Several months ago the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) put out a request for proposals for participation in the 2017 theme “Scholarly Storytelling: Compelling Research for an Engaged Public.” I jumped at the chance to bring together medievalists and organized a team who helped me to write a proposal. Our team recently received word that our proposal was accepted, and the following folks will be joining me at the SCI in the fall: Brantley Bryant, Kathleen Kennedy (blog), Dan Kline, Kate Wiles (blog), and Stephen Yeager. We’re also indebted to David Perry for his contributions to the proposal and ongoing conversations.

The premise of our proposal is that medievalists should actively engage the public through our own means of storytelling. A number of news-worthy examples have surfaced just in the past few weeks. Among them are medievalists addressing white supremacists appropriating Viking culture; Islamaphobes who want to recreate the Crusades; and James Comey evoking a comment about a “meddlesome priest” associated with King Henry II and the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket.

We hope that, by sharing our ideas, we’ll get others excited and start more discussion about how medievalists can reach the public through our storytelling.

We’re looking for others to share in our long-term endeavors: allies, supporters, collaborators, those who want to tell stories with us. As we hope is clear from our proposal, our goals go well beyond our team meeting at the SCI. We hope that our collaborators will be much more wide-ranging, too.

If you want to be part of our network for medieval storytelling, please let us know.

Here’s the main part of our proposal to explain what we want to get up to at the Institute and beyond.

If storytelling matters in our own contemporary context, then so too do stories from the past. Unfortunately, premodern tales often remain obscured or misrepresented.

For example, in the twelfth century, the English monk Thomas of Monmouth (fl.1149-1172) fabricated a story about Jews kidnapping and murdering a boy named William. This fiction, now known as the “Blood Libel,” continued to be told in various forms throughout the Middle Ages (see “The Prioress’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales); and it survives as a “zombie lie” even up to our own time, where it is still retold, often as history. As propaganda fodder for the far-right, however, the (mis)understanding of the Middle Ages evoked by contemporary retellings of the Blood Libel is racist, bleak—and completely misses much of what the medieval period has to offer to contemporary culture.

Our working group is comprised of a team of medievalists (academics, public scholars, journalists, activists) who want to engage the public with stories from the Middle Ages. Collectively, we want medievalists to be seen as public scholars by other public scholars.

During the Institute, we want to create a new roadmap toward public writing where we can deploy our academic skills for the widest possible audiences. We want to be recognized as storytellers who tell old stories that matter, and tell them to the twenty-first century. We want medievalists to plot to carve more space out of the mainstream media. We want to imagine the next type of The Toast, and to lay the groundwork to make it happen.

Our working group includes a cross-section of people who identify as medievalists, at various stages in their careers, working with different storytelling media to engage the public by telling medieval stories. Some of us are teachers and researchers in higher education, but some of us also have experience as journalists, public scholars, social media mavens, and consultants for film, television, and radio. Notably, all of the participants on this team are actively engaged in social media, especially through blogging and tweeting. One of our goals is to bring our interdisciplinary and inter-experiential voices together to learn from each other and to find new modes of storytelling in our own work and with others interested in similar pursuits.

We hope that participating in the Institute can develop a network and team among ourselves and reaching out more broadly, so that we can collaborate and speak more loudly together as medievalists even as we tell more diverse stories.

We are also curious what we might learn about so-called “futurists”—scholars apparently hired by think tanks, companies, and governments to write white papers that imagine future conditions, technologies, and their impacts on society and government. Modernists are usually offered such work, but we feel strongly that medievalists, those of us who study the origins of the very nation-states and technologies in question, are uniquely suited to such scholarly communication.

In all of this, we want to get better at teaching the narratives of the Middle Ages as contested ground both in medieval and modern contexts. From telling our stories, we want to forge connections between the premodern and contemporary, encompassing the longue durée, about violence across religious identities and histories of race; the unravelling of the myth of the “white” Middle Ages and “white” Western Civilization; untold histories of technologies leading to the so-called “digital age”; questions about gender and sexuality—none of which are by any means new in our contemporary era.

Some of our goals raise obvious questions and challenges:

• What do we mean when we talk about telling medieval stories to the public?
• What does it mean to be academics using more popular storytelling media?
• How (and why) do we enact scholarly communication as medievalists, for the public, and through diverse storytelling media?
• How do we break in?
• How do we do it accessibly?
• What new models of publication need to be established to achieve our goals?
• What can we bring to the public to show them medieval subjects matter?

There are some obvious answers to these questions, but also some less obvious answers that we want to work through in a network with others who are asking similar questions.

Medievalists, like medieval people, are all about networks. The Tale of Audun from the Westfjords poses one example, about a poor, resourceful, Icelandic merchant driven by luck to sail to Greenland, spend all of his money buying a captured polar bear cub, sail around Europe with the bear hustling kings, create a network of contacts from his experiences, and ultimately gain widespread reputation and enough wealth to settle into early retirement back in Iceland.

While fictional, the example is representative of the types of networks that pervaded the medieval world. Without networks, people went nowhere.

Our group at the Institute will capitalize on expanding our network: this is one of the substantive takeaways for us. We want to use our time at the Institute to create a plan for not only reaching the public through scholarly communication but also reaching others with the same goals. We will identify who else will take part in our plans; who will invite us to write in their networks; who will collaborate with us to shape the narrative of medieval studies going forward—not just our own group’s narrative. Our connection, our mesnie, our group of well-willers will expand, and our opportunities will grow, as will the patronage we can extend in turn. This profound reciprocity of networking is precisely what is missing from contemporary far-right understandings of the Middle Ages.

We suggest that scholarly communication needs to get a little more medieval.

For anyone who follows my blog, or my Twitter account, it’s obvious that the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew has been a major part of my research life over the last year and a half or so. (You can read more about other aspects of my work on Pseudo-Matthew here.) While I’ve been working on a new translation of this apocryphon, I’ve also found a number of questions to pursue, since they haven’t been adequately addressed in scholarship. One of these questions concerns the monastic sources behind the depiction of Mary’s life among a community of virgins in the temple.

I’m happy to report that my article addressing this issue, “The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Rule of the Master, and the Rule of Benedict,” has been accepted to appear in Revue bénédictine.

Here’s the abstract:

The reliance of the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew on the Rule of Benedict has been long acknowledged. The most significant scene to demonstrate intertextuality between the Rule of Benedict and Pseudo-Matthew is chapter 6, which depicts Mary’s ascetic life in a community of virgins. This scene adds much that is not in the main source, the Greek Protevangelium of James, based on the Benedictine life of work and prayer. Recent work on the sources of the apocryphal gospel, however, gives rise to questions about the sources involved in Pseudo-Matthew, especially opening up the possibility that the author of the apocryphon looked to multiple texts for various expansions. This article suggests that the author also relied on the Rule of the Master. Thus, the case of the Rule of the Master, Rule of Benedict, and Pseudo-Matthew is one of complex intertextuality with implications for how the text relates to monasticism.

Some of this work has also fed into my introduction to and commentary on Pseudo-Matthew, especially as it relates to the sources and literary contexts that fed into the text’s composition. I hope that this article helps to shed light on yet another piece of the complex puzzle of Pseudo-Matthew‘s origins as well as its relationships to various other late antique and medieval texts.

Commemorating events that occurred #OnThisDay (or #OTD) in history has become increasingly popular on social media. This practice can also bring appropriate reminders of how that past intersects with our present.

Historical events that occurred around the week of July 18th are particularly linked with acts of violence against Jewish people throughout history. Of course, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism (see Matthew Chalmers’s recent, useful discussion of these terms at The Public Medievalist) are not relegated only to one week. Yet the convergence of these historical events so close to each other on the calendar is rather striking.

Our own historical moment, when anti-Semitism is apparent around us in many ways–and in many ways linked to the Middle Ages–seems like a fitting time to reflect on these events. As I write this, I’m also aware of an unfolding discussion about diversifying medieval studies more generally. As this discussion develops, and as commemorative dates appear on the calendar, it’s important to remember moments of anti-Judaism, histories of diversity, and their connections to our present.

One starting point is July 18, 1290, when King Edward I of England (r.1272-1307) issued a royal decree known as the Edict of Expulsion. With this act, he legally exiled all Jews from England for the remainder of the Middle Ages. This edict was only repealed in 1657, by Oliver Cromwell.

Edward’s expulsion was just one result of tensions in England that had already brought about the persecution of Jews over the past few hundred years. In some ways, this edict was a culmination of rising anti-Judaism. 100 years before the Edict of Expulsion, in 1190, around 150 Jews were murdered in York during a riot against them. In 1218, King Henry III issued the Edict of the Badge, which required all Jews to wear a badge to identify them as Other. These events have disturbing resonances with recent threats and attacks on Jews as well as proposals for registering or identifying individuals based on race or ethnicity.

