Update:  I am planning my itinerary for a later summer visit. Right now I am still half way across the planet with a stack of OS maps and GoogleEarth!

For my first day of three perambulating around tenth-century Cumbria, I am considering a westward route from my base in Penrith, along the A66.

I definitely want to see the Penrith St. Andrew’s cross and hogback, the so-called Giant’s Thumb and Giant’s Grave, if I am not able to catch sight of them on my way in the day before.

St. Andrew’s Church, Penrith

Next or first stop, Dacre (Bede’s Dacore, HE iv.32) to see the cross monuments there as well as “bear” hogbacks (thanks, Senchus, for this lead).

From there, I will pretty much head for Workington, but may do a drive by of the Roman ruins just past Troutbeck, and maybe go over the Derwent bridge at Keswick just for the fun of it.

Otherwise, my lunchtime goal is Workington, specifically St. Michael’s church and the launch site for St. Cuthbert and crew on their aborted attempt to take his body to Ireland.

The afternoon is a southward journey toward Furness and Morecambe Bay, the alternate destination of the drenched but not waterlogged Lindisfarne Gospels, as proposed by Dan Elsworth.  I will be going on land, though, not via water!

Gosforth Cross

Along the way, I may stop at St. Bee’s, but definitely at Gosforth to see this cross.

How long I spend in and around Ulverston and Consishead will determine how much more I can do in one day.

I do intend to visit Heversham and Kendal, doable on a less direct route back to Penrith, but if it is too late in the day, I may save one or both for a day two circuit of the Kent and Eden valleys.

Any advice?

In the brief breathing space between the end of classes and the onset of grading, I have tried to use the few days respite to write.  Getting back into the fiction side is like plunging into a pool–once I am in, I am fine, but getting there takes some effort of will.  [And indeed, I have also gotten back into the pool to swim laps, a good place to contemplate.]

In addition,  I began a couple of weeks ago transcribing the original collectar of Durham A.IV.19 with Aldred’s gloss, to make it accessible online in the same way that I recently did for the manuscript additions by uploading my book appendix critical edition (ScholarSpace).  I did use Corrêa’s Latin edition as a base text, but am checking it word for word against the facsimile, putting italics in for Latin expansions, and omitting all of her very useful apparatus.  Then I add Aldred’s gloss from the facsimile and check it against Lindelöf’s 1927 version.  Very tedious.

And my point of boredom became the trigger.  As I procrastinated on the fiction effort, a sentence came to mind:  Aldred was bored.  And that started a new chapter, now in progress, tracking his glossing effort in the original collectar and imagining his thought processes.  I have just arrived, with Aldred, at the readings and prayers for the Purification of Mary (Feb. 2), and am wondering how the exotic verses from ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and the Song of Songs form part of his mental furniture–the smell of fruit, honey, and spices; the vision of breasts and necks; the feel of kisses and embraces.  All have spiritual symbolism of great potency, but based on tangible human experience.

It also raises the unanswered question whether Aldred was a married cleric or a celibate monk.  Historical arguments can go either way (or first one and then the other).  Clearly the stained glass artist at the Church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert Chester-le-Street (left) saw him as a monk, befitting a guardian of St. Cuthbert.  However, other than Symeon of Durham’s later assertions of a monastic core around the body of St. Cuthbert at all times, most of the evidence for the Chester-le-Street era points to a secular community of clergy untouched by the tenth century monasticizing reform.

I could cast Aldred as a monastic from the outset, or as either an unmarried cleric, a married cleric,  or a married cleric who, perhaps after some tragedy, takes on the monastic vocation (many of the “monks” escorting the body of Cuthbert on its sojourn from Lindisfarne before arriving at Chester-le-Street were prominent nobles with families who apparently took on a monastic vow in their senior years as guardians of the saint).  However, I have already written a scenario where Aldred’s mother dedicates him to the church, so I may stick with an unmarried state.  Does that affect his reading of the Song of Songs?

Meanwhile, I am also enjoying St. Cuthbert’s Final Journey, a pilgrimage journal coinciding with the Lindisfarne Gospels Durham celebration.  Although I cannot follow the entire path of Richard Hardwick and his companions, they are hitting some of the same sites I intend to visit on my own Cumbrian pilgrimage exploring sites in Aldred’s tenth century world.  So I am learning a lot from their descriptions, as well as their misadventures.  I will have a car and am planning three day excursions from a base in Penrith.  I have a set of Ordnance Survey maps and, I hope, a GPS in the car!

