The ‘Towards a New Edition of the Wycliffite Bible’ project which employs me recently put up a public prototype version of the project’s digital result: an open-access online edition of both versions of the Wycliffite Bible, designed to be expanded collaboratively in years to come. I gave a very quick paper introducing the project at Oxford’s interdisciplinary Medieval Studies meeting this week, and this seemed like a good moment to put up a new post contextualizing the project here.
Leave a CommentDaniel Sawyer Posts
I’m writing up a few more extended thoughts on the joint Early Book Society / John Gower Society conference last week, but for the moment I thought I’d share this useful(?) diagram:
When I was an MSt student preparing to tackle my summative essay on the palaeography and codicology course, Dan Wakelin told the class that it would be best, as a rule of thumb, to study either a few features in many manuscripts, or many features in a few manuscripts. I passed this useful advice on when I taught part of the same MSt course this year. When I came to write my paper for EBS, I realised that this advice was relevant to some of the ways we think about manuscript studies in general, not just when we’re starting out, so I built this diagram.
Leave a CommentEarlier this term I gave a paper at Teaching the Codex 2, a colloquium at Merton College here in Oxford. This was the sequel to a similar meeting last year, about teaching of/with/and manuscripts. The first TTC gave us a overview of manuscript teaching and available resources. The second felt like a proper extension, ramifying into detailed discussions of manuscript pedagogy in different disciplines and contexts.
Leave a CommentI’ve written a quick guest post in a series on what it’s like to be a researcher on someone else’s project, a position which come…
Leave a CommentThis week, at quite short notice, the excellent Michael Madrinkian and I found ourselves in a room recording readings of lyrics from Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio. This isn’t normal. Indeed, when I mentioned this to a friend and said that it’s unusual to be reading Rolle aloud, my friend said ‘It’s unusual to be reading Rolle full stop.’ So what happened?
Leave a CommentI enjoyed speaking at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and I hope the audience got something out of it! They were a kind, engaged set of listeners and they asked very useful questions. Those questions prompted this post.
In my session we looked at some objects from the Bodleian’s collections, handled ‘live’ in the lecture theatre by the brilliant Martin Kauffmann (Martin is the Bod’s Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts, and he’s both a formidably knowledgeable scholar in his own right and a great facilitator, the linchpin of much manuscript-based teaching). Among other things, we examined a couple of books of hours: one printed example, which both contains older woodblock prints and later manuscript material, and one in manuscript.
In one facet of my argument I emphasised how these books offer us much intimate and fascinating information despite being examples of one of the most ordinary and commonplace kinds of surviving book. In my conclusion I made a more general plea for attention to seemingly humdrum, ordinary objects in our research, whatever it is we’re researching.
Leave a CommentPrompted by the work I’m doing on the Wycliffite Bible project, I’m going to throw some thoughts at the wall and see if any stick.
Transcription is a significant part of the project work at the moment: an early step in the process of editing. In fact it’s how my first day started after an initial meeting and learning how to make a cup of tea in the faculty kitchen. Transcription was also a significant feature of my work for my DPhil thesis—I was handling, and sometimes quoting from, a lot of unpublished, unphotographed material. (Because if you work on the most successful English poem before print the rise of digital facsimiles hasn’t done much for access—but this is a topic for another time.)
Transcription’s a skill. We’re taught it, or have to teach ourselves, or muddle our way to grasping it through some combination of the two. On the MSt course here the palaeography exam requires you to transcribe and (roughly) date manuscripts from images. My interview for my current job began with a timed transcription test: how much of these two pages from different manuscripts can you transcribe accurately in ten minutes each? More broadly, transcription’s an activity which underpins editing and calendaring, or in other words it’s necessary for the things which are necessary for pretty a lot of the other work carried out by medievalists.
2 CommentsA quick note: on Monday I’ll be speaking at this year’s Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. I’m not there as a digital humanities expert—I’m…
Leave a CommentIn June I’ll be starting work as the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the ‘Towards a New Edition of the Wycliffite Bible’ project, based in Oxford’s English Faculty. I’ll be the junior member of a team of three, working with Elizabeth Solopova (the PI) and Anne Hudson (the co-investigator). The Wycliffite Bible is a late-fourteenth-century translation of the Latin Vulgate into Middle English: the first English Bible. It’s a complex and important text, but research is hampered by the fact that there is only one full edition, which was published in 1850. This edition was good for its time but has now been rather overtaken by later scholarship. We will begin (begin) producing a new edition of the whole thing by establishing a framework for the task and editing four books.
Leave a Comment