One other significant fact stands out about Edward’s expulsion of the Jews on July 18, 1290: in that year, that was the date of the Jewish holiday Tisha B’Av, a fast day to remember and lament the calamities of Jewish history. (This year, it’s on August 1.) From the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, we have a vantage point to look both forward and backward at other historical persecutions of Jewish people during the same week in July, across a time-span of roughly 1,850 years.

On the same date, July 18, 635 years after Edward’s expulsion (in 1925), Adolf Hitler published volume one of his book Mein Kampf. As is well known, a main feature of Hitler’s book was what he called “the Jewish peril”–an imagined global conspiracy of the Jewish people to gain control of the world.

The well-known content and implications of this book and its author’s political theories don’t need any further discussion. After all, they are still with us in the rhetoric and actions of present-day white supremacists. While I don’t want to stress the historical connections of calendar dates too far, the coincidence of Anti-Semitic events on July 18 in both 1290 and 1925 (and 2017) are hard to dismiss outright.

Looking back earlier in history, the Tisha B’Av on July 18, 1290 also echoes another event commemorated during the same week. The event was the invasion of the Fortress of Antonia in Jerusalem by Titus (the son of Emperor Vespasian) during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, outstanding for both its contemporary moment as well as its longstanding reputation through the Middle Ages.

Exact dates are uncertain, but it’s likely (as Kate Cooper notes) that “Titus breached the walls of Jerusalem” on the 15th and (according to Larry R. Helyer) that he besieged the fortress between the 20th and 24th. While this as just one moment in the unfolding siege, it was a decisive victory for the Romans. This victory allowed the Romans to establish a stronghold of power before launching a final attack on the Temple.

Famously, the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus (37-c.100) wrote about the Siege of Jerusalem as an eye-witness. In his work titled The Jewish War, Josephus navigates his own identity as both a Jew and a Roman. He claims that he helped to mediate between the two sides of the war as a sort of negotiator. He also writes with some amount of respect for certain members on both sides of the war.

Despite his own tensions of identity, Josephus provides a stark depiction of an advanced group of Roman soldiers scaling the walls of the fortress to defeat the Jewish guards. He tells the following account:

The first sentinels whom they encountered they cut down in their sleep and, taking possession of the wall, ordered the trumpeter to sound. Thereupon, the other guards suddenly started to their feet and fled, before any had noted what number had ascended: for their panic and the trumpet-call led them to imagine that the enemy had mounted in force.

Directly following this passage, Josephus leads seamlessly into an account of the weeks-long fight for control of the Temple:

So the armies clashed in desperate struggle round the entrances, the Romans pressing on to take possession also of the temple, the Jews thrusting them back upon Antonia.

Titus’ victory over the Fortress of Antonia led to the final outcome of the Siege of Jerusalem by the end of August: the destruction of the Temple. This is one of the major calamities mourned on Tisha B’Av.

As a moment of imperialist violence, the destruction of the Temple was not only a gesture of power by the Roman Empire but also a decisive moment in Jewish history. While many Jewish people had lived in diaspora before this event, in this stroke of colonial oppression, diaspora became a fundamental aspect of Jewish identity.

During the medieval period, Titus’ siege and destruction of the Temple was remembered in various ways. One of the most famous medieval depictions of the Siege appears on the back panel of the early eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket.

Back panel of the Franks Casket, depicting the Siege of Jerusalem by Titus, now in the British Museum.

Along the outside, in Anglo-Saxon runes and Latin, is a general description of the siege:

her fegtaþ titus end giuþeasu

HIC FUGIANT HIERUSALIM afitatores

dom / gisl

Here Titus and a Jew fight

Here its inhabitants flee from Jerusalem

judgement / hostage

This side of the Franks Casket is commonly rendered invisible or of secondary importance in studies that tend to focus on more popular images and their sources. This artifact is known more for its renderings of the stories of Wayland the Smith (Germanic), the Adoration of the Magi (Christian), or Romulus and Remus (Roman) than its representation of violent anti-Judaism. Yet this casket tells stories from diverse cultures, not one narrative from one tradition.

Perhaps Titus’ siege and its horrific outcomes were on the minds of medieval invaders in 1099, during another Siege of Jerusalem at the climax of the First Crusade. Indeed, both Jews and Muslims (called “Saracens” in contemporary texts) were commonly seen as the Other in comparison with Christian Crusaders during the Middle Ages. We find iconographic echoes in visual representations of the 1099 siege, such as this thirteenth-century depiction in a manuscript of Guillaume de Tyr’s Histoire d’Outremer. One indicator of parallels meant to be read across time appears in the Stations of the Cross in the upper register. Juxtaposition between Jesus’ Passion and the ongoing war at the city walls brings together first-century events around Jesus’ life and eleventh-century events of the First Crusade.

Later still, a fourteenth-century author (a close contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer) composed a Middle English poem about Titus’ siege. Drawing on a variety of established traditions, the Siege of Jerusalem combines late antique and medieval sources and contextual currents, accounts by medieval Crusaders, and unsettling anti-Judaism–all synthesized through the perspective of a medieval author deeply invested in a certain type of Christian ideology.

The events that I’ve highlighted evoke a through-line that runs from the first century onward, encompassing a history of violence toward the Jewish people. Just considering the events discussed here, we find heightened moments of oppression in Titus’ siege, Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion, and the medieval Crusades. Considering the longer history of Jewish exile and oppression at the hands of imperial powers, this history begins hundreds of years earlier than the first century and continues to our present moment in the early twenty-first century.

Taken together, this week of commemorations is a salient reminder of the treatment of Jewish people throughout history. For those of us in the Western world, ours is not a monolithic narrative filled only with white, Christian, European peoples. Our narratives are filled with diversity. We do well to dwell on that fact and the many variegated stories that indwell the histories of our past, present, and future.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly involved in the long-standing project known as the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (SASLC). First, I joined the project as a contributor, working on a series of entries (Pseudo-Bede) that seemed, at the time, untouchable. In 2014, I took on a role to help the project increase its online presence and move toward digital publication, and, in 2016, I joined the Editorial Board.

More recently, I’ve been considering the SASLC project within the larger scope of medieval studies and the ongoing conversations about diversity (or problems with diversity) in the field. (Among the links provided below, see especially resources at the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship website; and this crowd-sourced Race and Medieval Studies Bibliography, maintained by Julie Orlemanski and Jonathan Hsy.)[1]

In this post, I want to consider this ongoing conversation, speak from my position of privilege, and listen to the voices who are calling for change. I also want to reflect on several questions about seeking equity and creating equality that guide my thoughts in this post (more on these below). While my perspective is largely focused on SASLC, I hope that much of this can be similarly extended to other institutions and organizations in the field.

At the start, I want to offer several caveats. First, I write this as a member of the Editorial Board of SASLC, and one who is interested in seeing the project flourish into the future. I care deeply about this project, believe that it is an important one for the field, and believe in taking stock of criticisms to make the field better. But, second, I write this from my own personal perspective, not on behalf of SASLC, nor under its auspices, nor with any kind of authority from the project’s other leaders. Finally, I write this as a cis, white, able-bodied man with a tenure-track job, and I must acknowledge my privilege in that position, socially and academically.

An Image Problem

As medievalists know, and as recent conversations have highlighted, the field known as “Anglo-Saxon studies” faces many reasons for reflection and change.

For example, a recent post by Elaine Treharne has raised the issue (and caused much discussion; link will only work for members of the Anglo-Saxon Studies group) about how our common terminology matters both within and outside of academia. Titles like “Anglo-Saxonist” and related terms are fraught with background. It is a striking and distressing fact that the second definition of “Anglo-Saxonist” in the Oxford English Dictionary indicates “A person who believes in the importance or superiority of Anglo-Saxon language, people, or culture (past or present).” This is a racist perspective that easily foments white supremacy. Historiographic, nationalistic, racist, colonialist ideologies have been projected onto the past by appropriating such terms, and the damages are still very much with us.

For scholarly organizations like the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) and academic projects like the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, the problems of terminology need to be considered, at the least. The future of Anglo-Saxon studies (which I use as a term consciously, but not unreflectively, because of its commonly accepted use [for now] in the field) rests on such considerations.

Beyond terminology, however, there are other considerations. It is likely not a surprise to anybody that the reputation of traditional Anglo-Saxon studies is also problematic within academia. Foremost is the reputation for being the purview of white men. The Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon Studies has been held only by white men. Similarly, the major journals in the field, Anglo-Saxon England and the Old English Newsletter, have been predominantly overseen by white, male editors. The Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture was founded and, until recently, primarily directed by white men (see more on this below).

Raising these criticisms is not meant to direct specific judgment, but to point out an unfortunate aspect of our field: as with all parts of society affected by structural sexism and racism, Anglo-Saxon studies has marginalized those who are not white men.

