- Department of Digital Humanities
2nd Floor
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL - +44 (0) 20 7848 2813
Peter Stokes
King's College London, Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty Member
- Digital Humanities, Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, Anglo-Saxon charters, Digital palaeography, Latin Palaeography, and 10 moreLatin Paleography, Paleography, Medieval Studies, Codicology, Codicology of medieval manuscripts, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), Insular Latin language and literature, Anglo-Saxon Studies, Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), and Old English Literatureedit
- THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. For up-to-date research profiles and open-access publications see my online CV, OR... moreTHIS PAGE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. For up-to-date research profiles and open-access publications see my online CV, ORCID profile or (up to 2017) King's College London profile:
- http://peterstokes.org/cv/
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9060-9340
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/peter-stokes(454fdb9e-d916-41a2-b3b6-419631596248).html
After Honours degrees in Classics and English Literature and in Computer Engineering, Peter Stokes completed a PhD at Cambridge on English palaeography of the early eleventh century. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in Palaeography at the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, where he developed new methods of quantitative and computer-based palaeography, then worked at the Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH, now Department of Digital Humanities) at King's College London on the LangScape, Anglo-Saxon Cluster and Electronic Sawyer projects before being awarded a major research grant from the European Research Council for his DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic. This project, completed in September 2014, lead to two further major grants from the AHRC for collaborative projects in which he is Co-Investigator: The Conqueror’s Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday Survey of South-West England (with the University of Oxford), and Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government, 1100–1250 (with the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge).
Major publications include English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 – circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014) and DigiPal, and he has also published on name-studies, lexicography, Anglo-Saxon charters, image-processing, and digital humanities, as well as palaeography. He is a correspondant scientifique at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris), and Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) there in 2015. He lectures on the MA in Digital Humanities at King's College London, and has also lectured in palaeography and codicology, digital publishing, medieval history, and medieval Latin at the Universities of Cambridge, Leicester and the School of Advanced Studies in the University of London.
Other professional positions include:
- Elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine
- Correspondant scientifique and, for two months in 2015, Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) at the CNRS in Paris (Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, UPR 841)
- Member, Équipe Humanités Numériques, Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS, UMR 8132)
- Specialty Chief Editor of Digital Paleography and Book History, a Specialty Section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities
- Principal Coordinator of Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA), a five-day international training programme for PhD students.edit
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Research Interests: Art History, Jewish Studies, Digital Humanities, Anglo-Saxon Studies, Medieval Studies, and 12 moreManuscript Studies, Medieval Iberian History, Paleography, Medieval Scandinavia, History of Art, Modelling, Scandinavian Studies, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), Palaeography, Viking Age Scandinavia, Viking and Anglo-Saxon England, and Anglo-Saxon England
This article provides an overview of digital humanities activities that relate to publishing. Digital humanities is a growing scholarly domain, definitions of which vary but which generally involves the application of computers to... more
This article provides an overview of digital humanities activities that relate to publishing. Digital humanities is a growing scholarly domain, definitions of which vary but which generally involves the application of computers to research questions that fall within the traditional remit of the humanities. It includes many areas of research that overlap with publishing. An important aspect of digital humanities is therefore to question assumptions that digital publishing should produce faithful visual reproductions. We argue that this cannot be the only objective of digital humanities publishing, and rather that publishing needs to be understood as a range of modelling activities that aim to develop and communicate interpretations, whether consciously or not. The article introduces a selection of digital humanities publishing standards and systems that support a flexible digital representations of objects, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which emphasizes scholarly flexibility and collaboration.
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This article deals with the manuscript and historical contexts of the Old English ‘Vision of Leofric’, an account of miraculous visions seen by Earl Leofric of Mercia (d. 1057). This text has rarely been studied and never in its... more
This article deals with the manuscript and historical contexts of the Old English ‘Vision of Leofric’, an account of miraculous visions seen by Earl Leofric of Mercia (d. 1057). This text has rarely been studied and never in its manuscript context. It is shown here that the only surviving manuscript of the ‘Vision’ was written at Worcester at the end of the eleventh century, copied in the context of attempts by the bishop and community at the cathedral to recover lands lost to or threatened by the secular nobility including the sons of Earl Leofric himself. Two of the other texts in the same manuscript have been re-dated, and one of the scribes identified as ‘Hemming’, the scribe who copied part of and possibly composed sections of a cartulary. The textual transmission of the ‘Vision’ is also discussed, and comparison is made to a similar account in Osbert of Clare’s Vita Sancti Edwardi Confessoris, particularly an account there of a schedula upon which the earl’s vision was said to be written. Finally, a new edition and translation of the ‘Vision’ is presented.
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Palaeography is the field of Humanities research concerned with the study of ancient handwriting, books and documents. With the development of computerized tools, collaborations have grown between scholars of palaeography and computer... more
Palaeography is the field of Humanities research concerned with the study of ancient handwriting, books and documents. With the development of computerized tools, collaborations have grown between scholars of palaeography and computer scientists. These have led to tools being designed to provide palaeographers with computational means to analyze, retrieve, and compare ancient documents, reducing the many labour intensive elements involved in palaeographic study and paving the way towards making palaeography an evidence-based field. During September of 2012, computer scientists and palaeography scholars met at the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics –for a Perspectives Workshop intended to explore the future for these multi-disciplinary collaborations. This paper presents some of the high-level conclusions and prospects for computation and palaeography, which have emerged in these meetings, fuller discussion of which is available in the corresponding “Dagstuhl Manifesto”.