I admit I have nothing substantial to post, mainly because I have let the tyranny of the urgent (class prep and grading, reviewing a book and an article, and judging for History Day) get in the way of the bigger research projects.  In the meantime, this from the satirical Onion:  wouldn’t it be great to live in the 960s?  Many thanks to Jonathan M. in the English department for sending this to me.  And, no, I won’t be incorporating it into my fiction on the 970s era, or the 1970s for that matter!

from James Doyle, Edgar the Pacific, courtesy Wikipedia

So, I have found an easy and quick way to make my edition of Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 available online as a searchable text, a first step in creating a database for Anglo-Saxon service books.

Our university library has an open access policy with a dedicated site called ScholarSpace that allows faculty to upload their publications into collections.  The publisher of my book, The Ohio State University Press, takes a liberal view of copyright and has allowed me to upload the critical edition from the appendix “as is” in its pdf format from the cd (as long as no one is charged for access).  For more info on the book and project, see my previous post.

The direct link to my ScholarSpace collection with the edition is Durham Cathedral Library MS A.IV.19, fols. 61r11-88v.

Meanwhile, I am editing the first part of the manuscript, the original collectar with Aldred’s gloss.  Alicia Corrêa edited all of the Latin in the Durham Collectar, Henry Bradshaw Society 107 (London:  Boydell Press, 1992).  But no one has edited the Old English gloss since Lindelöf in 1927 in Rituale ecclesiae Dunelmensis: The Durham Collectar, ed. U. Lindelöf with introduction by A. Hamilton Thompson, Surtees Society 140 (London:  Andrews for the Surtees Society, 1927).  The even older and more problematic edition by Stevenson (1840) has been digitized in Google, but is only readable as a pdf image–Google’s attempt at character recognition is a dismal failure.  Character recognition takes a whole lot more work because of all of the special characters, particularly in the Old English.  I am working from the manuscript facsimile, checked against Corrêa’s edition of the Latin and Lindelöf’s edition of the Old English gloss.  Tedious.

For the moment, this means I am not pursuing a TEI mark up strategy, which seems to me to require an army of trained assistants.  However, a confederation of liturgists seems to be forming around the idea of creating a liturgical database.  This may include more that just liturgy but also encompass other service book materials and related items, such as charms and medical texts.  That project will migrate to another blog once we have it set up.

 

July 28-August 5 will find me in Dublin (for the first time since 1977) for the ISAS (International Society of Anglo-Saxonists) conference.

I am pondering whether I can stretch my research fund $$ to do a post-conference trip across the Irish Sea to Cumbria, and perhaps Northumbria to visit the Lindisfarne Gospels in residence at Durham.

I thought about taking a viking voyage across the Irish Sea, which would involve a steam packet from Dublin to the Isle of Man and then another to Heysham, but practical considerations suggest that I get a BritRailPass UK-Ireland, which seems to include ferries.  I could then stop in Wales, having never done so before.  It would be fun to go around Cumbria a bit, then cross the Pennines, but the rail goes around the north.

However, all this is adding up fast and I need to book my Honolulu-Dublin air ticket soon.  Any suggestions from faithful readers in the North?

 

For those still following–or my fellow conferees at the Marco Manuscript Workshop this coming weekend–I have posted another fiction draft, focused on Scribe B’s sole contribution to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 on fol. 61.

This particular item is curious for several reasons.  First, Scribe B is less than competent in Latin and orthography:  his intial letter “d” (to the left) uses too small a nib for the size; other errors include odd abbreviations and a decidedly ungainly letter “a.”

Second, Aldred not only glosses the text in red but also corrects it, arguably while Scribe B is still copying–or possibly taking dictation, considering some of the aural errors, like “d” for “t” in such basic words as habed and ut.

Third, the text in question is the prayer of St. John for poison, also found in the medical texts Leechbook and Lacnunga, prayerbooks of Cerne and Nunnaminster, as well as Irish sources, although this is the only case where it is glossed in Old English.

Last, these three points lead me to posit that Aldred set the task for Scribe B as a literacy exercise, giving him a text that would require him to copy words not even Aldred knew the meaning of, such as various and sundry reptiles not found in the British Isles.  I have speculated that Scribe B might be at the lowly clerical rung of exorcist, with this prayer a fine example of the cleaning duties assigned to exorcists (forget the head-spinning stuff and think of washing church utensils).

So my fictional account (Scribe B draft) attempts to reconstruct the relationship between master and pupil as they converse about this prayer–not just the letter forms and words, but the meaning and spiritual import.  Comments are welcome, here or on the page.

So, this is my first post since September 7, 2012?

Okay, so it was a busy fall semester with two experimental classes plus the birth of My First Grandchild, Brian William Kaster, on October 22, 2012.

However, I am moving forward on at least one of my two research fronts, figuring out how to digitize the additions to Durham A.IV.19 in a way accessible and usable by others.