Over the past few years, medieval studies generally and Anglo-Saxon studies specifically have had to face intersecting issues. Early 2016 brought a prominent outcry for examining structural sexism in the field. This was largely sparked because of controversy around Allen Frantzen’s personal anti-feminist website. Furthermore, close connections exist between the intersectional issues of sexism and racism, especially in alt-right (white supremacist) ideologies.

In 2017, there has been both an appeal to examine whiteness in medieval studies by Medievalists of Color and conversations about diversity coming out of events at the annual International Medieval Congress. More specifically, Adam Miyashiro has raised criticisms in response to the 2017 ISAS meeting in Honolulu. All of this has been precipitated especially by a rising awareness of white supremacists appropriating medieval studies (particularly Anglo-Saxon studies) for their causes.

As Mary Dockray-Miller has pointed out, “Old English has a serious image problem.”

One reaction to facing criticisms would be to react defensively. We might cry out, “Not all Anglo-Saxonists!” or–in the case of my own situation–“Not all contributors to SASLC!” We could point out the many women who have joined SASLC and contributed to it over the years. (And I’ve just done this, haven’t I?) But good intentions need to be paired with actions that bring about structural change. Nor is inclusion the only issue at stake.

With this post, I want to consider other ways forward, with less defensive posturing. I want to ask, in all seriousness and openness: How do we meaningfully seek equity, decolonize, enable inclusion, foster diversity, and bring about change within established groups like SASLC? How can we move away from the mere rhetoric of diversity and inclusion to create a field that genuinely rests on equality? How can SASLC help to boost the voices of those scholars who are marginalized? How can the project and its foundations be used to create a future medieval studies that is better for all?

The Theory of SASLC

A brief history of the SASLC project is useful. It was founded by James Cross, Tom Hill, and Paul Szarmach–all three respected men in the field–who wanted to gather a team of scholars interested in extending the work of J. D. A. Ogilvy in his Books Known to the English, 597-1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). SASLC’s self-stated goal is (as it always has been) “to map the sources that influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England.” At the same time, the complementary project, Fontes Anglo-Saxonici (Fontes), was also begun in England. SASLC has continued, in various ways, publishing a number of volumes, with that same goal in mind, up to the present.

At its heart, as its name suggests, SASLC is a project rooted in source study. It is, in its most basic pursuit, a bibliographic undertaking, which seeks to provide encyclopedic knowledge about what has been said about the use of sources in Latin and Old English literature. As I’ve already stated, I believe that this work remains valuable to the field. SASLC provides an account of basic knowledge that allows for future studies.

Other implications arise from acknowledging these roots in source study. SASLC is driven by a methodological approach that places its theoretical basis in line with nineteenth-century developments in the field of “textual criticism”–concerned with philological and literary criticism. It’s important to note that such philological and source studies were (and, erroneously, sometimes still are) considered part of “scientific” endeavors.

There are, of course, relevant criticisms to the text-critical and philological underpinnings of source study. Certainly pretenses to “scientific” inquiry have lead to problematic, empiricist notions of positivism. Indeed, source study rests on its own methodological assumptions and, like all methodologies, is not immune to necessary reflections on its weaknesses as well as its benefits. Even J. R. R. Tolkien (a traditional philologist if there ever was one) criticized source study in his famous 1936 lecture on Beowulf.

What I mean to highlight with these reflections is an important point: this work is theoretically grounded. The methodological assumptions of source study rely on the foundational theories of textual critics (from the nineteenth century up to the present). Amid the many critical theories that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, it can be easy to lose sight of this fact when considering traditional approaches.

All scholarship is underpinned by theoretical foundations.

There are also associations, actual and perceived, between traditional modes of scholarship like source study and academic attitudes about them. Again, I might turn to assumptions that philological inquiry (and its outgrowths, such as source study) has remained the realm of white men, whereas inquiry with “critical theory” has emerged as the realm of those who identify as feminists, people of color, lgbtq+, etc.

Framing the conversation in these terms also establishes a binary that is harmful for all scholarship. In many ways, such a divided view of scholarship reifies the assumption that approaches must remain divided. (Beware tautology.) It creates the sense that some scholars must only be allowed to work in traditional methodologies while other scholars must only be allowed to incorporate critical theory. At root, such divides marginalize: distinctions marginalize those who are attracted to critical theory as well as those who find themselves benefiting from the whole range of methodologies.

Establishing binaries between methodologies (“traditional” and “theoretical”) also creates an erroneous picture of work of the field. Many scholars–contributors to Fontes and SASLC as well as many others–have found useful ways to bring together both source study and critical theory. In an important essay for the field of source study (originally given as the T. Northcote Toller Memorial Lecture at the University of Manchester in 1993), Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe[2] amply demonstrates how critical theory helps to address source study in new ways. She also points out that such questions were already present at the start of Fontes and SASLC, as Colin Chase considered them at the event that sparked both projects, the 1983 Symposium on the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture (proceedings published in 1986).

In all of this, SASLC is both a major contributor to source study and the basis of work that rests on its production of knowledge. But source study is not an end in itself. It also remains a valuable basis for work that embraces diverse voices and approaches both within the project and in the wider field. As such, it is a project that (like the rest of the field) needs to reflect on its methodologies at the same time that it invites new voices.

At the end of her essay, O’Brien O’Keeffe levels an argument that Anglo-Saxon studies is still attempting to come to terms with: “that these two sorts of discourses (the ‘documentary’ heuristic of source work and ‘post-modern’ critical analysis) are incommensurable, that they proceed from complementary presuppositions, but that they are both necessary for the development of the field when they are understood to work in conjunction.” This conjunction is the work that SASLC can enable, foster, and help to expand.

These same notions also point to the need for scholars of traditional approaches to lean into this conjunction. In other words, scholars who prefer traditional methodologies need to read and reflect on critical theories of gender and race, even if those theories do not directly inform their scholarship.

Source Representation Matters

There is also potential for emphasizing the global Middle Ages by way of considering representation in the realm of source study. After all, not all sources used in Anglo-Saxon England came from Western Europe. Many came from North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Similarly, the authors of these texts were not Western Europeans.

Apocrypha (one of my personal areas to study) provide abundant examples. Anglo-Saxon literature share parallels with extra-biblical texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, and Ethiopic. What are the global connections that precipitated these parallels? What do these connections reveal about the diversity of the medieval world, and Anglo-Saxon England within that larger context? We shouldn’t forget that even the Bible (both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament) was written by Middle Eastern authors under colonial rule, not the European Christians who later used it for their own imperialist aims. Here postcolonial theory could prove useful for examining sources as well as their long histories of transmission and reception. Exploring these subjects is certainly one way that the findings of SASLC can open new ways of considering “Global Perspectives.”

For more specific cases, we might consider three examples: Augustine of Hippo, Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, and Anglo-Saxon women in legal records.

As a patristic author (note the androcentrism even in that term), Augustine of Hippo (354-430) tends to be lumped into the category of old, white, male authorities (for more, see this book). And, given his legacy, this is fair. Certainly this is the way his legacy has been used by other white male authorities. Yet it is also easy to lose sight of the fact that Augustine was from North Africa, born in the Roman-Berber city of Thagaste, in present-day Algeria. His father was a Roman, and his mother was, most likely, a Berber. He likely grew up in an environment where he learned both his father’s and mother’s native languages, Latin and Berber. By the time of his birth, North African Berbers were already a multi-ethnic people group influenced by the diversity of the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean. This seems to have influenced his thinking later in life, as he identifies as North African, as he writes of “us Africans” and calls other North African figures “ours” as countrymen. Augustine’s identity was certainly multifaceted.

Theodore of Tarsus (602-90) was born in a region of present-day Turkey (for more, see this book). Incidentally, the year of his birth also brought about a twenty-six-year war between the Byzantine and Persian Sassanian empires in his own homeland. His childhood was filled with multi-ethnic encounters. He saw Greek and Persian cultures first-hand in Tarsus; he gained his education in Antioch and later in Constantinople; he learned Syrian culture, language, and literature; he saw the emerging culture and religion of Islam expand toward his home–possibly encountering Muslims in person; and he learned about Roman and Christian Latin literature while living in Rome. In 669, Theodore took this multiculturalism with him when he moved to England and became the archbishop of Canterbury. With him went his friend Hadrian (d.710), a North African (probably a Berber) who became abbot of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury.

Considering these brief biographies, it is significant that Augustine, Theodore, and Hadrian were multi-ethnic, multilingual, and arguably multiracial. Of course, we need to acknowledge that modern social constructs of race are not wholly applicable in these cases, but the ethnic diversity of such figures and the implications for global medieval studies matter. And yet, unfortunately, these points about Augustine and Theodore remain factual points in their biographies, not fully interrogated in larger contexts. Why have these details gone unexplored?

