houses will have to get out of their 19th century industrial mode of production and distribution or they will go the way of the dodo. At the moment, it is faster and cheaper to order a paper book online for yourself than have a bookseller do it, and if publishers don't provide electronic services, they are doomed. But for some things, we just like our books.

  The electronic book might just send the book back into a more medieval mode. We have all been taught how naughty it is to write on our industrial type books or to alter things, but with the capacity in electronic media to make annotations on other people's work, or update our own, we might end up with something more like those medieval glossed works with commentary dribbled all around the core text and every version just a bit different. Librarian's nightmare!

More Little French Things

There is now a paleography exercise for the letter close of Jean le Bon.

Little French Things

  What this website needs is a few little French things Patsy. Saffy, pop down and get us a few little French things sweetie!
  No seriously, Medieval Writing needs a few more French things, so I have started with a script sample from a 14th century letter close of Jean le Bon in French Secretary cursive script. I have not done the paleography exercise yet, but will do it soon as it is just a wee little document. Much more fun than sorting out notes and backing up files.
  I have just noted that the Dirty Books article mentioned a couple of posts ago has had its illustrations restored, in a natty format so they zoom out of the page at you when you click on them, so you can see the grubby finger marks, as well as the beautiful manuscripts that they were left on.
  Oh, and about the mulberry tree. Well I will get back to that, but I'm afraid that manuscript has a rather similar effect on me as the consumption of gross excesses of mulberries. I will endeavour to finish the exercise though, imperfect as it may be. I just have a bit of a problem with all that horticultural and gynaecological imagery all mixed together.

Paleographical Passion and Archivist Angst

  Much of the basic groundwork in paleography and in the study of archives was done a long time ago. That is not to say that good work is not still going on, but to get back to the roots of it, it is necessary to ferret out some rare old books. That has had me ratting around in The Internet Archive and printing out great tomes at painful speed, or more recently downloading bad scans of imperfect copies of old books to my Kindle. It all has deficiencies, but better than not being able to get your hands on things at all.
  A noticeable feature of academic writing of earlier times is that authors were allowed to express their passion, and by crikey did they get passionate about their subjects. The following is a series of quotes from Hubert Hall 1908 Studies in English Official Historical Documents Cambridge University Press. This is a working guide to the English Public Records, with a bit of concise history about the various classes of records and what happened to them over the centuries. Pretty dry stuff, you might think, but the following decontexted grabs express some of his feeling about how the records were treated during the 18th and 19th centuries:
  “... we have to deplore almost incalculable losses through premature decay and systematic abstractions. These losses are chiefly due to the deliberate neglect of later official custodians and to the still more wanton refusal of the parliaments and ministries of the 18th and even the 19th century to adopt the simplest precautions ofr their safekeeping.”

  “...the anxiety displayed by enlightened antiquaries to save some specimens of historical evidence from these putrid heaps of parchment ...”

  “By dint of groping on his hands and knees amidst the dust and corruption of the low-roofed cock-lofts of the Exchequer treasuries  ....”

  “Almost within living memory the public Records have been sold for glue by the soldiers and workmen employed to remove them from one pestilential vermin-haunted den to another...”

  “... after a further period of official procrastination, illumined by various destructive fires, the Records are still found in festering heaps...”

  “... the officials who should have been engaged in their jealous preservation were employed as sub-commissioners in preparing worthless texts, imperfect calendars, and misleading indexes...”
  Hubert Hall would no doubt be much delighted with the way in which the Public Records are now housed, and made available for study; another subject on which he expresses strong opinions. He would also, no doubt, be pleased that since his time local record offices have acquired back vast numbers of records that were in private hands, another area that he laments. Not much to be done about the glue or the rats though.
  Perhaps the main point is that modern writings tend to be laden with jargon and complex conceptual baggage, and nobody want to be caught out having an emotionally charged opinion about such matters. After all, Hubert doesn't give the impression that archivists were the dull sort of people of their (probably unfairly ascribed) reputation. We can never convince governments about the importance of educational matters if we just jabber in tongues among ourselves, and never let rip with our angst and passion.

