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Daniel Sawyer Posts

IMEV, SIMEV, NIMEV and DIMEV

Published 16 April 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

I recently published a note. The specific new discovery that it reports is not going to rejig the landscape of scholarship. By remarking on the previusly unrecorded appearance of a rhyming proverb in Bodleian Library MS Digby 99 the note alters our understanding of the textual and geographical affiliations of Balliol College, MS 354 (available online here), the so-called ‘commonplace book’ of Richard Hill.

But I make a broader point in my conclusion. In work on Middle English verse we rely on a set of indexes to keep track of what is what and where:

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Spaces for Reading

Published 22 March 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

I recently had a chapter published in Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin (New York, 2016). My bit’s about the various fixed physical markers for navigation that we find in medieval manuscripts—tabs, string, leather balls and so on—and I think it’s rather good—although I would say that, of course.

These little objects might seem less interesting than written marginalia, and aren’t as mobile as book ribbons or as mechanically sophisticated as book wheels (see this blog post for a good quick overview of all these types). But book ribbons and book wheels could move, and almost certainly all have moved since our period, and so we can’t now use them as evidence for readers’ attention to specific parts of books. Fixed markers, however, do let us track readers’ attention, or at least to track the parts of books which they expected to want to access rapidly.

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Finishing the DPhil

Published 20 February 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

Three years, two months and four days after starting, I submitted my thesis on 16 December 2015! This is not the end, of course. My viva is scheduled early next month, and I will probably make minor or major corrections. And even when the thesis is finished for good and deposited in the Bodleian it will only be a cross-section of my research from a particular moment. But submitting still felt very good!

As in my previous post about writing, I’m going to note down here a few more bits of advice, very much in the spirit of recording things I wish I’d known, and not all expecting to say anything particularly new.

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Writing

Published 4 December 2014 by Daniel Sawyer

There is a lot of advice about academic writing on the internet, usually full of imperative verbs, and I don’t feel I’m really qualified to…

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The Happy Return

Published 3 October 2014 by Daniel Sawyer

Before I witter about what I’ve been up to, some links.

Jenni Nuttall has been writing a series of helpful guides to different aspects of Middle English poetics on her blog. I can see these being primarily useful for an undergraduate audience, but I’ll admit I found reading them helpful myself—they’ve reminded me of some questions about the mechanics of form. What do we notice about the form of a poem, and why do we notice those things and not others? What did people notice in poems five hundred years ago, and how can we tell? These are questions which hang around the periphery of a chapter I’m returning to right now.

Also, the Bodleian’s new Weston Library is open and Sjoerd Levelt has a write-up. I visited on Monday and second his praise (and his hope that Duke Humphrey’s Library can remain as a reading room of some sort!).

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Weblog 17 May 2014

Published 17 May 2014 by Daniel Sawyer

First of all, a long-overdue link: Colleen Curran wrote up these notes on using the Vatican Library. I was linking to them in a post I half-drafted a month ago, but the post died in draft! So I’ve linked them now. This also seems like a good moment to mention that Colleen is one of the organisers of this exciting (and free!) conference in London on 3 June.

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