We can also consider the influences of Anglo-Saxon women on legal practices (following, for example, recent work by Andrew Rabin). We have little surviving literature penned by known or named Anglo-Saxon women–a product of a textual record dominated by men, which normalizes ideas of textual production by men. Yet SASLC’s stated goal of tracing “the sources that influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England” might also extend to considering how advocates like Queen Ælfthryth affected legal texts; or it might encompass how charters represent women like the “Peterborough Witch” or the noblewoman Wynflæd acting as litigants in legal cases. Scholars could pay more attention to Anglo-Saxon women who might be otherwise marginalized make their voices known through legal documents.

These are only a few specific examples, but many more abound. We could also consider the influence of Jewish authors like Philo and Josephus; Muslim influences like those on Offa’s imitation gold dinar with an Arabic inscription; the influences of various classical, patristic, and medieval texts on Anglo-Saxon attitudes about gender and race; or the many anonymous Latin and Old English texts that might have been written or influenced by women.

Highlighting such examples of premodern diversity matters for decentering narratives that often focus on traditional, normative subjects. They also undercut modern racist narratives by those who claim that diversity did not exist before the twentieth century.

SASLC (and Anglo-Saxon studies more widely) needs studies of people of color, women, and gender issues in Anglo-Saxon England; at the same time, it also needs scholars of color, feminist scholars, and lgbtq+ scholars working on the sources of Anglo-Saxon England. Beyond the specific goals of SASLC as a project, the larger field also needs studies that use bibliographical data about sources to create new narratives and theoretical examinations of the historical issues at stake.

Ways Forward

As we consider the future of our shifting field, we also need to reconsider the shifting roles of our established institutions and organizations. How we approach equity and equality is central to how we forge a new future for our field.

One way in which SASLC has already attempted to reconsider its shifting role in academia is its publishing model. Indeed, one of the main goals over the past few years has been to embrace a publication plan that includes open access. Issues of open access and equity go hand in hand (also see this post, especially the latter part). This point is especially apparent in an age of predatory publishing, for-profit companies taking advantage of scholars, and shady online repositories. But this is only one starting place.

Highlighting diversity is also key. This is part of our impetus for expanding the SASLC Editorial Board, which now includes a group of international scholars, both men and women, across a range of career stages.

Highlighting diversity within Anglo-Saxon culture is one way forward, but we also need to highlight diverse voices within Anglo-Saxon scholarship. As we put out a new call for members of the project, we invite the work of diverse scholars in contributing to the future of SASLC.

[1] I am happy to acknowledge two friends who have especially helped me by discussing and providing feedback on this post. With their perspectives as a queer woman and a queer trans man, both have provided significant criticisms, comments, and suggestions. While they wish to remain anonymous, I owe them immense gratitude. You know who you are, so thank you.

[2] I want to digress to note a fact related to the issues I’m discussing: I was rather disturbed to see on the Wikipedia page about the T. Northcote Toller Memorial Lecture that six “notable lecturers” are listed, but only one of them is a woman: Barbara Yorke. This case thus represents another problem of representation for Anglo-Saxon studies. Whereas a Wikipedia page like the one for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon Studies contains a list of every man who has held the position, the page for the Toller Memorial Lecture includes only a selection, which excludes all but one of the women who have had this distinction. Other women who have given the lecture include: Janet Bately, Roberta Frank, Joyce Hill, Audrey Meaney, and Joana Proud (whose lectures are published in this volume), as well as Leslie Webster (according to this site), Elaine Treharne (2005), and, most recently, Clare Lees (2016). I have been unable to find a full list online of those who have delivered the lecture to date (the common link cited loads only an error page), even by searching the University of Manchester website.

CFP: Preach It, Sister! A Roundtable about Women and Homiletics
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), May 10-13, 2018

Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary. From the Rupertsberger Codex Scivias.

For over ten years at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics (SSASH) has thrived in its aims to promote scholarship related to the sources, compositions, appropriations, and early studies of Anglo-Saxon homilies. In 2016, the session sponsored by SSASH gathered nearly 40 attendees, providing evidence for continued relevance and support. For a number of reasons, SSASH was unable to organize a panel for the 2017 Congress, although there was interest from several scholars in the proposed roundtable. The session proposed for 2018 seeks to continue this presence at the ICMS, as well as the vibrant scholarship and collaborative discussions that Anglo-Saxonists have come to expect from the Society.

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Janet Bately’s handlist titled Anonymous Old English Homilies: A Preliminary Bibliography of Source Studies (1993), which remains an invaluable resource in the field. Yet this publication is just one representative of how women have been integral to the study of Anglo-Saxon preaching. For example, we also continue to rely on foundational editions and studies by Dorothy Bethurum, Mary Clayton, Helen Foxhall Forbes, Mechthild Gretsch, Joyce Hill, Susan Irvine, Clare Lees, Joyce Tally Lionarons, Mary Swan, Elaine Treharne, Dorothy Whitelock, and Samantha Zacher. The past decade has brought about the publications of major books by women featuring sermons, such as Zacher’s Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (2009); Lionarons’s The Homiletic Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan (2010); Treharne’s Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (2012); and Forbes’s Heaven and Earth in Anglo‑Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith (2013). The proposed roundtable will feature reflections about the work of women on Anglo-Saxon homiletics, allowing for not only showcasing past scholarship but also a forum for lively discussion of future directions. At a time when the study of gender is at the foreground in Anglo-Saxon studies, this roundtable will provide an intervention in historiography meant to celebrate the legacy of women in the field.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to Brandon Hawk by September 15, 2017. For more general information about the ICMS, please visit the conference website here.

Depiction of Saint Matthew in an eight-century Irish Evangelary, Saint Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 51 (c.750), p. 2.

September 21 is the Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, in the Western church. With these titles, he’s most well known as one of Jesus’ twelve disciples in the gospels, and for his role as writer of his own Gospel. He’s also patron saint of accountants, bankers, tax collectors, perfumers, and civil servants–because he was a civil servant/tax collector for the Roman Empire before following Jesus.

In the early Christian and medieval periods, Matthew became associated with many other traditions about him. Some of these traditions are related to the most popular of apocryphal literature in Western Europe.

For example, in late antiquity Matthew’s name became attached to non-canonical gospels now known (by modern titles) as the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Unfortunately, these apocrypha survive only in fragments quoted by patristic authors; but it is clear that these are later compositions, from the second and third centuries.

Apparently early Christians who encountered such apocryphal texts believed them to have been written by Matthew in Hebrew for the emerging Jewish-Christian communities. In fact, this logic of attribution was related to the early belief that Matthew had written his (canonical) Gospel in Hebrew first, after which it was translated into Greek. Modern scholarship has largely set this claim aside, but it was a claim made popular by Christian authorities like Origen (184/5-253/4) and Jerome (347-420). These same ideas continued throughout the medieval period, as exegetes continued to associate Matthew with these works.

Later, in the early Middle Ages, Matthew’s name became attached to another apocryphon, known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (read more about my work on this work here). This attribution of authorship didn’t appear along with the composition of the work, however. Since this text was based on the earlier (second-century) Protevangelium of James, it likely circulated at first with a prologue naming the apostle James as the author (as is found in some manuscripts of Pseudo-Matthew).

Depiction of Saint Matthew in the Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk (Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Gen. 8; c.1340), fol. 14r, a work reliant on the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew for its narrative and images.

By about the year 800, the representative of the oldest version of Pseudo-Matthew (the A-text) had gained a set of prefatory materials linking it to Matthew as author. This prefatory material contains a series of letters forged as if by Jerome and Chromatius and Heliodorus, two bishops who acted as patrons. In the second letter, this “Jerome” responds to the bishops’ request to translate the apocryphon. He also claims that the gospel was written by Matthew in Hebrew, and passed it on only to the most religious men worthy of reading it.

Once these letters were added to Pseudo-Matthew in the manuscripts (from the ninth century onward), the association with Matthew as author became part of the tradition that followed the apocryphon in the medieval period. Later, an adaptation of Pseudo-Matthew known as the Nativity of Mary emerged, probably around the year 1000. This text also participated in the same tradition.

In a similar way, another letter forged in the name of Jerome circulated with the Nativity, perpetuating the same story about Matthew composing the source story in Hebrew. This letter states that, “it is said that the holy Evangelist Matthew composed the same little book sealed with Hebrew letters and placed it at the head of his gospel.” In other words, according to this letter, Pseudo-Matthew was supposed to act as a prequel to the canonical Gospel of Matthew.

As one of the four Evangelists, Matthew has remained a prominent figure in the Christian tradition. This was no less the case in the medieval period, which produced thousands of manuscripts containing the Gospel of Matthew. Yet Matthew’s name flourished as the author of not only this canonical gospel but also a host of other related works. Indeed, as medieval audiences knew him, Matthew’s legacy was as an author of other narratives that provided significant details about the lives of Mary and Jesus beyond the canonical Bible.

