Alexander Zawacki

This article seeks to clarify the varied utilities of multispectral imaging (MSI) and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for the purposes of fragment recovery and analysis. The two technologies are discussed in detail, with the aim of explaining their functionality and required methodology to a humanities-oriented audience. For purposes of comparison, two medieval manuscript fragments—one a palimpsest, the other damaged by abrasion and staining—were imaged using both MSI and HSI systems. The data sets were then compared using several metrics and the results outlined. MSI was found to have significantly better spatial resolution (the amount of fine detail that the system is capable of capturing), while HSI had vastly better spectral resolution (the number of wavelengths discerned by the system). The MSI system also displayed a superior signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and edge response, meaning that images were clearer and sharper. MSI images enabled the identification, transcription, and approximate dating of the palimpsested fragment, but the less visually clear HSI data set failed to fully do so. However, the superior spectral resolution of the HSI system allowed for the noninvasive and nondestructive identification of inks and pigments and enabled our team to differentiate between even those that appear to be identical to the naked eye. In this case, the red pigment used on the palimpsest was identified from the hyperspectral data but could not be from the multispectral. Our conclusion is that HSI systems can offer valuable information about material composition and history and may shed light on provenance. Neither system is universally superior; the choice of which one to employ depends upon what questions a scholar seeks to ask of the object.

The Middle English Gast of Gy is intimately concerned with the hermeneutic process. Irruptions of the preternatural are destabilizing events that threaten Church authority and so demand an interpretive response. The clerics in the poem serve as first-contact exegetes. They fulfill a vital, sacral function as interpreters of texts and phenomena, and as mediators between the mundane and the otherworldly. Hermes, a liminal god with dominion over both ghosts and the act of speech, is here deployed as a lens through which to view these separate duties and bring them together under a coherent conceptual heading. Gy then serves as an effective case study in how Church control is established over a disruptive paranormal event, how clerics in the field work at the discernment of spirits, and how orthodox understandings of the supernatural are formulated and propagated through dialogue and writing. A mid-fourteenth-century Middle English poem based on the Latin De spiritu Guidonis, The Gast of Gy has received scant critical attention. 1 This is not wholly surprising. Firstly, there is the complicating factor that there are in fact three Middle English translations, spread across some ten manuscripts. This paper treats the version found in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poet. 175 (SC 14667) and British Library MS Cotton Tiberius E. vii. Secondly, there is the problem of the poem itself. Doctrinally conservative and structurally unambitious, its meager plot arouses little excitement: the bodiless ghost of a townsman appears to his widow, who enlists the help of local church authorities. A prior is dispatched to the home and engages in a dialogue with the spirit with the chief goal of ascertaining whether the ghost really is who he claims to be. After a lengthy discussion that ranges over everything from basic cat-echismal points to contemporary hot topics in eschatology, the spirit is laid

This paper proposes a modification to A.C. Spearing’s seminal view of the poem, The Awntyrs off Arthure, as a diptych, and suggests interpreting it as, instead, analogous to the medieval cadaver tomb. The poem then becomes a single ‘awntyr’: Guinevere and Gawain’s encounter with their own mortality and their subsequent failure to integrate this death-awareness into the social and psychological fabric of the Arthurian court.