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This manifesto documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 `Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits'. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and... more
This manifesto documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 `Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits'. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide efficient solutions to time and labor consuming palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.
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This report documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and... more
This report documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide ecient solutions to time-consuming and laborious palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.
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As many hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts are now being digitised, with many millions of pages becoming available, the question of how to find specialised content in this material is becoming increasingly urgent. In this paper... more
As many hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts are now being digitised, with many millions of pages becoming available, the question of how to find specialised content in this material is becoming increasingly urgent. In this paper I present a new conceptual model for the description and therefore retrieval of features of handwriting in Western medieval script. Digital Humanities requires first a theoretical model which outlines all of the features of a given domain and the relationships between them (McCarty 2004), and this is the focus of the present paper. However, the implications of this work are very much wider: just as the TEI has lead to ‘a new data description language that substantially improves our ability to describe textual features’ (Renear 2004: 235), so the formal model of handwriting presented here sharpens and could even resolve long-standing problems in palaeographers’ own terminology and practice.
[Reproduced from the 'Introduction']
[Reproduced from the 'Introduction']
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"[Reproduced from the Introduction] Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the letter-shape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this... more
"[Reproduced from the Introduction]
Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the letter-shape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this approach are visible in almost all palaeographical handbooks, particularly those that provide alphabets or selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, which also provides a useful discussion of morphology as a palaeographical method.
Commonly, a morphological system of descriptors contains two main categories: One category is the grapheme or perhaps, more correctly, character: the letter as an abstract entity but with physical form, such as a, æ, or a single punctuation mark. The second category is the allograph, namely, a particular way of writing the letter; typical examples include ‘Caroline’ or ‘insular’.
A key question, given any system of descriptors, is to evaluate the relative importance of each of the components of this system. For example, it is well known among palaeographers that the grapheme a is very distinctive for late Anglo-Saxon minuscule (Ker 1957; Dumville 1988; Stokes 2005); however, subjective evaluation of distinctiveness could potentially be misleading. It is therefore quite useful to conduct a statistical analysis of significance, and potentially contribute thereby to the practice of palaeography, provided the results can be presented in a meaningful form.
In this work, we employ methods that are commonly used for mining insights from biological experiments regarding underlying genetic mechanisms. We show that in the context of palaeography such an approach also provides insightful observations."
Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the letter-shape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this approach are visible in almost all palaeographical handbooks, particularly those that provide alphabets or selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, which also provides a useful discussion of morphology as a palaeographical method.
Commonly, a morphological system of descriptors contains two main categories: One category is the grapheme or perhaps, more correctly, character: the letter as an abstract entity but with physical form, such as a, æ, or a single punctuation mark. The second category is the allograph, namely, a particular way of writing the letter; typical examples include ‘Caroline’ or ‘insular’.
A key question, given any system of descriptors, is to evaluate the relative importance of each of the components of this system. For example, it is well known among palaeographers that the grapheme a is very distinctive for late Anglo-Saxon minuscule (Ker 1957; Dumville 1988; Stokes 2005); however, subjective evaluation of distinctiveness could potentially be misleading. It is therefore quite useful to conduct a statistical analysis of significance, and potentially contribute thereby to the practice of palaeography, provided the results can be presented in a meaningful form.
In this work, we employ methods that are commonly used for mining insights from biological experiments regarding underlying genetic mechanisms. We show that in the context of palaeography such an approach also provides insightful observations."
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"S 786 is one of the so-called Orthodoxorum charters, a group of documents which provide important evidence about the Anglo-Saxon chancery, the development of charters in the tenth century, and the history of Pershore Abbey and the... more
"S 786 is one of the so-called Orthodoxorum charters, a group of documents which provide important evidence about the Anglo-Saxon chancery, the development of charters in the tenth century, and the history of Pershore Abbey and the tenth-century Benedictine reforms. The document has therefore received a great deal of attention over the past century or so, but this attention has been focussed on the surviving tenth-century single sheet, and so a second,
significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this paper both versions of the document are discussed and are presented together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated."
significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this paper both versions of the document are discussed and are presented together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated."
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The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of... more
The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of “digital” palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in “digital” palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance.
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The Digital Resource for Palaeography (DigiPal) is a new project that brings digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion. At its heart will be hundreds of newly-commissioned photographs of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon script from... more
The Digital Resource for Palaeography (DigiPal) is a new project that brings digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion. At its heart will be hundreds of newly-commissioned photographs of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon script from the major manuscript collections in the world, with detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the scribal hand(s), the textual content, and the wider manuscript context.