Glossed Bible

And a little bit of medieval detritus that I found has turned out to be a torn fragment of a page of what was once probably a very nice glossed Bible. I have put a segment of it here so you can have a peek.

Monastic Pressmarks

OK, I promised I would sneak a little something in. There is a set of new script samples of cursive writing from the 14th and 15th centuries, as found in monastic pressmarks, basically inscriptions in books as to where they are stored in the library. These are interesting on a few counts. They show the diversity of cursive hands, but they also show something of medieval monastic library practice, and they point out avenues which have been used by researchers for discovering the history of books.
I have made some minor changes to the frame structure of the site, and before you say you hate it anyway and I should throw it out, I might point out that it is only there so that I can do some of these reorganisings when certain sections get overloaded, as I only have to change the navigation frame, not umpty gazillion pages. The script index now has its own section, as that is what a lot of people use the most, and it is getting kind of large. The navigation frame is wider, as I figure you have all got wider screens than the one that it was originally designed for. If the site comes up looking really weird next time you load it, just try clearing your cache so that everything fits again. If your favourite section has somehow got lost in the wash, please let me know.

The Medieval 90s

  The stuff you find when you start looking through old files! No doubt I thought this primitive bit of computer cartooning infinitely hilarious in nineteen ninety something, but it's a variation on the monk in a scriptorium joke that every medievalist had some variant of on their pinboard at the time.  What is really scarey is that the computer the chap is typing on was just like the one I had at the time, complete with little foldup screen which, in my case,would not have displayed that lovely coloured capital as it could only manage vile electric green in chunky pixelated lumps. I wonder if I should re-do it with him holding an iPad, or has this lame old monk/computer joke run its course?
  Actually, I think this was originally a monk with a typewriter joke that I pinched in concept from somebody else. Ah, the 20th century was so medieval!

Dirty Medieval Books

  OK, so here I am dutifully typing up catalogue entries from scruffy old notebooks and sending files into The Cloud and vowing not to do anything fun until the job is done, when the family medievalist walks in with something he found while looking for something else in the London Metropolitan Archives, and I'm hooked.

  One of the things that has always intrigued me in my own collection of medieval manuscript detritus is the greasy finger marks which can be quite apparent on the edges of the pages. I'm sure there is some residual DNA in there, and we could clone ourselves a friar or a devout lay person or two. I even once snagged a tiny little miniature on an orphan page from a book of hours. It went cheap because it was smudged. As it was an image of Veronica's handkerchief, odds on it was smudged by having been kissed by its owner. To me that is value added, but not to the buying public apparently. But somebody else of significant stature in the medieval art history world has got right into this subject.

  Kathryn Rudy has spent some time, effort and ingenuity actually measuring the amount of grot from finger marks on books of hours in order to work out which parts were read most frequently. A brief article entitled Measuring Medieval Dirt can be found on the website of the London Metropolitan Archives. Her longer article, Dirty Books, appears on the website of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Volume 2, Issue 1. You have to look it up from the home page as it appears that the site will not let you in through a direct link. It is a long article, but unfortunately the many illustrations appear to have been removed. (They have since been restored.)

  A couple of her main conclusions indicate that late medieval folks were a bit like us; they hit the indulgences pretty hard for fear of the hereafter, and they didn't manage to stay up late enough to complete the entire daily round of offices. Mortal humans all.

  There seems to be a bit of lateral thinking going on in manuscript studies at the moment, with new ways of looking at things and new questions to ask. Those who claim that paleography is dead just need to broaden their definition of the term.

