Anglicana

Musings on manuscripts, digital humanities, Middle English, historiography, and literature more generally. An intersection of my geeky enthusiasms for 700 year-old books and tomorrow's gadgets.

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Pinnockshire, part 2- My book is now available at the University of California e-scholarship portal: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tm7x1rv

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Pinnockshire, or, as sure as God’s in Gloucester

It’s an odd phrase, really, “As sure as God’s in Gloucester.” I spent a fair amount of time chasing the origins of the phrase while investigating Pinnockshire, the little county that couldn’t, as it were. It kept appearing alongside a late Middle English rhyme on the counties (not the Shiring, originally a Latin/French historiographical text), which included the line “Pinnockshire is not to praise / A man may go it in two days.” Which struck me as a rather odd poetic exaggeration given precisely how tiny the area of Pinnockshire must have been. Regardless, if God was in Gloucestershire, it’s often thought to be connected to the vial of Christ’s blood at Hailes Abbey, known as the Holy Blood. There was a second rather less famous relic of the Holy Blood at Ashridge, also in Gloucestershire. I’ve been working on Ashridge’s books for a while, but more on Pinnockshire and Hailes and the Short English Metrical Chronicle (or, the Short Chronicle) in London, British Library, MS Additional 19677 can be found here: http://fisherm.bol.ucla.edu .

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BL MS Arundel 74 and Bede gone wrong

The cover of my book is this image from British Library, MS Arundel 74 : 

Something, obviously, has gone terribly wrong. “Nocciam insula” or “[I]n occiani insula” are not how Bede’s Historia begins. The caret and “Britannia” in the left margin, and the unexecuted scribe/author portrait, all point to the few available options for fixing such an unfortunate beginning. See the rest of the argument about MS Arundel 74 in the introduction to Scribal Authorship, linked here: http://fisherm.bol.ucla.edu

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Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England

Ohio State University Press never got a Google Books account sorted out before Google closed the program (over copyright issues, I assume). Which means my book is functionally invisible: its full text isn’t available online. Frankly, this is sufficiently annoying that I’m making it available in the hope that Google will index the thing. I’m less fussed about getting credit and more interested in making the book more broadly accessible from a search perspective. Because stuff like “Pinnockshire” and Robert of Gloucester’s text in Arundel 58 should be...findable. So, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012), is linked here. Twice.

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Just encountered the newly-digitized (?) Dartmouth Brut, or "Chronicles of England."  s. xvmed.  I added it to the Catalogue of Digitized Manuscripts, but doing so reminds me how very, very broken the German links are. Sigh.

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I'm curious how this will play out - funded by Google, a digitization program for which the second stage seems to be "build a crowd-source community interface, hope lots of people enter accurate metadata for sheet music because we made it available."  I'm skeptical, as while it might generate basic metadata, it's not going to do the kind of detailed cataloging still required for manuscripts (medieval or otherwise).  The BL, for all of my frustrations with their online medieval mss catalogues, are improving both the scholarship and the digital access to that scholarship at the same time.  It's a shame, but the Bodleian (a beloved space for me) is well short of where it might have been.

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Normally I'm skeptical of "digital museum" exhibitions, let alone with so unpromising a promise as "3D"! But, they've done a really nice job from a usability standpoint (though, flash...) The 8 objects have been photographed in delightfully high resolution, and stitched together with a rotate/zoom feature that's basically zoomify for a three-dimensional object. It's an instinctive interface, and they've gone all Web 2.0 on the exhibition's presentation (including the fabulous touch of the detailed images being visible behind the transparent navigation menus). The interface, in fact, begs to be viewed on an iPad, inasmuch as it models physical engagement with the objects displayed, which makes the Flash choice all the more unfortunate. That quibble aside, it's fabulous work - congratulations on a wonderful digital resource to accompany what looks like a delightful exhibition.

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This is _awesome_.  How are text and image linked? I was imagining something quite similar to this project, but they seem to have resolved the issues I feared would arise.  I must find out more about this.

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All well and good, really, but I don't think I've ever seen vellum defined as "mammal skin" before.  It makes me a bit uncomfortable, too close to "it rubs the lotion on its skin".....

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TEI P5 cubits

In TEI P5 manuscript descriptions, the "dimensions" tag supports cubits. I'm measuring all of my manuscripts in cubits from now on... 

<width extent="6 cubit">six cubits</width>Also, the "locus" tag is intriguing for deep location linking.  Things that make you go "hmm".  Or, make you fall asleep.  Even money, really.

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While working on the grant proposal for the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, I came across this gem.

I have a soft spot for the Commodore 64, and water-color memories of tape drives, of upgrading to a single 1541 disk drive, of saving up hundreds of dollars for the wholly indulgent second disk drive.  So, whoever is out there browsing the web on a C64 (emulator, I would guess, but that diminishes the drama somewhat), and moreover browsing the Catalogue: cheers.

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My site, with Chris Baswell.  It indexes and links to almost 3000 manuscripts, digitized in their entirety.  We're working on funding for a second version of the site, which will hopefully accommodate all of the manuscripts added to the web since the site launched just over two years ago.

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Diplomat, Quentin Miller's software tool to transcribe manuscript images and generate XML output.

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James Ginther's blog on developing T-PEN, a manuscript transcription tool.

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Huntington Library, MS Hm 132, f. 51v.  Higden's holograph.

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Public person

I imagine this as a place to be a person and a digitally interested medievalist, rather than the variously quasi-anonymous personae I have scattered about the Web.  Right now, I'm finishing an article on Higden and Huntington Library, MS HM 132, the holograph in his hand.  This is a leaf from the manuscript, via Digital Scriptorium, trusty workhorse for digitized manuscripts - 002202A.jpg