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The ‘Electronic Sawyer’ presents in searchable and browsable form a revised, updated, and expanded version of Peter Sawyer's Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, published by the Royal Historical Society in 1968. Its... more
The ‘Electronic Sawyer’ presents in searchable and browsable form a revised, updated, and expanded version of Peter Sawyer's Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, published by the Royal Historical Society in 1968. Its main content derives from Sawyer’s catalogue, with corrections and modifications, and with additional data collected by Dr Susan Kelly, Dr Rebecca Rushforth, and others.
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This JISC-funded project explored the issues in integrating disparate Anglo-Saxon sources, bringing together four different existing online publications. Anglo-Saxon Cluster is built on research carried out on four other projects... more
This JISC-funded project explored the issues in integrating disparate Anglo-Saxon sources, bringing together four different existing online publications. Anglo-Saxon Cluster is built on research carried out on four other projects involving collaborations between King's College London and Cambridge University, and which collectively provide models for digitising prosopographic data, boundary clauses, charter catalogues and the diplomatic discourse of the charters themselves.
The Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London has developed a new web-based digital resource articulated around the Anglo-Saxon charters as core material, through which the data and the corresponding metadata embodied in each of the component projects is made available together in a thematic cluster. It serves as a unified point of entry into the individual resources, allowing users to see contextually appropriate data from each project in juxtaposition and to access union indexes generated across the data in each resource. It also provides a platform for exploring different approaches to cross-searching.
The aggregation of data follows a dynamic model, taking into account the fact that the component resources will continue to be updated and evolve. We expect that the project will have a dual impact: in the development of a technical framework for the integration of disparate resources; and as a possible model for gathering textual and contextual information around medieval charters.
The Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London has developed a new web-based digital resource articulated around the Anglo-Saxon charters as core material, through which the data and the corresponding metadata embodied in each of the component projects is made available together in a thematic cluster. It serves as a unified point of entry into the individual resources, allowing users to see contextually appropriate data from each project in juxtaposition and to access union indexes generated across the data in each resource. It also provides a platform for exploring different approaches to cross-searching.
The aggregation of data follows a dynamic model, taking into account the fact that the component resources will continue to be updated and evolve. We expect that the project will have a dual impact: in the development of a technical framework for the integration of disparate resources; and as a possible model for gathering textual and contextual information around medieval charters.
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This article discusses differences in two versions of the Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries for Powick and Leigh (both in Worcestershire). The two versions are found in London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii.6 (a tenth-century single... more
This article discusses differences in two versions of the Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries for Powick and Leigh (both in Worcestershire). The two versions are found in London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii.6 (a tenth-century single sheet) and BL Cotton Vitellius D.vii (a sixteenth-century transcript). Significant differences between the two texts reflect probable rearrangement of the estates in the late tenth or early eleventh century.
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This paper explains some techniques for enhancing digital images of manuscripts in order to recover damaged text with freely available software such as Adobe Photoshop and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The paper also... more
This paper explains some techniques for enhancing digital images of manuscripts in order to recover damaged text with freely available software such as Adobe Photoshop and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The paper also introduces new software developed by the author. It also includes a brief introduction to digital images and theoretical discussion of image enhancement, including the need (rarely followed in practice) of documenting every change made to an image.
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Textual scholars have tended to produce editions which present the text without its manuscript context. Even though digital editions now often present single-witness editions with facsimiles of the manuscripts, nevertheless the text... more
Textual scholars have tended to produce editions which present the text without its manuscript context. Even though digital editions now often present single-witness editions with facsimiles of the manuscripts, nevertheless the text itself is still transcribed and represented as a linguistic object rather than a physical one. Indeed, this is explicitly stated as the theoretical basis for the de facto standard of markup for digital texts: the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These explicitly treat texts as semantic units such as paragraphs, sentences, verses and so on, rather than physical elements such as pages, openings, or surfaces, and some scholars have argued that this is the only viable model for representing texts. In contrast, this chapter presents arguments for considering the document as a physical object in the markup of texts. The theoretical arguments of what constitutes a text are first reviewed, with emphasis on those used by the TEI and other theoreticians of digital markup. A series of cases is then given in which a document-centric approach may be desirable, with both modern and medieval examples. Finally a step forward in this direction is raised, namely the results of the Genetic Edition Working Group in the Manuscript Special Interest Group of the TEI: this includes a proposed standard for documentary markup, whereby aspects of codicology and mise en page can be included in digital editions, putting the text back into its manuscript context.
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This chapter reflects on the author’s practical experience teaching palaeography in several different contexts at the start of the so-called “digital age”. Material for manuscript-studies is becoming available at an enormous rate: perhaps... more
This chapter reflects on the author’s practical experience teaching palaeography in several different contexts at the start of the so-called “digital age”. Material for manuscript-studies is becoming available at an enormous rate: perhaps most obvious are the results of the large-scale digitisation programmes which are making high-quality colour facsimiles of manuscripts available online to wide audiences. At the same time, Virtual Learning Environments provide new possibilities for teaching and learning, and many tools for research on manuscripts can also be used for teaching. Perhaps more fundamentally, however, it has often been noted that scholarship is changing as a result of digital tools, resources, and methods. What, then, of teaching? Should the teaching of manuscript studies also change along with the scholarly discipline, bringing the Digital Humanities into our classes on palaeography and codicology? To begin answering this question, and to suggest some pedagogical possibilities brought about by technology, the author’s own experiences are discussed. Some limitations of technology for teaching are then considered, and some general remarks are then provided on the relationship between palaeography and Digital Humanities, two fields which are both fighting for recognition as full academic disciplines and not “mere” Hilfswissenschaften.