A while back, I had a twitter conversation about using network visualization tools online for studying the connections between medieval texts and manuscripts. After this exchange, I figured that others might be interested in seeing some of my work and, more specifically, how I went about it.

My main interests in network visualizations so far have been related to how texts circulate, what texts circulate together, and how this happens across different manuscripts. I’ve done the most work on network visualizations for my forthcoming book, Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England. But I’ve also done some for other projects, and I’m continuing to use this type of inquiry as I consider Old English preaching texts (homilies and sermons) beyond apocrypha. Angie Bennett Segler has done similar work with Piers Plowman and other texts that circulate with that poem, and she’s expanding that work in her Mapping Medieval English Manuscript Networks project.

An example of a visualization-in-progress of the network that I discuss in Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England (image created in Palladio): visualizing connections between Latin and Old English apocryphal texts and manuscripts from the Continent and England.

There are many possibilities for this type of corpus approach. Essentially, it means taking a set of data (sometimes “big data”) and using macroanalysis, or analysis from a bird’s-eye view. This type of approach allows us to see things beyond a single text, or even a single instantiation of a text. Yet it also poses possibilities for navigating between close and distant reading; a single text and its larger contexts; and the various media connections that spiral outward from one focal point to many other relations.

In my book, I address the more discursive and theoretical issues of thinking about transmission networks, as well as my own analytical and interpretive ideas about considering apocrypha and preaching with a network studies approach. But I don’t discuss the behind-the-scenes methodology as much as the payoff. In this post, I want to lay out the process I went through with my data and visualizations of apocrypha and the manuscripts containing them.

First, I’ll note at the start that I’ve used fairly accessible, open tools for my work. For data collection, curation, and organization, I’ve used Google Sheets, mainly because it was an easy platform for sharing my data with others who might want to use it. For network visualizations, I’ve used Palladio, created by Stanford’s Humanities + Design Research Lab. Other tools exist, such as the Gephi interface or coding with JSON. Palladio, however, offers a fairly easy, out-of-the-box tool for users who don’t have coding knowledge or prior experience. (Miriam Posner has written an especially helpful beginner’s tutorial; and Marten Düring has a more intensive lesson for historians.)  Palladio is also surprisingly versatile, since there are a number of ways to play with data-sets and to create different types of visualizations.

It’s important to acknowledge that this approach requires a lot of work behind the scenes, with collecting, organizing, editing, and curating data. Before even opening the Palladio website, a data-set needs to be created. For some projects, data may be collected or “scraped” from digital files, repositories, or websites. My own work has largely consisted of manual data collection.

For my projects, my interest has been with specific texts and the manuscripts in which they survive. Here you’ll find the data-set that I used for my book. Fortunately, for Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, I’m able to rely on recent catalogs and resources about manuscripts and their texts. As you can see from my data-set, I wanted to include data about the following:

Text titles for each apocryphon
Modern shelfmark for each manuscript
References to standard catalogs (NRK & ASM)
Date of creation for each manuscript (given as ranges)
Manuscript origin for each manuscript (definite, probable, likely, or possible)
Whether a manuscript is from England or the Continent (Eng/Cont)
Language of the text
Short title reference according to the Dictionary of Old English

So I turned to two of the most authoritative catalogs: Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge’s Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto, 2014); and Orietta Da Rold, Takako Kato, Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne’s The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (a wonderful resource available for free online). Putting all of my data together took a substantial amount of time. Creating data-sets is labor-intensive.

My main goal with visualization was to give a sense of how the various fields of my data-set relate to each other. I wanted to be able to visualize the relationships between texts and manuscripts based on shared content. For example, I wanted to be able to show how different vernacular and Latin versions of the Apocalypse of Thomas survive in seven manuscripts, and how those manuscripts are connected via common content (even beyond this apocalypse, in fact). Conversely, if organized or visualized differently, I wanted to show how the Blickling Book contains Old English versions of four apocryphal texts, and how that collection is related to other manuscripts with parallel content.

To visualize this data-set, I turned to Palladio. To use the data-set in this tool (as in most software), I needed to use a more universal file type, so I downloaded the Google Sheet into the Comma Separated Values (CSV) file format. Once I uploaded the file into Palladio, I was almost ready to go. But, first, needed to verify some bits like special characters, and I needed to tell Palladio to recognize most fields (except dates) as text.

Next, to visualize the relationships I wanted to highlight, I played around with a few options. What I settled on was to tell Palladio to use the “Apocrypha” field (text titles) as the source, and the “Manuscript” field (short shelfmarks) as the target. This made the title of each apocryphal text (e.g. Apocalypse of Thomas) a single node visualized as a dot (in network theory terms, a vertex), every manuscript a single node (again, a dot), and every link between texts and manuscripts a connecting line (in network theory terms, an edge). For clarity of the different types of items in the visualization (text or manuscript), I also experimented with the “highlight” option, to offset the colors of nodes from each other.

While I’m fairly happy with Palladio overall (it’s the most user-friendly option for network visualizations that I’ve used), I do have a few peeves that are worth mentioning here.Unless the data happens to come out looking just right, visualizations in Palladio need some massaging by users.  One issue is that the nodes do not remain in static place unless you physically move them, pinning them by doing so. Below is an example of the network visualized in Palladio without any modifications to make it more legible.

I spent quite a lot of time moving nodes around to optimize how the network was displayed, since there were so many connections and so much complexity.

(I also had a lot of back and forth with the press when we were preparing images of these visualizations for publication, as they had to be revisualized, nodes set back in place, and even touched up in photoshop to make everything legible for printing. Note that the images I’ve included in this post are not the re-visualized, edited, final versions as they’ll appear in the book; instead, I’m posting some versions of visualizations-in-progress.)

Given that the tool is supposed to help sort out that complexity, these issues pose potential frustrations. Nonetheless, like the creation of data-sets, these points remind us that there is a certain amount of humanness needed in digital humanities. This work includes labor that might never be seen or acknowledged by others.

After I had my network pretty well settled in place, I was able to use some of the other options built into Palladio. This was very helpful for how I wanted to show my data in different ways, depending on my focus. For example, in my book, I spend quite a bit of time talking about apocrypha in Latin collections from the Continent.

An example of a visualization-in-progress of the network that I discuss in Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England (image created in Palladio): visualizing Latin apocryphal texts in Continental manuscripts known to Anglo-Saxons (using the “facet”s feature in Palladio).

To visualize these connections, I was able to limit the data displayed in Palladio by field. In this case, I used the “facet” option to set up two limitations: one for Language and another for Eng/Cont–so I could limit the visualization to only the Latin texts in manuscripts from the Continent. From another perspective, I was able to use the same “facet” options to limit my visualization to only the Old English texts in manuscripts from England.

Both of these ways of displaying the data play into my overall arguments about how scholars approach the subject of apocrypha, limit our scope, and come to conclusions that often don’t account for the whole of the network. Limiting the data has its benefits in a tool like Palladio. So does being able to switch between facets that might intersect or reveal patterns in the data not otherwise obvious from a catalog or spreadsheet.

Of course, all of these visualizations also require more discursive discussion and analysis. What we do with the data is not only in visualizing but also in synthesizing and interpreting what it means.  All of this reminds us that complexity matters when using data.

One of the best parts of studying the medieval period is exploring the many idiosyncrasies of manuscripts. In fact, #medievaltwitter is great for this sort of fun, as medievalists post so many photos of manuscripts with strange elements.

I’ve been able to do a bit more sustained thinking about the pleasures of manuscript details while teaching a course on “Medieval Multimedia” for the last two semesters (first as a graduate seminar, now, reworked, as a senior seminar). This week, we read the article “‘It’s a Magical World’: The Page in Comics and Medieval Manuscripts” by Martha Rust (English Language Notes 46.2 (2008)), a nice reflection on the use of pages across older and newer media. As part of her argument, Rust discusses how a hole in a manuscript of a French romance makes meaning with the text that can be seen through it. This led me to consider other types of holes found in medieval manuscripts.

It’s not uncommon to find holes or similar flaws in parchment from the Middle Ages. After all, the possibility of holes from preparing a manuscript is one of the hazards of using parchment. All the flaying, soaking, rubbing, stretching, scraping, drying, and cutting of animal skin to get pages sometimes brought about unintended blemishes. (In addition to links below, see some other examples from Marjorie Housley here, some from Erik Kwakkel here and here, and some from Allie Newman here.) But medieval scribes found ways to deal with such gaps, sometimes with unexpected results.

One of my particular favorite manuscript holes is in a page of Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica in the fourteenth-century codex Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9, folios 31r-v. This particular page features not only a hole but also a decorative job to patch it up:

Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9 (14th century), folio 31r.