Scribal Anxiety

  I guess new writing technology has always caused anxiety. I mean, a block of stone marked with a chisel has so much greater archival stability than those marks made with black liquid on some flexible but fragile medium. When I was at school, newfangled ballpoint pens were banned because they would cause our writing to become messy and illegible. (They may have had a point there). We had to use fountain pens. (Ask your grandma!) Essays had to be handwritten, not typed, so that the teachers could tell you had actually done it yourself. There were even neurotic fears among the professions that used typewriters for a living. Legal firms employed very accurate typists, because no corrections were allowed on legal documents, as it would then be impossible to know whether the document had been tampered with.
  Then along came computers, and a whole lot of other issues to get anxious about. From the beginning, a major source of anxiety was the storage of our files. My first computer used a cassette tape (Ask your grandma about that as well.) to load and save very small text files very slowly and frequently inaccurately. We printed everything. Then floppy disks came along. (Ask grandma again, and perhaps dad might have a hazy memory of these.) Horrible things happened to these in the early days. People put staples through them so they wouldn't fall out of envelopes for posting. They carefully saved files to them and stored them on top of those oldfashioned monitors that oozed heat and magnetic fields. They left them in the gloveboxes of their cars. My greatest scribal anxiety about them was that if the computer was merely rearranging very small magnetic fields on a thin plastic film, why did it make a noise like a woodpecker in full spate while it was doing it? Possibly they just included that noise as an extra so that you would be reassured that it was doing something.
  Teachers developed new anxieties about the authenticity of students' work when presented as a computer printout. They demanded that students hand in their drafts as well as the final product, not understanding that with this new technology, writings were edited, not redrafted. I remember my now middle aged son carefully editing backwards his school assignments into a more messy form to hand in as a draft. (Hey, it's a life skill!)
  Hard drives were a great boon, and they didn't sound so woodpeckery; more like death watch beetle. Even the youngest of you has one of these I presume, but the earliest ones had a tiny little capacity compared to those of today. As computers became capable of manipulating graphics files, audio, animation, video and all the fun of the multimedia fair, we had to find somewhere to store those files.
  We were advised to use CDs, as hard drives suffered from "bit rot". Mind you, every computer problem I have ever had that was supposed to have been caused by "bit rot" wasn't. It always turned out to be something else. Recourse of the lazy IT help desk expert. Reinstall Windows - bah humbug! On the other hand, those floppy disks suffered from some sort of rot. Anxiety attack as everything stored on them had to be transferred to something else. Worse than silverfish in your vellum codices. Floppy disks were stockpiled by manufacturers then abandoned by so many users so abruptly that stocks were being sold that were ten years past their use by date. Came the time when about fifty percent of floppies in an unused box turned out to be unusable. 
  I have a large collection of photographs of things of medieval interest, used for teaching by the family partnership. They were originally on slides. (Ask grandma again.) They dated from the days when cameras contained little rolls of photosensitive strips, which gave you beautiful images that then started decomposing immediately. We got them put onto CDs, initially by professionals at great expense, but then doing it ourselves as the equipment became available. And always an extra set for backups. 
  Then scribal anxiety again, or rather, illuminator's anxiety. Apparently CDs are not archival after all. Ha ha, tricked you. Buy a whomping great big new hard drive and copy the whole lot on. Apparently they don't suffer from "bit rot" after all. My scribal anxiety at this point was based around wondering how any dumb machine could remember where so much data was and be able to find it again.
  Assorted portable devices for storing and transferring files from one computer to another came and went; very small volume portable hard drives, Zip disks (The players went crick, crick, crick and died, taking the contents of the disk with them!), thumb drives or sticks (OK for short term use but not recommended for archival.) Come on guys, where can a girl get a good scriptorium when she needs one?
  Bought a new laptop and discovered that the hard drive on this slim device has more capacity than the whomping big one originally used for backups. Copy everything on to that. But now we have another cause for scribal anxiety. Offsite backups used to be stored in the family medievalists's university office, but now he is retired, moved all his stuff back home, and everything is in the one place. This in a country replete with droughts and flooding rains, and bushfires.
  Now some clever clogs in the family has convinced me that my backups would be better out there in The Cloud, wherever that may be. Makes sense, but there is a conceptual difficulty. I can't see it, and I don't know where it is. I choose faith over reason and go down that track. But what if governments fall, there is revolution, another global financial crisis, someone steals my data and finds an antisocial use for pictures of medieval manuscripts and misericords .... what if, what if?
  I now have more backups than a dump truck, but I still have to sort out the muddle of handwritten notes stuffed into filing cabinets, printouts of scanned images, overdue library books and other things that have accumulated untidily since I first started this project. You can see where this shaggy dog story is going, can't you. I am just trying to explain why there might not be a lot of new material on the Medieval Writing website for a little while as I rearrange the deckchairs and wait for the next iceberg. Trouble is, as I work through this stuff I keep finding interesting little bits I want to use, so I might sneak a few little things in.
  The good news is, as I work steadily through all my material, I have only discovered one thing so far that appears to be actually lost. It is a rather obscure Old English transcription, and it was on a piece of paper.
PS. If you want to know what my first computer looked like, click here. They've put it in a museum!!