First, I am corresponding with Dr. Rebecca Fisher at the University of Sheffield on the possibility of creating a database for Anglo-Saxon charms that parallels the effort to digitize liturgical materials.  In some ways, Durham A.IV.19 stands at a nexus of liturgy and charms (Aldred’s field prayers), as does the marginalia in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, which I have also tried to digitize.  Rebecca put me on to a website tutorial for the Text Encoding Initiative, called TEI by Example.  I am working my way through it as well as looking for similar projects, one with glossed texts would be nice.  Derek Olsen, if you are still following, any thoughts?

Second, I am presenting my project at the Marco Manuscript Workshop at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Feb. 1-2 (run by Roy Liuzza).  That has lit a fire under me to keep at it.  Also, my university college is trying to get some kind of Digital Humanities consortium running, so I am on a committee exploring those angles.

But what about my fiction?  I miss the leisure of reading and writing while on sabbatical.

One of the tasks I set for my recently completed sabbatical was digitizing the Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 additions and making them available on the web as the beginning of a liturgical database for Anglo-Saxon studies.  But I have felt stymied in that effort by a number of technical difficulties.

The additions to Durham A.IV.19 made circa 970 by a group of Chester-le-Street scribes (Aldred and Scribes B-F) are in the appendix of my recently published book, The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century, available in a cd version as well as print from Ohio State University Press.  In the book, I mention the difficulty of sourcing some of the liturgical texts and the need for a full text database.  Right now, we can search incipits in print volumes of service books published by the Henry Bradshaw Society or others presses, google odd phrases and get random hits from out of copyright editions that happen to have been scanned, search the PL (if you happen to have a library with access to the electronic version) for what may be in there, or scramble through the composite volumes of the Romano-Germanic Pontificals, sacramentaries, benedictionals, and the like.  The incipit searches in printed editions are the most reliable in the sense of metadata (you know what manuscript and text you are searching in, unlike Google) but many of the prayer texts in Durham A.IV.19 are hybrid or composite such that material in the middle of a prayer is unidentifiable without a full text search.  The trouble with Google is you don’t know what you are searching in, that is, you don’t know what is not there.  I have had surprising hits (who knew that odd phrase was also buried somewhere in that missal?), but no hits doesn’t tell you what texts were scanned (or not) unless you search for every known manuscript edition to see which ones are there (someone needs to do that).  Also, of course, Google metadata is notoriously unreliable, not to mention scan errors and out-of-date editions.

So my thought was to revive a project initiated by Sarah Keefer (DILS) but using more recent developments in technology.  Sarah and I came up with a project name, Two Languages @ Prayer, to define our common interest:  Anglo-Saxon service books (broadly defined) that include Latin and Old English materials.  Our conversation started, literally, over Durham A.IV.19.  I never got past that point but got sucked into the manuscript, re-editing the additions.  Now I am wondering whether I should forge on with the digitization project, starting with Durham A.IV.19, or not (perhaps wait for other initiatives and teams to emerge).  I do have a blog set up called 2 Languages @ Prayer for that purpose, but am not sure how to proceed.  My thought was to create a gateway website that would serve first as a guidebook for the Anglo-Saxonist trying to figure out what books and resources to use to look for liturgical materials and second as a site for building a database of searchable liturgical texts.

Here are the things hanging me up:

1.  Format.  I have the additions from my book in pdf as well as Word format, but the footnotes are delinked.  My older Word drafts (before copy editing) would need to be updated to show things caught by the copy editing process.  I could go the fast route and just upload to my website or the blog the text “as is” in Word or pdf, with our without the footnotes.  Or, I could take the slow route and re-edit each text in a website with hyperlinks, et. al.  This brings the second issue.

2.  Text encoding.  If I do re-edit, what are the protocols for making it searchable and usable, especially for special characters (of which there are many in the Old English texts particularly)?  I am aware of text-encoding initiatives, most associated with big grant projects, but I am out of my depth.

3.  Team effort?  While I can do Durham A.IV.19 in some fashion, it will take a team of people (and money) to get other Anglo-Saxon service book materials online.  Others projects out there:  Geographies of Orthodoxy wiki; crowdsourcing example and ThatCamp both sponsored by the George Mason Center for New History and Media; and the Interpreting Medieval Liturgy project of Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton.

4.  Copyright.  Many of the manuscripts included in this database sweep are available in print through HBS; others are in out date editions, some scanned by Google books.  Then there are the synthesized editions of  service book material by Deshusses, Vogel, and Andrieu.  The outdated but still usable Monumenta veteris Liturgiae Alemannicae of Martinus Gerbertus is available but I haven’t tested its searchability too far.

Any advice, suggestions, or volunteers?

