Long Hot Summer

There has been a bit of a hiatus on progress on the website for the last month or so. The main reason is that down here in the upside down part of the world we have had the longest hottest summer ever. My study, previously regarded as a detached haven of tranquillity, has turned into an oven, within which rational thought is not possible. As autumn approaches and we have nightly thunderstorms, the brains may now be able to engage. Watch out for lots of new developments.

Medieval Manuscripts on the Move

One of the amazing things about medieval manuscripts is how they have ended up in the many places that they have, and how they have so often been preserved almost by inertia. They represent a whole new viewpoint on social history. I once had the extraordinary experience of seeing a family archive of medieval and later documents in a small semi-rural cottage outside the town of Queanbeyan in Australia, preserved in the papers of a family afflicted by changing fortunes over the centuries.
Whole libraries of amazing books have been pitched out during the course of religious change, only to be collected together again by those with antiquarian interests. Books of types once common, like Bibles, breviaries or books of hours, have been pulled apart to preserve the illustrations. Fragments of old books or documents have been used as book wrappers or bindings. I have recently encountered a case where a set of German medieval notarial deeds had been sliced up at some unknown time in history and used as bookmarks.
The internet has made it possible for people of modest means such as myself, located in remote corners of the globe (OK, I know it's round and doesn't have corners!) to acquire a few scraps of medieval manuscript, which, in this case, have been and will be used on the Medieval Writing website. What intrigues me is how these oddments have survived until today, to appear in bits and pieces among various antique dealers. Those books from which the illustrations have been pillaged must have sometimes been preserved, but by whom or why would be fascinating to know. It is distressing to see substantial fragments of books further reduced to single pages as they are scattered around the more downmarket buyers, but on the other hand the upmarket buyers are only interested in undamaged goods, and they hide them away in their bank vaults, so perhaps in an odd way it represents a form of preservation. Isolated legal documents can never tell a coherent historical story, but even archival collections are not always coherent, either in their collecting policies or their cataloguing.
Colleagues in the academic world are apt to get uptight about material which is removed from the research database, but there are so many research projects which have never been attempted on the substantial body of material now held in public institutions already, so that perhaps this is a more theoretical than actual issue. One thing is for sure, with more and bigger archives than ever before, and online catalogues, access to a whole range of medieval manuscripts has never been easier. The paradox is that there is both aggregation (in major archival collections) and dispersal (on the private market) happening at the same time. I wonder how this will ultimately affect our perception of the medieval era.

English 4 U

As a person who started their education many decades ago, I tend to get cranky and pedantic at errors in written English. I have a particular antipathy to the modern curse of errors undetected by spelling checkers. A recent example was a writer attempting to "illicit" information, while "loose" as in "loose the plot" is becoming so common that in might soon make the Oxford English Dictionary as an alternative usage. All this only shows firstly, that English has developed in an illogical, unphonetic and chaotic manner and secondly, that at some point somebody tried to stop this happening, and my education was profoundly influenced by this attempted ban.
In the age of manuscript, which we look at in Medieval Writing, there were no controls over the language. English was a Germanic dialect, infiltrated with bits of Scandinavian, French and Latin, varying greatly around its native land and constantly evolving. Spelling had no consistency at all. It was printing that really caused this to be seen as a problem. The printer Caxton bewailed the difficulty of printing the major works of cultural heritage in his own language, when the language of some older versions of these works was incomprehensible to him. The inhabitants of England could not even agree on the simple word for an egg. Today, reading even 15th century English throws up some mysteries. I am not entirely sure what the word "koryosloker", as found in an example used in one of my paleography exercises, means, and I'm not entirely sure that the scribe did either.
Dictionaries and grammar books of our own language, as opposed to the Latin of the medieval era, became prescriptive rather than descriptive in the age of printing. There are some who think they still should be, and decry the modern procedure of using academic dictionaries to document changes to the language rather than dictate correctnesses of the 18th century. Interestingly, the genie has been let out of the bottle by the democratisation of word production through changing technology. Just as the scribe with his quill had no sub-editor cracking him across the knuckles (unless he was transcribing the Bible in Latin!) so the modern communicator with PC and mobile phone is unconstrained. Perhaps the whole concept of correct English will eventually be seen as a brief anomaly in the history of the language.
: -) 2 U, rite gd!

Another New Year

Happy New Year to all of you, and I hope you all had a great festive season, whatever branch of the festive tree you inhabit.
Medieval Writing has been out there for six years now. I was encouraged to ponder the history of the site, and its place in the electronic universe, when I had to renew some permissions to use photographs from the British Library. Five years ago I had to tell them what I was hoping to achieve. This time I could point them to what was there already, with promises for further advancement.
I am still intrigued by the slow pace at which major institutions actually get the concept of the web. They say that if your permission is not renewed, you have to delete all their photographs from your database. To me, that is like saying if you have published a book, you have to go around the world cutting out all the illustrations with a Stanley knife. Somehow we have to get the idea across that web publication is not merely the production of ephemera, but can be a means of developing constantly expanding projects. The production of quality material on the web is also no longer the exclusive domain of large institutions. The mechanics of it now puts the process of production and development into the hands of whoever has the urge and commitment to get on with it. (And just between you and me, the fact that rugged individuals such as myself don't have to deal with an ITdepartment and a bunch of so-called multimedia experts makes it so much easier and cheaper!)
Anyway, the images are safe for another five years. Perhaps, with your help, by then some of these august old bodies will be getting the idea of what it is all about.