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Anglo-Saxonists have always been well represented in the field of Digital Humanities, and perhaps the foremost project among these has been The Dictionary of Old English. However, this early adoption of technology has forced the... more
Anglo-Saxonists have always been well represented in the field of Digital Humanities, and perhaps the foremost project among these has been The Dictionary of Old English. However, this early adoption of technology has forced the Dictionary to adopt different standards at different times, from print to microfilm to SGML to SGML+XML+HTML on CD-ROM to HTML on the Web. The first part of this article will therefore examine the technologies used to compile and publish the Dictionary and will consider the difficulties in adopting each one and in migrating from one to the next, particularly with respect to changes in modelling which this has brought about. The present electronic resources associated with the Dictionary will then be reviewed and the existing and potential relationships with other resources will be considered, as well as the level of integration between them. Finally, the reception of these electronic resources in general and the Dictionary in particular will be considered, as will the question both what impact this electronic publication has had on scholarship, and what it has done and can still do to enhance scholarship and promote use of the resource. [8,000 words]
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Three articles for the Handbook: two biographies of prominent palaeographers (1,500 words each), and an extensive review of scholarship on Western Medieval scripts (7,000 words).
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This paper considers the application of image-processing and data-mining to the analysis of scribal hands. The work of forensic document analysts on feature-extraction is considered, particularly the algorithms developed for automatic... more
This paper considers the application of image-processing and data-mining to the analysis of scribal hands. The work of forensic document analysts on feature-extraction is considered, particularly the algorithms developed for automatic handwriting-recognition by Srihari, and by Bulacu and Schomaker. Automatic clustering is also considered using the AutoClass package. Preliminary results of the author’s own experiments with these approaches are presented, and some of the obstacles are outlined which must be overcome before a practical system can be developed for the automatic identification of medieval scribes.
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A prototype system designed to aid in the identification of handwriting, particularly medieval, following the principles outlined in my article for Digital Medievalist 3 and contribution to Rehbein et al. The system includes a viewer for... more
A prototype system designed to aid in the identification of handwriting, particularly medieval, following the principles outlined in my article for Digital Medievalist 3 and contribution to Rehbein et al. The system includes a viewer for enhancing images of damaged manuscripts as described in my contribution to Chai-Elsholz et al.
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Scribbles on the back flyleaf of London, British Library, Royal 2.B.v (the 'Regius Psalter') are examined and the case put forward that they include notes relating to charters in favour of Christ Church Canterbury in the mid-eleventh... more
Scribbles on the back flyleaf of London, British Library, Royal 2.B.v (the 'Regius Psalter') are examined and the case put forward that they include notes relating to charters in favour of Christ Church Canterbury in the mid-eleventh century and not a lost copy of a ninth-century document as proposed by O'Neill.
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The LangScape project provides a fully searchable corpus of Anglo-Saxon charter bounds, all of which have been checked against the original manuscripts and marked up in XML to allow complex visualisations and searches on both linguistic... more
The LangScape project provides a fully searchable corpus of Anglo-Saxon charter bounds, all of which have been checked against the original manuscripts and marked up in XML to allow complex visualisations and searches on both linguistic and geographical criteria.
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An overview of the codicology of Western medieval manuscripts, from the manufacture of parchment through the various stages to production of a bound book.
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An encyclopedia entry on London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv which preserves the only surviving copy of the Anglo-Saxon poem 'Beowulf'.
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An encyclopedia entry on the 'Vercelli Book' of Old English prose and poetry (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII, or in English sometimes Vercelli, Cathedral Library MS 117).
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An entry on the Junius manuscript of Old English poetry (Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11) which contains the poems now known as 'Genesis A', 'Genesis B', 'Exodus', 'Daniel', and 'Christ and Satan'.
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An entry on Cynewulf, one of two named poets whose work survives in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular; his works include 'Juliana', 'Elene', 'Christ II' (also called 'The Ascension'), and 'The Fates of the Apostles'.
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An entry on the Jacobean book-collector and antiquary, one of the most important English collectors of medieval manuscripts, whose books are now primarily in the Cotton collection in the British Library.
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An entry on the archbishop focussing on his book-collecting. He was one of the most important collectors of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; his books are now in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College and comprise approximately a quarter of... more
An entry on the archbishop focussing on his book-collecting. He was one of the most important collectors of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; his books are now in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College and comprise approximately a quarter of all surviving vernacular Old English manuscripts.
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An entry on the palaeographer, scholar, and librarian, who was instrumental in the study of Anglo-Saxon and other medieval manuscripts, and was Keeper of the Library of Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer, and his son, and... more
An entry on the palaeographer, scholar, and librarian, who was instrumental in the study of Anglo-Saxon and other medieval manuscripts, and was Keeper of the Library of Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer, and his son, and thereby built up one of the most important collections of manuscripts, the Harleian one which is now preserved in the British Library.
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An entry on one of the first scholars of Old English after the Dissolution during the reign of Henry VIII.