It's Personal

There is something about handwriting that links us to the writer; or at least, we are under the delusion that it does. I must admit to a naive delight in handling a scrap of paper or parchment that a real person has toiled over, marking in their own quite individual way, even if that person is entirely unknown to me.
I guess that is why people collect autographs. A cricket bat or a sports shirt or a CD or a concert program or a book is all very well as a piece of memorabilia, but so much more desirable if somebody associated with it has scrawled their signature and a message on it. I guess we feel in some way that it connects us to our heroes.
When I was a young thing at school, all the authors that we read were dead. So recently I resolved to make an effort to read some literature by people who are still alive. That's how I came to be reading Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man. Somewhat depressing book, full of screwballs and losers. Perhaps the saddest thing about it is that the protagonist (he could not be called a hero), who trades in autographs but is only interested in collecting for himself the autograph of one elderly film actress, ends up discovering that he has invented a persona and a life quite different to that of the owner of the autograph. 
I guess we might be doing the same thing when we immerse ourselves in those historical documents penned by people involved in the affairs of the day. Still, when you know that somebody was clerk of the council during the minority of Henry VI, became bishop of Chichester as well as Keeper of the Privy Seal, and ended up murdered in the street by a mob in Portsmouth because the folk were angry about the losing of some possessions in France, you have to think that your romances and fantasies could be no more exotic and out there than the simple historical truth. It's not just paleography any more, it's personal.

There are people who claim that all history is fiction, but who cares!

Photograph by permission of the National Archives, London E28/G8/18

Merry Christmas to the Myopic

Some little while ago I discovered a comment on somebody else's blog complaining that the fonts on this blog were way too small. What actually happened was that when I changed my blog template, somehow all the existing postings got changed to a teensy weensy little font. It seemed that it could only be fixed by manually going into the html, so I did it for the most recent, and figured nobody reads old blog postings anyway. It seems they do, so I have gone through and fixed the rest, I think. So if you want to amuse yourself by reading old blog postings over Christmas, you won't need to buy a new pair of glasses. Cheers, have a good holiday!

Reading and Listening

I recently received an email from someone who, as an aside to the main conversation, said he was an Oxford graduate in literature and Classics, but he had read all this literature in modern printed editions. They never discussed the manuscript tradition in those courses.

Now this is a great bugbear of mine. Any modern edition of an ancient work from the manuscript tradition is selected, corrected, disinfected, analysed, annotated and authorised. In many modern definitive editions there is no discussion of where surviving manuscript copies reside, or how many were consulted to produce the edition. Surviving manuscript copies of a work can range from one, as with Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or several which are each significantly different, as with Piers Plowman, or hundreds with multiple variations, as with the Travels of Marco Polo. Numbers and variants that survive may be serendipitous, but may at least hint at the popularity of a work, and at how much writers and scribes were willing to alter the work in transcription. It is all part of the story of the story, if that makes sense.
There are studies of the variants of certain well known medieval works, some of which are on the web, as this modern medium is more adaptable to production of multiple variants of texts than the old linear string of little black symbols on a page. I seem to have sung this song before. When it comes to written communication, we are going medieval again.
Modern definitive editions have their place,of course. If your Latin or Middle English or Old Slovenian is a bit wonky, it at least gives you access to something you might not otherwise read. But surely literature studies should be looking at how the work has appeared in its various historic guises, at least as part of the consideration of the text. Ah well, I guess I am never destined to be a Professor of Literature!