This example intrudes on a rubricated list of chapters and descriptions for the events in Exodus begun on folio 30v. Unlike the previous example, this hole doesn’t appear to be the result of flaws from preparation, since it’s cut somewhat symmetrically into something like a hexagon. Of course, it might be the case that this hole began as a blemish from the creation of this parchment and was later cut for some reason, maybe even for aesthetic sensibilities. In any case, the rainbow yarn embroidery touches it up with a nice flair.

This repair job, however, isn’t especially practical (see another, more utilitarian stitch-up job here) as much as decorative. Perhaps purposefully–or perhaps ironically, from our own perspective–this use of such colorful yarn draws attention to the hole. Even more, this isn’t the only decorated hole in this manuscript. According to the description by Charlotte Bretscher-Gisiger and Rudolf Gamper, this codex contains over 70 holes that have been similarly embroidered.

A sampling of other instances demonstrate a few of the ways that embroidered holes show up in this Aarau codex.

Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9 (14th century), folio 150r.

Some of these holes intrude on the text, as above, while others are only in the margins, as here:

Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9 (14th century), folio 67v.

These embroidered holes in the margin, however, cause us to pause. Why do some holes look cut while others are clearly accidents from preparation or later damage? Why were some holes embroidered while others weren’t? (I’ll return to these questions below.)

Another example is an even more curious instance, since it shows another hole that must have been cut out and sown up; but the thread was later removed except for a few traces:

Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9 (14th century), folio 209r.

One final example poses yet other questions, since this hole must have been cut after the text was written, and it was never repaired:

Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, WettF 9 (14th century), folio 136v.

Like so many of the holes in the Aarau manuscript, this one is clearly cut, deliberately defacing the text. Were other holes also deliberately cut not because of flaws already in the parchment but for other purposes?

One possibility is that, yes, various pieces were cut out deliberately. We might note that some of the cut outs are more like blocks of parchment while others are more slender strips. Judging from these shapes and sizes, it is likely that these cut out pieces were used in the bindings of other manuscripts.

Of course, repurposing from manuscripts was common practice in both the medieval and early modern periods. This is the case with palimpsests as well as many pieces of larger manuscripts that survive only in bindings or other uses as fragments. Perhaps this is the explanation for so many missing parts of this Aarau codex. But at least the pages were decorated in their loss.

Some of my readers might have seen when I took to Twitter yesterday for a rant about representations of the medieval period in pop culture. It began with a video game and ended with some arguments about needing more medievalists telling better stories for more audiences.

I want to offer an extended version of my reactions in this post. I also want to use this post as a way to connect these thoughts to my recent involvement in the the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (Triangle SCI) and my growing belief that medievalists need to be better public scholars. While I know that I’ve said some of this before, it’s worth saying again.

My frustration yesterday began with fascination. I happened to see a tweet by Ciaran Jones, who mentioned a video game that caught my interest:

There’s a PC video-game where you get to play as a clergyman, build a church, and get experience points for preaching to the town folk – all the while scheming and plotting to defeat rival families. #twitterstorians #phdchat #Reformation500 pic.twitter.com/tyKJWA1XQx

— Ciaran Jones (@Ciaran_Jonesy) November 20, 2017

For those who know me, it’s no surprise that this would widen my eyes and get my heart thumping a little faster. After all, I’ve spent much of my life and years of my academic career thinking about preaching. And I love some good intrigue and scheming.

Unfortunately, what I found when I looked into the game widened my eyes and got my heart thumping more in ire than out of interest.

It turns out that the game is titled The Guild II: Renaissance, and its setting is Western Europe in the fourteenth century. My first hesitation with the game was the title itself. For years medievalists and some early modernists have been raising red flags about the term “Renaissance” for a number of reasons, especially because of its origins in problematic ideologies in the nineteenth century. I could go on about the connection of this idea with notions of historical progress (teleological history), which are also bunk.

In short: the term “Renaissance” is deeply flawed and sets up a way of thinking about the Middle Ages with all sorts of problems. Using it unironically is already an indication of misrepresenting history.

But what really got me was the description of the game. As I quoted in my initial rant, here’s how the game creators set up the background to the game’s story:

For centuries Europe has been dominated by the church and nobility. On the shoulders of ordinary people the servants of god and the noble families justified their power and wealth. This was the incontrovertible, divine world order. A truly dark era…

This is where many medievalists find their pulses quickening. This whole description smacks of misconceptions about the medieval period. I could provide many references to articles, books, and online stories, but this piece by Matthew Gabriele hits the major points.

Foremost of the problems in the game’s description is the evocation of the concept of “The Dark Ages.” Medievalists keep addressing the misconception, but this zombie lie just keeps coming back as a terror. But it really is just wrong-headed. (See number 5 in Gabriele’s list.) The term, the ideas behind it, and evocations of these ideas continually hijack popular understandings about the Middle Ages.

Beyond the title and description, another insidious aspect of the game is what appears to be a thorough whitewashing of medieval people. Despite the game’s name and claims, the setting in fourteenth-century Europe is thoroughly medieval. But this is a fantasy Middle Ages, not a complicated, historical depiction. From the trailer and images of the game on Steam’s website, the characters all appear to be pretty white. Of course, there could be people of color in the game (full disclosure: I haven’t played it), but as far as I can tell none are featured in the promotional content.

There’s a dangerous aesthetic in this game that many pop culture depictions of the Middle Ages uphold. These kinds of misconceptions and representations allow white supremacists to gain a foothold to use medieval studies for their nefarious ends. And it’s no surprise that–as Dorothy Kim and Helen Young have discussed–these issues are also (like the idea of “The Renaissance”) linked to problematic nineteenth-century ideologies.

We can thank a whole host of medievalists for combating these types of misconceptions (I’d especially like to single out Medieval People of Color with this excellent Tumblr), and yet they persist. Zombie lies are hard to kill, and some perpetuate serious violence.

[Edit 11/22/17: Now you can also read more about some other “medieval” games on Steam in this post.]

So how do medievalists stop these types of misrepresentations of the Middle Ages?

This same question intersects with my participation in the Triangle SCI, which focused this year on the theme of “scholarly storytelling.” While there, I was part of a team considering storytelling for medievalists–a group we conceive of as including academics, para-academics, fans, aca-fans, practitioners, and the generally medieval-adjacent. I wrote about this project before (see the previous link), when the proposal was accepted, and in our time together we came up with solid plans to carry our project forward in exciting ways. We’ll have more to say sometime when we make a more formal announcement about it all, but we certainly have PLANS.

For now, I have just a few thoughts that I pose here as a type of prolegomenon for our hopes concerning public storytelling by medievalists.

It’s clear that we need to make medieval studies (in all of its many facets) relevant in new ways. As part of another Triangle SCI project team, Alyssa Arbuckle and Bonnie Stewart provided a bombshell of an article about making scholarship relevant through multimedia storytelling. There’s a certain resonance between my thinking and what they wrote: “we want to share narratives and story environments that invite diverse publics to participate in scholarship in action.” So much of this is applicable to what we need in medieval studies.

At the heart of our plans for medieval storytelling are still the pursuits that we described in our original proposal. As I said in my Twitter rant, we need better stories about the medieval period. Medievalists need to tell these stories ourselves, and we need to help other creators to tell the right stories across many media forms.

Medievalists need to tell stories that resist modern, teleological narratives about historical progress embedded in the idea of “The Renaissance.”

Medievalists need to tell stories that challenge misconceptions about the Middle Ages being driven by the church, the elite, or backward thinking.

Medievalists need to tell stories about what makes the Middle Ages so fascinating to us, to the interested, to anyone who encounters them.

Medievalists need to tell stories about the fundamental diversity of the global Middle Ages.

Medievalists need to tell stories that resist white supremacists.

Medievalists need to tell these stories because it’s our ethical responsibility. If we don’t do it, others will, and we might not like the stories we find.

This post is meant as a follow-up to my previous thoughts about medievalists telling medieval stories. In that piece, I begin by considering a video game and end with reflections on the larger implications for storytelling about the Middle Ages. After writing it, I got to thinking about other medieval video games, so decided to check some more out. Naturally, I went to see what’s offered on Steam.

There’s no surprise that searching by the keywords “medieval” and “Middle Ages” brings up quite a few hits (and some irrelevant results, as far as I can tell). I can’t go through the whole list, but here’s a selection of games released in 2017 that promise some sort of “medieval” experience–and notes on how they seem to represent the Middle Ages, at least on the surface.

Many of my criticisms are based on what claims each game seems to make about the medieval period as well as diversity (or lack thereof). These seem to be two of the biggest ways that misconceptions of the Middle Ages have taken over pop culture. Of course, these are knee-jerk reactions based on the content up front on each game’s page, including the trailer, screenshots, & description. So here we go.

“The Dark Ages” Fail

First, I’m going to lump a few games together under this single heading. All of these games have one thing in common: they prominently display the zombie lie of the medieval period as “The Dark Ages” and fail in doing so. (See number 5 in this piece for a good, brief take-down of the problem.) Here are the games in this category of cringe-worthiness:

Age of Darkness: With this name, I can’t even. Nope.