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An entry on the Latin secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker who was in his own right one of the earliest scholars of Old English and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
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An important consideration when evaluating manuscripts from any period is the grade of script. As palaeographers have long recognised, scribes had available to them varying degrees of formality in script, and the choices that the scribes... more
An important consideration when evaluating manuscripts from any period is the grade of script. As palaeographers have long recognised, scribes had available to them varying degrees of formality in script, and the choices that the scribes made in this respect reflects and signals the status of the text being copied. In some cases this took the form of a deliberate hierarchy, such as the Insular script-system outlined by Julian Brown or the Gothic script-system discussed in detail by Derolez. In other cases there seems to have been no deliberate system, but instead a continuum of formalities within which given scribal hands lie. In this paper I shall explore the corpus of English vernacular minuscule from ca 1060–ca 1220 with respect to script-grade. By comparing the hands in different types of texts, in texts of different languages, and comparing the use of vernacular and Caroline script and letter-forms in vernacular texts, I hope to provide insights into the grades of script used, and thus the status of different texts in the post-Conquest period.
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Palaeography is in essence the study of old handwriting. As such, palaeographers are most often asked one of four questions regarding medieval or ancient documents: what was written, when was this written, where was it written and by... more
Palaeography is in essence the study of old handwriting. As such, palaeographers are most often asked one of four questions regarding medieval or ancient documents: what was written, when was this written, where was it written and by whom. Answering these questions, and indeed reading the text itself, are basic prerequisites for any kind of work with primary sources, and the study of almost all fields relevant to the ancient and medieval past therefore depends on them. Moreover, palaeography extends beyond an auxiliary science: it encompasses the history of one of humanity’s most pervasive technologies – writing.
Palaeography as a discipline typically involves difficult, complex, and time-consuming tasks, often involving reference to a variety of linguistic and archaeological data sets, and the invocation of previous knowledge of similar documentary material. Due to the involved reading process, it is difficult to record how the final interpretation of the document was reached, and which competing hypotheses were presented, adopted, or discarded in the process. It is also difficult to acknowledge and present the probabilities, and uncertainties, which were called on to resolve a final reading of a text. As a result, paleography is an allegedly ‘authoritarian’ discipline, which depends on ‘faith’ or ‘dogma’ but is based on ‘informed guesswork’.
Partly in response to this, scholars world-wide have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. This approach, often referred to as ‘digital palaeography’, aims to improve and enhance the traditional methods. Its goal is to help efficiently solve palaeographic issues and/or provide more quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, and in consequence to cater for a better understanding of our cultural heritage.
Such computational methods as proposed by digital palaeography have been the subject of much research in the last few years; however, as image analysis and statistical inference techniques improve, we expect the field to evolve quickly:
1. Most of the current research has been theoretical or applied only to small cases; however, a major strength of computational methods is their scalability.
2. The applications to date have also focused almost exclusively on the question of scribal identity, ignoring other aspects of palaeographical research. The emergence of digital historical corpora might enable much broader expert systems.
3. Current efforts tend to view letter-forms as objects outside the manuscript or documentary context in which they were written, but palaeographers have long understood that handwriting depends heavily on the context in which it is produced.
4. Much more significantly, current methods tend to make the computer a ‘black box’ which receives images of manuscripts at one end and returns a classification of the handwriting at the other, masking out underlying dependencies on very subtle and often unstated assumptions about the underlying data. Usually scholars cannot evaluate the ‘black box’ and so are rightly reluctant to accept its results, which leads to the need to adopt more suitable statistical techniques that can output palaeographical data in a way which scholars can understand, evaluate, and trust.
The participants of the workshop will discuss the potential of such methods not only in order to improve palaeographic research on its leading, traditional questions but also to identify questions one would not have asked without the emergence of innovative methodology.
Palaeography as a discipline typically involves difficult, complex, and time-consuming tasks, often involving reference to a variety of linguistic and archaeological data sets, and the invocation of previous knowledge of similar documentary material. Due to the involved reading process, it is difficult to record how the final interpretation of the document was reached, and which competing hypotheses were presented, adopted, or discarded in the process. It is also difficult to acknowledge and present the probabilities, and uncertainties, which were called on to resolve a final reading of a text. As a result, paleography is an allegedly ‘authoritarian’ discipline, which depends on ‘faith’ or ‘dogma’ but is based on ‘informed guesswork’.
Partly in response to this, scholars world-wide have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. This approach, often referred to as ‘digital palaeography’, aims to improve and enhance the traditional methods. Its goal is to help efficiently solve palaeographic issues and/or provide more quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, and in consequence to cater for a better understanding of our cultural heritage.
Such computational methods as proposed by digital palaeography have been the subject of much research in the last few years; however, as image analysis and statistical inference techniques improve, we expect the field to evolve quickly:
1. Most of the current research has been theoretical or applied only to small cases; however, a major strength of computational methods is their scalability.
2. The applications to date have also focused almost exclusively on the question of scribal identity, ignoring other aspects of palaeographical research. The emergence of digital historical corpora might enable much broader expert systems.