Almost a month since my last post, I realized today while reading Jonathan Jarrett’s recent post, both a lament and a resolve to do more.  I found myself identifying with many parts of it, but especially the uneven rhythm of academic life created by the competition between research, teaching, and service.  Even in the research arena, some projects cycle quickly, but the ones we care about are the long deep ones that frequently get pushed aside by the “tyranny of the urgent” (not just grading student work or doing committee reports, but editing volumes, writing short pieces, or serving as a peer reviewer).Two things have slowed me down in the last month.

Jerry Bentley (1949-2012) and wife Carol Mon Lee, History Department party at the Waikiki Aquarium, 2002.

One is the untimely death of my dear colleague Jerry Bentley on July 15, after a 7 month battle with pancreatic cancer.  Like Jonathan’s memorial to Mark Blackburn, I found myself contemplating the life and work of someone who passed away at the height of his creative powers.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with Jerry in the last month of his life and gather some stories of his life and career to use in a biographical portrait (one version of which is coming out in the September issue of The Journal of World History).  I wanted to go back for more.  Alas, too soon he passed peacefully, but leaving many of us–but especially his wife Carol Mon Lee–wanting more time with him.  So for much of the last month I have been writing about Jerry and mourning his departure.

With the start of August, the other factor kicks in:  my sabbatical is over and I need to prepare fall classes.  For reasons unclear to me now (I know better), two of my classes involve experimentation.  For World History to 1500, I am using a “flip” classroom, essentially doing with a large first year class what I do with all my upper division students:  use class time to engage them in deeper analysis through dialogue, built (idealistically) on the premise that they do the reading before class.  Then in my early medieval class, I am planning to use blogging to fulfill the “writing intensive” component.  That brings me to this post’s subject:  any advice?

I do have one colleague who used WordPress in a course last year.  And the Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an article, “A Better Blogging Assignment,” from an experienced blogging instructor on becoming weary of reading student blogs (uh-oh) but also listing some excellent strategies he has developed.   One of our teaching specialists recommended Google Blogger as having an easier learning curve, so I am checking on that.

First off, I plan to incorporate blogging in such a way that if things go wrong we can go to plan B (just submit your paper to me electronically).  I don’t want the tool to get in the way of the content and skills they are supposed to be learning.

Second, the course has two different blog types.  The course (C) blog that I develop will post questions on the weekly reading for students to comment on; then as the semester progresses they (in groups or individually in assigned roles) will be in charge of writing posts on the readings as well as commenting.  This C blog will remain private, only for students as users.  It essentially replaces the online discussion board our university has (Laulima) and helps ensure that students come to class ready to dive deeper into the material.  The students will each develop their own P blog over the course of the semester, essentially a portfolio of writing.  For the four traditional paper assignments, they will instead create a “page” on their blog, with earlier drafts developed in posts to their blog.

Third, I am developing a guidebook for blogging, starting with a glossary of terms to define equivalencies, e.g. a page = a paper.  Then come all of the rules to keep them on track and out of the weeds in terms of finding, using, and citing sources.   For example, they should NOT use resources “beneath” them (K-12 websites, encyclopedias, online textbooks, History Channel, etc) but should use peer level or above resources, such as primary sources, artifacts, or scholarly articles by historians or other professional researchers that include documentation on source data and images.

So, veteran bloggers, have any of you used blogging in your courses and if so, what advice would you give me?

I have just posted a new draft of the Oakley chapter/short story that tries to account for the Durham A.IV.19 colophon and memorandum Aldred wrote.  This revision has taken a great deal of time, hence the silence in recent posts, also occasioned by other projects.  A recent presentation I gave on Beowulf at a children’s literature conference for teachers and writers was great fun and stimulated ideas for using Beowulf in my fall class.  I also gained some writing inspiration from the authors present.

For those of you who read the first draft and remember it, this one is quite different in the framing, but the dream-vision and colophon-writing remain pretty much the same.  The landscape, geographic and political, draws on charter evidence.  I have included more reflections on religious reform.  Most of all, Aldred’s personality–his struggles with pride–come through more.

I would appreciate feedback from Anglo-Saxon or tenth century experts as well as fiction authors and readers.  Some areas I am wrestling with include:

• Direct speech:  trying to use Old English based words when the speech would have been in Old English; more Latiny when the provost and bishop discourse.
• St. Swithun as a foil to St. Cuthbert:  the Winchester cult of St. Swithun officially begins in 971 with his translation, but the stories (apocryphal or not) must have begun in 970, I think.  Michael Lapidge’s über-volume on the Cult of St. Swithun is a huge help.
• The monastic reform movement:  how much tension was there and what would the Northumbrians have felt about it?
• Known bigwigs like King Edgar:  how to represent them in a fictional setting is tricky.
• Charter evidence:  have I got the signing details right?

Some things I may pursue:

• Bring in some of the other charter signers and political figures.
• Develop an encounter with Abbess Herleva of Shaftesbury.
• Take them to Winchester, go across the bridge Swithun built.

Other ideas?