The Guild 3: This is a follow-up to the game I already addressed in my previous post, and it doesn’t portray the Middle Ages any better. Its description uses the same premise and failed description: “The dark middle ages, once dominated through nobles and clergy, ends and a new era begins: the age of the free cities of trading and of the free mind!” Nope.

Strategy & Tactics: Dark Ages: In addition to the failure of a name, the game goes for the dark theme, too, since it’s “set in the violent world of alternate Middle Ages.” Still, the game does capture a certain sense of the global Middle Ages, since it appears that players can build armies from figures who seemingly represent Europeans, Middle Easterners, Asians, and a range of races and character types. Unfortunately, we don’t have to read far into the description to find these non-Europeans referred to as “the exotic cults of the Mesopotamia.” Exoticizing and Orientalizing fail.

Hints Toward Complexity

Life is Feudal: This MMO game looks pretty. But it’s hard to tell how it fares for representation. Setting aside the problem history of the term “feudal,” the game seems to tap into the idea that the Middle Ages were, in the game description’s words, “unforgiving.” After all, the title itself puns on the homophonic pair “feudal” and “futile.” Eye rolls from the medievalists who know otherwise, though maybe it’s not that egregious. It seems mainly to evoke Northern Europe in its settings. It’s also very white. Perhaps a positive: I think I did see a woman warrior in the trailer (though she was pretty white & blond). The sword and sickle as a logo is a curious choice, since it’s pretty evocative of the famous Hammer and Sickle as a Communist symbol (see a discussion thread related to the game logo here); perhaps more could be said about this.

Armed Warrior VR: Having gotten medieval with virtual reality once, this looks fun. Given the development of VR games (from what I’ve seen), it’s not surprising that this game is mainly a weapons & battle game. As the description says, “With medieval fantasy background, users become medieval knights and adventure with various weapons.” These weapons are, for the most part, related to European varieties: swords and shields, bows and arrows, and catapults. Some have nice fantasy twists. And a few weapons (some arrows and catapult items) even feature explosives, presumably because of gunpowder–which was a medieval weapon developed in the East that spread West in the later Middle Ages. Players can also fight dragons with ranged weapons, which just seems like loads of fun in VR. But for all its fantasy claims, it’s hard to tell how imaginative the game is with diversity: the trailer shows the ability to choose gender, but nothing other than whiteness.

Swords and Sandals Medieval: Like others in the Swords and Sandals series, this is a pretty straightforward cartoonish, turn-based combat RPG. The description poses it as a pretty light-hearted game: “In Swords and Sandals Medieval you start as a peasant and turn him into one of the greatest knights in the realm. You will fight other knights, from a distance and up close using melee weapons, joust, go on quests and get into to all sorts of chivalrous mischief and adventure.” In a surprisingly nice turn of events, a few of the screenshots (like the one displayed here) indicate more racial diversity than we usually see, even if all the knights pictured are guys.

What These Games Tell Us

Finally, just a few reflections emerge from these examples. One is that there are layers at work in these games. Some of my criticisms address issues only on the surface, while more complexity emerges with more exploration. In other instances, some of the criticisms are related to deeper aspects of story, setting, gameplay, characters, and more.

It also comes out that the sensationalism of the alterity of the medieval period as dark, violent, ruthless, and completely foreign is also part of what is expected to sell these types of games. Whether this view is true or not is somewhat a sideline. Games creators think this sells.

That last point is significant in relation to my call for more medievalists telling better stories for the public. Perhaps the sensationalism and alterity of the Middle Ages does sell. But we also need to show the public other ways of telling medieval stories. And we need to show the public that other medieval stories can also be popular and successful in their own ways.

Many untold medieval stories have great potential to grab popular imaginations. We need to tell those stories so that they begin to shift the types of medieval stories told in popular media.

A little more than a week ago, the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature was held in Boston (November 18-21), and I’ve seen several posts in the last week about it. I’ve never been to the SBL, but I follow the conference and hope to attend at some point because of my continued work on the transmission and reception of biblical and apocryphal media in the medieval period. This year, I had hoped to attend a reception by the Enoch Seminar for the release of a Festschrift in honor of Michael Stone since I have an article in the volume, but even that proved too difficult.

I am glad to see that more people are beginning to write reflections after the event. Like live-tweeting at conferences, post-conference write-ups allow others (like me) to feel more connected with the field. In this post, I want to respond to a few of the pieces that I’ve seen concerning the study of what I want to call “biblical apocrypha.”

For me, the most compelling post-SBL write-ups are David Brakke’s guest post on Tony Burke’s site; Burke’s final post in his 2017 SBL Diary (day 1, day 2, day 3); and Philip Jenkins’s related post on his Patheos blog. All three of these come out of a review panel for a publication edited by Burke and Brent Landau, New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2016). This is the first in the More New Testament Apocrypha series (MNTA), with more to follow in the coming years. These post-SBL remarks are valuable, provocative reflections on the subject that have sparked my own thinking about issues I’ve been mulling for years.[*]

While I won’t respond to everything Burke, Brakke, and Jenkins say, and certainly not systematically, there are a few points worth noting first. All three authors discuss both the terminology and scope of the field and their relevance to an anthology like Burke and Landau’s. For example, what do we call non-canonical, extra-biblical texts about biblical subjects? How does the standard terminology of the field perpetuate problematic views? What is the chronological range of texts included in this corpus? How are the pursuits of such texts related to early Christianity, the history of Christianity, or even larger aims? Each author offers some tentative answers, and here I want to consider some others, from my own perspective as a medievalist.

The term “biblical apocrypha” is a fraught one, and it’s my own deliberate choice to use it as broadly encompassing. The same subject has been subsumed under similar but different and interrelated terms like “Jewish pseudepigrapha” and “Christian apocrypha,” “Old Testament pseudepigrapha” and “New Testament apocrypha,” or, as in Jenkins’s view, “Alternative [Jewish and/or Christian] Scriptures.”

None of these terms are neutral, and all of them are fraught with ideology. Here, I want to clarify that I use the term “biblical apocrypha” to encompass the wide variety of non-canonical texts written about or purported to be written by figures of the Bible, about biblical subjects, or biblical-adjacent in their content. Such apocryphal works are those outside of the Bible as an authoritative collection, however a specific community defines that. Of course, definitions of the biblical canon and apocrypha are, at the start, necessarily fluid, as different textual communities include different texts anyway.

It’s my hope that a less restrictive, definitive, or categorical term like “biblical apocrypha” helps to elide some of the distinctions that are often imposed on such literature. For example, in scholarship and the posts I’ve already referred to, it’s obvious that any clear splits between “Old Testament pseudepigraph” and “New Testament apocrypha” or “Jewish” and “Christian” are modern, problematic, and wholly constructed. Many Jewish texts are transmitted in Christianized forms, and many Christian texts are certainly bound up with Judaism. Indeed, the earliest Christian authors (Paul and others) identified as Jewish themselves, and surely that’s the case for certain authors of apocrypha.

The distinction or elision of terminology is made all the more pronounced for medievalists. After all, medieval authors often didn’t distinguish or create new terminology. The term “apocrypha” was used widely to mean any text related to the Bible but clearly (from that specific author’s perspective) outside of the boundaries of the canon. In this sense, there were no distinctions between origins in Judaism or Christianity (mainly knowable from modern textual criticism), notions like “pseudepigrapha” and “apocrypha,” or content related to the so-called “Old Testament” or “New Testament.” These sub-categories and their assumptions arose only in modern scholarship, for good or ill.

That last point brings up another distinction that I find significant: I write all of this as a medievalist, not as a scholar of the early Judaism or early Christianity. While I have had a fair share of training in biblical studies and the field of late antiquity, I do not share the same perspective as scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity. Arguably, many scholars within these sub-fields also do not share the same perspectives.

My own scope of work is focused more on the Middle Ages than the late antique world. And I believe that there is value in how medieval studies can speak back to other scholars of apocrypha.

I’m personally glad that more scholars of apocrypha (on various sides of the modern, disciplinary OT/NT divisions) are opening their embrace of medieval texts. This is true of Burke and Landau in the MNTA volumes, other scholars I’ve worked with, like Lorenzo DiTommaso, and the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature more generally. And, of course, Jenkins himself is no stranger to medieval apocrypha, as he discusses them in his book The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

One example I might pose for some useful reflections is a text that I’ve translated as a contribution to volume 2 of the MNTA series, a medieval Latin text known as the Life of Judas. This text relates a brief, moralized biography for Judas leading up to his role as a disciple: in an Oedipal twist of fate based on his parents’ knowledge of a dark prophecy for his life, Judas is orphaned, unknowingly kills his father, marries his mother, and flees in penance after he discovers these sins.