3. Current efforts tend to view letter-forms as objects outside the manuscript or documentary context in which they were written, but palaeographers have long understood that handwriting depends heavily on the context in which it is produced.
4. Much more significantly, current methods tend to make the computer a ‘black box’ which receives images of manuscripts at one end and returns a classification of the handwriting at the other, masking out underlying dependencies on very subtle and often unstated assumptions about the underlying data. Usually scholars cannot evaluate the ‘black box’ and so are rightly reluctant to accept its results, which leads to the need to adopt more suitable statistical techniques that can output palaeographical data in a way which scholars can understand, evaluate, and trust.
The participants of the workshop will discuss the potential of such methods not only in order to improve palaeographic research on its leading, traditional questions but also to identify questions one would not have asked without the emergence of innovative methodology.
This round table invites reflections on the intellectual benefits of studying and teaching medieval culture in an increasingly interconnected world. What new and exciting opportunities await the 21st-century medievalist? How can we create... more
This round table invites reflections on the intellectual benefits of studying and teaching medieval culture in an increasingly interconnected world. What new and exciting opportunities await the 21st-century medievalist? How can we create and nurture transnational communities of medievalists? Areas of exploration will include: the use of international databases, digitization projects, and other scholarly initiatives to facilitate teaching and the advancement of research into the medieval period; the relationship between the increasingly shrinking modern world and the increasing interest in reevaluating geographic and temporal boundaries within Medieval Studies; and the fruits of ongoing academic projects that encourage the development of transnational intellectual communities. How can one open up new and interesting routes of scholarly communication and investigation in the age of globalization? And, finally, what might one draw from the medieval past when calibrating one's own academic compass?
Participants are J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Fordham University, New York), Pavlina Rychterová (Österreichische Akademie der Wisenschaften, Wien), Peter A. Stokes (King's College London), and David John Wallace (University of Pennsylvania).
Participants are J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Fordham University, New York), Pavlina Rychterová (Österreichische Akademie der Wisenschaften, Wien), Peter A. Stokes (King's College London), and David John Wallace (University of Pennsylvania).
The script used for vernacular writing in eleventh-century England has been famously intractable to palaeographical analysis to date. Neil Ker, perhaps the best-regarded expert in the field, asserted that it ‘followed no obvious course of... more
The script used for vernacular writing in eleventh-century England has been famously intractable to palaeographical analysis to date. Neil Ker, perhaps the best-regarded expert in the field, asserted that it ‘followed no obvious course of development’ from the 990s until the 1040s at the earliest (1985 reprint, 34), and T. Alan Bishop and Pierre Chaplais consistently noted the difficulty of dating vernacular documents from the 1040s, ’50s and ’60s (1957, passim). This extreme variation is sometimes attributed to the Danish invasions, conquest and rule from the 990s until 1042 and the assumed breakdown in society that came with it, but this view is disproven by the relatively consistent Caroline script that was produced by (presumably) the same scribes when writing Latin texts.
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
The script used for vernacular writing in eleventh-century England has been famously intractable to palaeographical analysis to date. Neil Ker, perhaps the best-regarded expert in the field, asserted that it ‘followed no obvious course of... more
The script used for vernacular writing in eleventh-century England has been famously intractable to palaeographical analysis to date. Neil Ker, perhaps the best-regarded expert in the field, asserted that it ‘followed no obvious course of development’ from the 990s until the 1040s at the earliest (1985 reprint, 34), and T. Alan Bishop and Pierre Chaplais consistently noted the difficulty of dating vernacular documents from the 1040s, ’50s and ’60s (1957, passim). This extreme variation is sometimes attributed to the Danish invasions, conquest and rule from the 990s until 1042 and the assumed breakdown in society that came with it, but this view is disproven by the relatively consistent Caroline script that was produced by (presumably) the same scribes when writing Latin texts.
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
- Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
- Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
- Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
- Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
- Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
- Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
From the website: 'The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts... more
From the website:
'The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts and interested members of the public, an interaction that promises to be highly informative and enjoyable for everyone involved.
This year the focus will be on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and the beginnings of their culture. The 2012 LASS will include the following sessions, which will consist of short papers and plenty time for questions and discussion:
Session 1: The origins of the Anglo-Saxons: historical and an archaeological perspectives. Led by Dr Stephen Baxter (King's College London) and Prof. Andrew Reynolds (University College London).
Session 2: The English language: origins and early ways of writing. Led by Dr Sara M. Pons-Sanz (University of Westminster) and Dr Peter Stokes (King's College London).
Session 3: The early Anglo-Saxon economy and its literary representations. Led by Dr Gareth Williams (British Museum) and Dr Jennifer Neville (Royal Holloway College)
Session 4: Anglo-Saxon culture and its modern reinterpretations. Led by Professor Richard North (University College London) and Dr Fiona Sampson (Kingston University).'
'The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts and interested members of the public, an interaction that promises to be highly informative and enjoyable for everyone involved.
This year the focus will be on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and the beginnings of their culture. The 2012 LASS will include the following sessions, which will consist of short papers and plenty time for questions and discussion:
Session 1: The origins of the Anglo-Saxons: historical and an archaeological perspectives. Led by Dr Stephen Baxter (King's College London) and Prof. Andrew Reynolds (University College London).