Web Sites and Medieval Manuscripts

One of my favourite ponderings is about how web sites are much more like medieval manuscripts than they are like printed books, and the more I think about it and discuss it with colleagues, the more ways I find that this is so. The old industrially produced printed book was a single linear stream of code which was processed in our mind as text. Illustrations were regarded as somewhat frivolous unless the topic was art analysis, and were often not placed adjacent to the appropriate text. An index, itself a string of linear code, was used as the only finding aid apart from the general table of contents. The text was fixed, and only changed if the major process of bringing out a new edition was undertaken.
As in a medieval manuscript, graphic elements and spatial mapping are part of the reading and navigating process of a website. Illustrations are placed, or linked, to the appropriate significant parts of the text, and also serve as part of the complex finding aids. Text transferred electronically can be amended and added to, so that, like the many variants of a medieval manuscript text, there may be multiple variant readings.
In the middle ages there was a process called compilatio, in which texts were compiled in various ways from a range of sources to create new permutations and combinations. Sites like Wikipedia, just to pick one huge example, are cherrypicking all our web sites for their own compilatio.
Medieval manuscripts had forms of hypertext. The canon tables at the beginning of the gospels, or the structure of a missal or breviary are examples, where the text was not intended to be read from beginning to end, but selected and combined for a particular circumstance.
Texts were not necessarily copied absolutely varbatim, but were shortened, extended, amended and translated into other languages or even dialects of the same language without any by your leave of the author. I do sometimes wonder what Babelfish or Google translations does to some pages of my website.
I think the time is fast approaching when we regard the industrially produced book as an aberration in the history of writing, and return to the more organic mode of the middle ages. Definitive editions will be a concept with no further validity.

User Queries

I get quite a range of email requests and queries, some of which are highly specific, but others may be of more general interest, so I will pass them along. One user recently asked if the reason that the letters u, v and w are not in the History of Individual Letters section was because they are too hard. Fear not, nothing is too hard! I have been gradually assembling that section from sample letters already on the site in various examples, working my way steadily through the alphabet. Hopefully we will get to the end soon, including u, v and w.
Another reader has asked for higher resolution images in the paleography exercises. There is always a compromise in photographic images between quality and image size, which affects download time quite drastically. As the exercises are essentially introductory, I have perhaps favoured speed over very high quality. I would be reluctant to put very slow loading images into the exercises as such, as I think people would give up before they downloaded, but I would be interested to hear if anybody else would be interested in higher resolution images placed in a separate download area. There would have to be a number of you out there wanting this, as it would take up a fair bit of storage space.

What Do You Want?

To the website Medieval Writing I have been gradually adding a range of scripts from the very earliest days that could be described as medieval to the early modern period. That is a long time! While I want to provide a broad picture, I am also aware that users have specific needs, but these may be very different. If anyone, or paticularly groups of people with interests in common, out there, has any special requests, I am always willing to listen. I am currently getting a range of signals on what areas people are interested in, but those signals are diverse and sometimes surprising. I have all manner of materials available to put on the site, and the time delay is the time it takes to process every individual effort, so if you want your interest on the top of the pile, just let me know.

Medieval History and Modern Literacy

Medieval history courses at both secondary and tertiary level have been taking a battering in recent years from those in high places who think that they can determine what the world needs to know, on the basis that the subject is outdated, exotic and irrelevant. Well, there are little things like the origins of our governmental institutions, the religious background to our present moral codes, past religious conflicts, our artistic and cultural heritage and a host of other issues medieval that would seem to be particularly relevant.
One issue which intrigues me is the way in which a study of medieval literacy might shed some light on this topic as a modern educational issue. We tend to regard literacy as an absolute. You can either read and write to a sufficient standard to be able to function in our society, or you cannot. Nobody seems to really understand how we learn this process, or why individuals do it differently. Over the course of the middle ages literacy was not an absolute. There were those who could read and write complex tracts in several languages. There were those who could read their own language, in some cases slowly and only aloud, who could not write. There were trained copyists who could write, but evidently with minimal understanding. There were people who could read and write just as much as they needed to for their job, but who would probably not be classified as literate by modern standards testing.
A really thorough study of the reading and writing process in the middle ages might just shed a little light on some of the issues of literacy in our time. A closely related issue is whether we rely so much on the written word today that we have forgotton how to remember. Medieval knowledge was not all written down. How can we value our remembrancers?

Welcome

As the Website Medieval Writing has been available for some years now, it has generated quite a bit of email feedback. It seemed to be about time to get modern and open up a bit of interactive discussion about what is on the site and how people are using it. I originally thought that the subject of medieval paleography would be of interest to about twenty people, widely dispersed around oldfashioned academic institutions. I am intrigued by the continuing use of the site by what seems to me to be large numbers of people (OK, it's not a Harry Potter fan site, but there are definitely more than twenty of you out there!). As well as medieval scholars, users evidently include calligraphers, genealogists, professional re-enactors, drama producers and those whose interests are in the problems of modern literacy. I will be popping up a few of my more random ideas in here to see what comes of it.