This week Orietta Da Rold, along with colleagues at Cambridge University Library and Stanford University, launched an exciting MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) they have developed, called ‘Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts‘. It’s a free course, open to the public and has already got a lively and expanding community following it.

Here’s a video in which you can find more about the team and a description of the course to whet your appetite:

Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts introduces you to the study of early text technologies, focusing principally on the medieval book, but covering other textual objects, too, such as scrolls and diplomata. The Digging Deeper team of scholars from Stanford and Cambridge reveals how to investigate manuscripts within repository settings and through online resources, what to look out for when confronted with manuscript images, and how to exploit all the information a manuscript offers. You will learn major characteristics of book production, the terms and methods used by manuscript historians to describe the book, and key themes in early book history. Where were manuscripts made and who made them? What kinds of materials were used and what can those materials tell us? What kinds of texts were created and copied during these centuries? How did multilingualism matter in the medieval period? In pursuing these questions, you will study some of the most significant and beautiful books held by the university libraries of Cambridge and Stanford.

Orietta has also been awarded a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant to carry out research on ‘Mapping Medieval Paper in England’. The grant provides seed funds for a larger project on paper, which will aim to refine the data set and the methodology which can then be used to carry out wider research on the significance of paper in written communication. The project will be launched in February with the aid of a Research Assistant. Watch this space for news of the coming website too!

Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) gave a stimulating paper to the Medieval Research Seminar on ‘”Vox in choro, mens in foro”: distracted prayer and divided selves in some medieval rules for living and Piers Plowman’ on Wednesday 21 January.

Amongst Alastair’s previous publications are: ‘Covetousness, “Unkyndenesse”, and the “Blered” Eye in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014), and ‘Brevis oratio penetrat velum: Proverbs, Prayers and Lay Understanding in Late Medieval England’, New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012).

Christopher Page’s The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History is due out this year. The title-page has just been confirmed and you can read a brief description below:

Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.

The Middle English Graduate Seminar meets on Wednesdays at 5.15pm in the English Faculty Board Room.

21 January
Alastair Bennett (RHUL)
‘”Vox in choro, mens in foro”: distracted prayer and divided selves in some medieval rules for living and Piers Plowman’

4 February
Jorie Woods (Texas at Austin)
‘Classical Emotions in the Medieval Classroom’

18 February
Katie Walter (Sussex)
‘Reginald Pecock’s Images’

4 March
Dan Wakelin (St Hilda’s College, Oxford)
‘Does the page matter?’

11 March
A.C. Spearing (Virginia)
‘What is a Narrator?’

Alex da Costa gave a paper at the English Graduate Research Seminar at Queen Mary University of London on 15 January examining the paratexts of early evangelical texts and how they sought to persuade readers to risk buying such forbidden material. The paper looked at censored texts from the opposite angle to her recent article ‘”Functional Ambiguity”: Negotiating Censorship in the 1530s’ in The Library, arguing that the blandness of title pages, for example, may have been less about disguising evangelical material from the censors than not scaring the wavering reader.

ABSTRACT: There has been a tendency amongst Reformation scholars to ignore the question of how the market for vernacular, evangelical writing was initially fostered and expanded. What this leaves unaddressed is the specific problem that the earliest evangelical, English writers faced if they wanted to do more than preach to the converted: how to entice resistant readers steeped in traditional religion into reading material that was both forbidden and, probably, uncomfortably challenging. Until 1534, England remained part of the Roman Church and even after the break with Rome, Henry VIII regarded himself as a Catholic, often unwilling to sanction key tenets of evangelical belief. Successive statutes, proclamations and instruments made it clear to printers and readers alike that books which strayed from accepted faith were forbidden and the possession of them was used as significant evidence of heresy. In such circumstances, obtaining texts by writers like Tyndale or Fish was not only difficult, but dangerous, so idle curiosity about newfangled heresies was unlikely to be enough to make a reader purchase such a volume. With the difficulties and risks so elevated, how did these writers and their printers make consumers of potential readers? In this paper, I want to explore the ways in which evangelical books printed in the 1520s and early 1530s deliberately sought to attract new readers and to persuade them to pay the purchase price through the manipulation of title pages, prefaces, tabula, notes, errata notices and imprints.

Nicolette Zeeman and Jean Michel Massing have edited a fascinating collection of essays, King’s College Chapel 1515-2015, ‘to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the completion of the stone structure of King’s College Chapel in 1515. It contains seventeen newly-researched essays exploring the artistic, musical, religious and cultural history of this extraordinary building from its foundation to the present day.’ In addition to editing the volume, Nicolette has contributed an essay on ‘The Chapel Imagined 1540-1830.’ You can see the full contents of the book here.

Barry Windeatt gave a very interesting paper at the Oxford Graduate Research Seminar on 8 December entitled ‘True Image? The Vernicle in Medieval England’.

[A vernicle is a ‘copy in miniature of the picture of Christ, which is supposed to have been miraculously imprinted upon a handkerchief preserved in the church of St. Peter at Rome’ (Skeat). Chaucer’s Pardoner ‘a vernycle hadde…sowed upon his cape’ (‘General Prologue’, Canterbury Tales, l.685). In this painting by Hans Memling, you can see St Veronica, who became associated with the miracle, holding the cloth.]

You can read all about what members of this research group are currently up to on the members page.

More good news for medieval teaching at the Faculty! Dr Simon Meecham-Jones has been appointed affiliated lecturer and will be teaching undergraduates and graduates this coming year.

Simon has published widely on his research interests in the poetry of Chaucer and John Gower; Latin literature of the twelfth century (in particular the lyric tradition); language contact and medieval code-switching; and the representation of Wales in the literature of medieval England. He has also edited with Ruth Kennedy two collections of essays: Authority and Subjugation in Writing Medieval Wales (2008) and Writers of the reign of Henry VII (2006). He is currently working on ‘the later stages of a book on Chaucer, the natural world and literary authority, and…researching code-switching and dialectal variation in manuscripts from the Welsh March.’

It is a pleasure to welcome Dr Lucy Allen to the English Faculty as a Teaching Associate. Lucy completed her PhD at York University earlier this year, and is very excited to be returning to teach at Cambridge, where she was an undergraduate.

Alongside lecturing and contributing to graduate seminars, Lucy will be continuing work on her current research project which ‘looks at gendered representations of truthfulness in medieval romance’ and preparing for publication parts of her PhD thesis, which focused ‘on religious manuscript cultures in England’. More widely, she is interested ‘in feminist readings of popular fiction’ and regularly writes a thought-provoking blog.