Session 2: The English language: origins and early ways of writing. Led by Dr Sara M. Pons-Sanz (University of Westminster) and Dr Peter Stokes (King's College London).
Session 3: The early Anglo-Saxon economy and its literary representations. Led by Dr Gareth Williams (British Museum) and Dr Jennifer Neville (Royal Holloway College)
Session 4: Anglo-Saxon culture and its modern reinterpretations. Led by Professor Richard North (University College London) and Dr Fiona Sampson (Kingston University).'
Topic and Research Questions. The workshop will focus on the potentials and challenges of digitising the book as a material object. Digital Humanities projects often focus on the text outside its material context, or represent the book... more
Topic and Research Questions. The workshop will focus on the potentials and challenges of digitising the book as a material object. Digital Humanities projects often focus on the text outside its material context, or represent the book simply as a sequence of photographs of disembodied pages. Both approaches are entirely valid and useful for many purposes such as making the content accessible, providing the text in different forms, image enhancement for recovering damaged passages, and so on. However, there are other fields of study which they do not address. What about the binding, the codicology, the paper? The book’s history, readership? Its cultural value? Some of these material aspects cannot be captured in digital form in the foreseeable future, but an informed understanding of the potentials and limits of digital technology is necessary both for those digitising books and for those using the digitised objects: the former to ensure that they respond to the needs of their intended targets, and the latter so that the results are used to their potential but not misused by failing to understand their limitations.
Audience. The workshop will concentrate on modelling and representation of the book in digital format. As such, the target audience is scholars looking to design digital resources for academic research, although other groups would also be interested, such as librarians or archivists who plan to introduce digitisation projects. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own examples of challenging or problematic material for discussion.
Duration. This is a full-day workshop, consisting of about six hours of content plus lunch and coffee breaks.
Outline
Morning: Analysis and Modelling
• General Principles. The need to make content explicit to the computer
• Why digitise at all?
• Specific problems of material culture: how to capture and represent in ‘immaterial’ digital form?
• Analysis: understanding the objects, different points of view, different users, different research questions; practical exercises
• Modelling: how to capture these features? how to “teach” the computer to handle the book? practical exercises
Afternoon: Complexities
• Archaeology of the book: rebinding, additions/cancellations, annotations, rearranging…
• ‘Difficult’ formats: rolls, patches, fragments, disjoint pieces (sheets of paper, backs of envelopes…), …
• Participants’ examples
• Other topics, in brief or depending on participants’ interest:
o Reading environment, audience and usage. Who? When? Where? In what context?
o Cultural status. Size, weight, paper quality, cost…
o Provenance, glosses/annotations, library/ownership marks, dealer codes, …
o Sustainability; standards. Can we separate content from presentation?
• Final Case Study – Specialist Visualisation in the DigiPal project
Audience. The workshop will concentrate on modelling and representation of the book in digital format. As such, the target audience is scholars looking to design digital resources for academic research, although other groups would also be interested, such as librarians or archivists who plan to introduce digitisation projects. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own examples of challenging or problematic material for discussion.
Duration. This is a full-day workshop, consisting of about six hours of content plus lunch and coffee breaks.
Outline
Morning: Analysis and Modelling
• General Principles. The need to make content explicit to the computer
• Why digitise at all?
• Specific problems of material culture: how to capture and represent in ‘immaterial’ digital form?
• Analysis: understanding the objects, different points of view, different users, different research questions; practical exercises
• Modelling: how to capture these features? how to “teach” the computer to handle the book? practical exercises
Afternoon: Complexities
• Archaeology of the book: rebinding, additions/cancellations, annotations, rearranging…
• ‘Difficult’ formats: rolls, patches, fragments, disjoint pieces (sheets of paper, backs of envelopes…), …
• Participants’ examples
• Other topics, in brief or depending on participants’ interest:
o Reading environment, audience and usage. Who? When? Where? In what context?
o Cultural status. Size, weight, paper quality, cost…
o Provenance, glosses/annotations, library/ownership marks, dealer codes, …
o Sustainability; standards. Can we separate content from presentation?
• Final Case Study – Specialist Visualisation in the DigiPal project
Palaeographers have long been for relying on statements of opinion, the arguments for which are often difficult to articulate or explain: as a result, the field has been described as 'dogmatic', 'authoritarian' and based on 'faith'. In... more
Palaeographers have long been for relying on statements of opinion, the arguments for which are often difficult to articulate or explain: as a result, the field has been described as 'dogmatic', 'authoritarian' and based on 'faith'. In response to this, various attempts have been made to give a more quantitative basis, and this has recently lead to the use of computerised image analysis of scribal hands. However, this approach has some methodological issues which have not been addressed and also tends to alienate many practicing palaeographers. I argue that the limitations of this 'computational' approach can be overcome by a more broadly 'digital' palaeography, using the computer's capacity for visualisation, knowledge representation, exploration and manipulation. I will demonstrate some of these ideas using a proof-of-concept which is part of the 'DigiPal' project, a four-year project funded by the ERC, and will discuss some of the many issues that still remain.