In the recent collection by Ralph Elliot, which I mentioned a couple of posts ago, he has an article entitled "Chaucer's Voices", in which he discusses various styles of writing in Chaucer as actually representing the patterns of speech of certain types of people. This, he says, is relevant because in Chaucer's day most people knew the stories from having them read aloud to them. In the middle ages, it was reading, whether you did it with your eyes or your ears. Even legal documents often referred to "those who have read or heard" the document in question. This gives another layer of interpretation, through expression or on-the-fly editing. It was those rotten little black printed symbols that gave texts their unvarying character in the first place; handy for the church, but changing the whole nature of literature.

This Christmas, read aloud to somebody, or tell a story. Merry Christmas!

History of the Familiar

The latest addition to the website is The Strange History of Humanistic Minuscule. It is an odd thing that the form of medieval handwriting that is most familiar to us has a complex history that belies the notion that paleography is about changes to the shapes of letters. In this case, it is about changes to the nature of reading, even if the letters do not change that much and there are only very few absolute criteria that differentiate this family of scripts from what went before, and what continued in parallel with it.

Who Ya Talkin To?

Many years ago I used to have roistering arguments with archaeologists about the relationships between languages and their speakers. There were those who believed that if a whole new language family suddenly spread across the landscape, it meant that a whole bunch of ethnically related people were breeding like rabbits and migrating. Personally, I think that a whole bunch of people who may have been ethnically unrelated suddenly found something in common to talk about, like how you actually grow and cook these strange little grain things now that those big tasty meatbearing critters are getting hard to find.
Suddenly, the World Wide Web has given people all over the world all sorts of things to talk about together, and our languages are melding together. English has become a sort of lingua franca (Now there's a contradiction in terms!), but it is escaping from the straitjacket that the teachers of my youth wanted to keep it in. I was fairly recently rapped over the knuckles by an editor for splitting an infinitive or two, but hey, English has always been an evolving mongrel language. It makes you wonder how the rules of language get there in the first place.
I get a number of comments to this blog which I do not allow to appear, mainly because they advertise dubious services, like Dutch brothels, essay selling services for students who can't be bothered writing their own, drugs of dodgy provenance, and in one recent puzzling instance, white ant eradication services. I'm not sure why they do it. "Hey Honey, I think we've got white ants. I'll just look up that medieval paleography blog and see if they know what to do about it." ??? Nevertheless, here are some snippets which I enclose for your fascination and delight. I have removed all identifiers and urls. If you want an Amsterdam escort service, you will just have to Google it for yourself.
"Our girls will-power oblige all your dreams happen true. Harmonize with them not allowed at website. It's good up to girl and you can rumble a property of ladies inside. If you register doomsday wanted to look in on Amsterdam, by means of a fraction's length bring up the white pennon a call." Glad to see that no fancy singing is allowed on the website, but rumble away.
"X Grammar offers a exorbitant par Nursery entirely Piercing School education. By a multi-cultural environment that promotes perception amongst diverse nationalities, students are provided with the opportunities and resources to appropriate for cross-cultural learners and responsible citizens." I'm glad the nursery school body piercers are becoming multicultural and responsible.
"I give birth to infer from a few of the articles on your website now, and I really like your style of blogging. I added it to my favorites trap stage roster and disposition be checking back soon. Divert repress into public notice my site as well and leave to me know what you think. Thanks." Apparently I am providing gynaecological services for actors.

Now I'm not stuffy about evolving English. Languages grow and change all the time. I have recently been dipping into a recently published book of essays by a man who is besotted with the changes in the English language, from Beowulf through Chaucer to Thomas Hardy (Ralph W.V. Elliott 2010 Chaucer's Landscapes and Other Essays Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing). It makes you want to go and read all these things in their unmodernised versions, just to feel the words rolling along. It's just that I feel a little like the last of the mammoth hunters, and I don't know what the rest of the world is talking about. Is English no longer a national language, but a rapidly differentiating family of languages for the world's new tribal boundaries?

Is Blogging Dead?