The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London hosts no fewer than five completed resources directly relevant to the study of Anglo-Saxon Charters: ASChart, PASE, LangScape, eSawyer, and ASCluster. Although these projects... more
The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London hosts no fewer than five completed resources directly relevant to the study of Anglo-Saxon Charters: ASChart, PASE, LangScape, eSawyer, and ASCluster. Although these projects may look superficially similar – they all address approximately the same corpus – they are quite different underneath. They employ different technologies, ranging from TEI and non-TEI XML to relational databases, mapping and web services. More fundamentally, each has its own research questions and methodologies, each presents the material in different ways, and even those projects which present the same texts do so according to different editorial principles:
• ASChart presents texts of charters in TEI XML dating to AD 900 with detailed diplomatic markup.
• PASE is a prosopographical database which features charters as a significant proportion of its primary sources.
• LangScape presents the charter bounds in TEI XML with detailed linguistic markup.
• eSawyer presents Sawyer’s handlist of charters; it now also includes texts and translations where available but these are taken from a range of sources and with minimal markup.
• ASCluster uses web services to provide a single point of access for queries across the other four projects. A sub-project involved creating a single TEI-compliant model to integrate ASChart, LangScape and eSawyer.
The proposed poster will present each of these projects in brief, illustrating which aspects of the corpus they provide to researchers and how they meet research needs both individually and in combination, and how they come together through the Anglo-Saxon Cluster.
• ASChart presents texts of charters in TEI XML dating to AD 900 with detailed diplomatic markup.
• PASE is a prosopographical database which features charters as a significant proportion of its primary sources.
• LangScape presents the charter bounds in TEI XML with detailed linguistic markup.
• eSawyer presents Sawyer’s handlist of charters; it now also includes texts and translations where available but these are taken from a range of sources and with minimal markup.
• ASCluster uses web services to provide a single point of access for queries across the other four projects. A sub-project involved creating a single TEI-compliant model to integrate ASChart, LangScape and eSawyer.
The proposed poster will present each of these projects in brief, illustrating which aspects of the corpus they provide to researchers and how they meet research needs both individually and in combination, and how they come together through the Anglo-Saxon Cluster.
Abstract available at http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/isas2011/PeterStokes.cfm
Editorial work normally assumes that editors can extract the text out of its original carrier while preserving its integrity and semantic value; this is because text is usually considered as a linguistic object rather than a physical one.... more
Editorial work normally assumes that editors can extract the text out of its original carrier while preserving its integrity and semantic value; this is because text is usually considered as a linguistic object rather than a physical one. Indeed, this principle is explicitly stated as the theoretical basis for the de facto standard of markup for digital texts, the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Elena Pierazzo will discuss the very fundamentals of this assumption, presenting medieval and modern examples, and will introduce a new way of encoding documents using the model proposed by the Genetic Edition Working Group, a task force of the Manuscript Special Interest Group of the TEI.
The paper will be followed by a demonstration of a prototype developed for the ‘Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic’ project developed by Peter Stokes. Funded by the European Research Council, it aims to provide new ways of exploring visual and verbal information about handwriting and its manuscript context.
The paper will be followed by a demonstration of a prototype developed for the ‘Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic’ project developed by Peter Stokes. Funded by the European Research Council, it aims to provide new ways of exploring visual and verbal information about handwriting and its manuscript context.
This paper will address scribal practices associated with the monastic community at Worcester in the first quarter of the eleventh century and its relationship with Archbishop Wulfstan. It will argue for a set of scribal features which... more
This paper will address scribal practices associated with the monastic community at Worcester in the first quarter of the eleventh century and its relationship with Archbishop Wulfstan. It will argue for a set of scribal features which may be distinctive of Wulfstan’s circle, but in doing so it will also raise a series of methodological questions related to the problem of localising scribes, the relationship between the monastic and secular communities at Worcester and York, the nature of ‘script’ vs ‘hand’, and the possibilities and limits of quantitative methods and digital resources in addressing such questions.
A new, distinct script, English Vernacular minuscule, emerged in the 990s, used for writing in Old English. It appeared at a time of great political and social upheaval, with Danish incursions and conquest, continuing monastic reform, and... more
A new, distinct script, English Vernacular minuscule, emerged in the 990s, used for writing in Old English. It appeared at a time of great political and social upheaval, with Danish incursions and conquest, continuing monastic reform, and an explosion of writing and copying in the vernacular, including the homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan, two different recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, two of the four major surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry (the "Beowulf" and "Junius" books), and many original royal and ecclesiastical diplomas, writs and wills. However, although these important manuscripts and documents have been studied extensively, this has tended to be in isolation or small groups, never before as a complete corpus, a gap which this volume aims to rectify. It opens with the historical context, followed by a thorough reexamination of the evidence for dating and localising examples of the script. It them offers a full analysis of the complete corpus of surviving writing in English Vernacular minuscule, datable approximately from its inception in the 990s to the death of Cnut in 1035. While solidly grounded in palaeographical methodology, the book introduces more innovative approaches: by examining all of the approximately 500 surviving examples of the script as a whole rather than focussing on selected highlights, it presents a synthesis of the handwriting in order to identify local practices, new scribal connections, and chronological and stylistic developments in this important but surprisingly little-studied script.