I have just received an email informing me that this blog is listed on another blog posting entitled 50 Best Blogs for Medieval History Geeks. I tell you this not to blow my own trumpet, but to point out that there are 49 other excellent blogs listed there. There are some of my favourites, and some I haven't discovered yet so I will have to have a good look myself.
This is particularly interesting because I read recently some IT type claiming that people are not blogging anymore. However, I get the impression that there are increasing numbers of blogs around with something to say. I think it actually means that the very young people are giving it up, using their two minute attention spans in the more rapid fire media of Twitter and Facebook and the like. Perhaps if they expressed themselves in more leisurely media, they would have some thinking time to avoid getting into all the embarrassing situations they seem to manage on those social media.
Meanwhile, we bloggers are just slipping back into the middle ages, or getting middle aged.

John Paston's Books

Recently, when the family medievalist finally abandoned his university office and retired to a study at home, we transported boxes and boxes and boxes of books to a charity which runs secondhand book fairs. We both still have large studies packed to the gunwales with shelves of books. Naturally, in the 15th century when nearly every book was written out by hand, readers and book owners had to be much more selective.
In keeping with my recent trend of putting up on the website examples of horrible messy handwriting of truly interesting content, the last script sample and paleography exercise are a list of books written out by John Paston II in the late 1470s. They comprised his personal library. This funny scrap is part of the famous collection of Paston Letters in the British Library, so it is famous. As well as being in a script that is like cod liver oil, nasty but good for you, it sheds a little light on that whole topic of medieval literacy and the valuation of books. Enjoy it even if you can't read it.
I will get back to the mulberry tree, promise. I'm sure you are as fascinated by it as I am.

Of Tennis Balls and Mulberry Trees

When I was a kid I used to play tennis at a suburban court. Next door was a huge back garden with an enormous mulberry tree. If we should happen to hit a ball over the fence, we would have to climb over to collect it. At certain seasons of the year, this process could be protracted, involving a diversion up the mulberry tree, which was ended when the old lady who lived there would open the back door and yell at us to clear off. She never seemed to do this straight away, but just when she figured we had probably had quite enough.
The latest addition to Medieval Writing is script sample for a very tiny,semi-cursive Gothic rotunda script, as used in a theological work for personal study. I continue on my merry path of tormenting you with horrible scripts of the kind that you probably won't find in paleography books, but you will find if you want to read things in the wild archives and libraries.
I have had this leaf for some time, and have used it on the website to show some of the interesting marginalia, but I hadn't tried using it for a script sample or a paleography exercise as it had me baffled. It purports to be from a work in praise of the Virgin Mary by one Richardus de Sancto Laurentio, about whom very little seems to be known, and I could not find a transcript or translation of his text anywhere. So why not just read it? Well, it is rather difficult, with a lot of abbreviations, but I was sure I was getting something totally confused as it appeared to be trying to say that the Virgin Mary was an almond tree on one side of the page, and a mulberry tree on the other. There was something I just didn't get.
Recently I discovered, not a transcript or a translation, but a complete digital facsimile of an incunabula version of the work on a library website in Germany, and all was revealed. The chapter from which my page was abstracted was all about comparing the Virgin to a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, and in the process identifying her with all the different plants therein. Very strange. The Virgin was an almond tree and a mulberry tree and Christ was its fruit.
And to think that in my tennis playing childish innocence, covering myself with red goo up a mulberry tree, I was participating in a spiritual experience with very uncomfortable resonances with the ritual cannibalism to which the medieval Catholic church was so devoted. Mulberries as host, bread as the body of Christ, red dribbles all down the shirt front. Scarey.
I will provide a limited paleography exercise for a segment of the page when my shaking nerves are restored, and I have nutted out what this crazy guy was on about.

What's It All About?

If anybody out there is interested in the history and background to this project, there is an article in which I discuss it in the latest edition of the online journal The Heroic Age. That then links to an earlier article about the travails of my various medieval projects in this age of rapidly changing technology. (And no, I didn't have anything to do with the page design of this website!) It is wonderful to be able to do amazing things on the web. However, when your first computer used a cassette tape to save and load a couple of kilobytes of data and had a lurid green screen with monochrome graphics, there is an awful lot of material sitting as printouts in multiple little bottom drawers waiting for a complete overhaul before it can again see the light of day. Wonderful enigma, isn't it? Computers are this great aid to productivity, but steadily destroy their own products with obsolescence. We live in interesting times.