The earliest version of the Latin Life of Judas, in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14489 (ca.1160–ca.1170), fols. 109v-110r. Image courtesy of Gallica.

The Life of Judas survives in a handful of versions, both prose and poetry, but the earliest, simplest version is likely from the twelfth century. While there is no other, earlier text like this, a handful of Greek versions in late (16th/17th-century) manuscripts show affinities to the Latin versions, although the relationships are far from clear. Which came first, the Latin or the Greek? Pursuing the question likely brings as many headaches as chickens and eggs.

This particular Judas apocryphon is instructive, however, for demonstrating the issues of scope that scholars of apocrypha often face. While it doesn’t shed any light on early Christian belief, it does reveal intriguing notions about medieval Christians. For instance, it seems likely (as I argue in a forthcoming article) that it has close connections to contemporary preaching collections with exempla. Preaching and apocrypha during the medieval period especially have a longer history of interconnectedness, especially in England. The case of the Life of Judas seems to be one more part to fit into more general historical trends.

As Brakke, Burke, and Jenkins all note, there is much value to considering such cases as we more fully develop a better sense of the history of Christianity over time. All three authors also, in their own ways, ask: How much is “more”? The Middle Ages has even more to offer beyond what might be known, even to medievalists. I say bring on the “more.”

The Life of Judas is just one example of many medieval apocrypha that I might pose. Another example I’ve personally worked on is the Fifteen Signs before Doomsday, probably from the ninth or tenth century. This list of wonders on the fifteen days leading up to the Last Judgment is in many versions purported to have been found by Jerome in Jewish chronicles. Yet, despite the claims to antiquity and a connection to Judaism, there is nothing to substantiate them. It is, in fact, a thoroughly Christian eschatological text. Still, it does bear the influence of many apocalyptica, from the biblical prophets to early Jewish, early Christian, and medieval apocalypses.

I propose that medieval apocrypha are useful not only because they extend the field of study from late antiquity forward but also because they further challenge issues at the heart of the study of apocrypha. Medieval apocrypha muddy the waters and complicate our understandings. And scholars love complication. Even when they prove frustrating, such complexities drive us to reconsider our subjects in new ways that push knowledge beyond comfortable expectations.

I suggest that expanding our definitions, scope, and examinations reveal whole new ways of pursuing the study of biblical apocrypha. Surely medieval media can only add to the growing storehouse of subjects and scholarship on biblical apocrypha.

[*] A side-note that should be more than a note, but here it is nonetheless: I am aware that we’re all four white men (Brakke, Burke, Jenkins, and I), and the field of biblical and apocryphal studies (broadly defined) tends to be a pretty traditional field, so I want to pause here to acknowledge these issues, especially in light of recent, important discussions about gender, race, and diversity in medieval studies, classical studies, and biblical studies–among other fields. For those interested, I highly recommend the cluster of essays regarding the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife recently published in Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha, Proceedings from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium, ed. Tony Burke (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), especially the contributions by Caroline T. Schroeder (here’s a pre-publication draft) and Janet E. Spittler.

Since seeing Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, I can’t stop thinking about the books we see in the Jedi library on Ahch-To. To be honest, my mind was already going before seeing the movie, since the books stood out in the trailer. I wrote about them over on Forces of Geek based on what we see in the movie, but I still have more to say about them.

Phil Szostak reveals much more about those books in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and it turns out that I have more to say about them, too. Tumblr user Cassiopeia has an excellent post about further details of the Jedi scriptures featured in Szostak’s artbook. (It’s also worth checking out her other Star Wars content.) She discusses the script, manuscript, some illustrations, and a host of speculations about what they all reveal. Building on Cassiopeia’s post, as well as my own examination of the artbook, this is a follow-up on a current obsession (ahem) research interest.

[If you haven’t seen The Last Jedi yet, you might want to stop reading: there are some minor spoilers for the movie.]

Of Books and Their Pages

Szostak’s artbook for The Last Jedi contains three pages of interest to bibliophile Star Wars fans (61-63). All three offer beautiful spreads of concept art. (I include photos of just a few features.) The first page contains images of the “Tree Library” by Seth Engstrom and Rodolfo Damaggio. The next page includes more specific views of the “Book Nook” by Engstrom and mock-ups of four Jedi books by James Carson.

Given the numbering of these images (01, 04, 06, and 07), it confirms that there are at least seven Jedi manuscripts, as shown on the shelf in the movie.

Finally, the artbook contains a full-page spread of mock-ups for six pages from the Jedi books by Chris Kitisakkul.

In my previous article, I linked the Jedi books to the Middle Ages with the idea that the codex is a thoroughly medieval technological medium. Concept art of pages from the Jedi books confirms those connections as well as presents new ways to extend my argument.

Most obviously, these Jedi texts are handwritten in the same way that medieval manuscripts were. This is the basic meaning of the medieval Latin term manuscript, a compound of the words manus (hand) and scriptus (written, from scribo). Before the advent of the printing press with movable type in the fifteenth century (and even competing alongside it), handwriting was the dominant means of textual communication in medieval Europe–a means that continues to persist even now that digital media has become dominant.

The written texts might contain even more content of the images, but we would need translation–if it’s even a coherent language. In that case, it makes most sense for the text to represent some version of the common verbal system of Star Wars, Galactic Basic Standard–perhaps a cursive type of Aurebesh script (or maybe it’s meant to be an archaic handwritten form). This written form of the galactic language has appeared in many different uses throughout the films. Figuring out what the texts on these pages say is beyond me at this point, though. And it’s likely that Cassiopeia is right in her assessment that it’s not “meant to be deciphered anyway.”

Looking to the Heavens

Most of the content in these Jedi pages is astronomical of some sort. Medieval analogues to the images aren’t hard to find, since astronomy was widespread in the Middle Ages. This area of medieval learning is sometimes more like what we might call astrology, as science and belief merged. It’s also worth noting that science and religion often went hand in hand in medieval astronomy. This is a notable comparison with the Jedi religion in Star Wars, as it encompasses both the Force and study of cosmology.

Just a few examples of astronomical lore in medieval manuscripts are relevant, mainly from Western European Latin works.

I’ve written about the works of Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) as an example of medieval media, and part of his significance is in transmitting classical scientific knowledge to European scholars in the Middle Ages. As previously featured, one telling example is a detail of Isidore’s section “On the heavens” (“De caelo”) from De natura rerum (a compendium of learning “On the Nature of Things”) in Zofingen, Stadtbibliothek, Pa 32  (9th century), folio 62r.

This particular chart shows the heavens as medieval people understood them, in a geocentric model of the universe. The earth rests at the center, while the various outer portions represent the changing of the seasons in the rotation of the heavens around it.

Plenty of other astronomical manuscripts also exist from the medieval period. Many are indebted to Isidore’s works, although later authors and compilers continued to build on his knowledge. For example, in a late-ninth-century astronomical-computational encyclopedia in St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 250, page 23 contains a related map of the heavens.

This image depicts another geocentric model: the earth (Terra) in the center, surrounded by the orbits of the sun and moon, with various constellations around the outer rim.

Another astronomical collection appears in Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F.III.25, compiled in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Several diagrams may be used as analogues to the Jedi texts. One particularly striking chart, much more technical than those already shown, appears on folio 29r.

Again, the depiction is of a geocentric model, but it also represents the seasons and positions of constellations relative to the earth. This chart is also more mathematically sophisticated, as it includes numerical information about these astronomical positions.

Illustration from an astronomical treatise by Persian polymath Al-Biruni (973-1048), explaining the phases of the moon.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Western Europeans began to encounter the transmission of Arabic science from the East. The image to the right is one example of such learning–again, an apt analogue for the phases of the moon depicted on one page of the Jedi scriptures. As Latin translations flourished and knowledge spread, it continued to change astronomical science as represented by Isidore and his successors. This manuscript from Basel likely demonstrates those developments. Even more, this depiction of the heavens also demonstrates intriguing affinities with the star chars in the Jedi texts.

In all of these examples, the analogues occur not only in the images as diagrams (visual components) but also the textual annotations (verbal components). We see necessary associations between text and image in both the Jedi scriptures and the medieval astronomical works. Indeed, links between verbal and visual elements might be considered definitive features of medieval multimedia.

Illuminating the Jedi

Illuminated incipit from a twelfth-century Quran, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.556, folio 4b.

Other than astronomical knowledge, there are even more links to explore between medieval manuscripts and the Jedi texts in The Last Jedi.

In some ways, the Jedi pages resemble Arabic manuscripts. Although these are not my specialization (so there’s a caveat), a few parallels stand out. As Cassiopeia notes about the script, “it’s relatively thick and kind of blocky,” which is reminiscent of the oldest form of Arabic calligraphy, known as Kufic. In addition to the type of script seen in the Quran to the left, the folio also presents a kind of decoration at the top that may be seen as a parallel to the golden borders of the Jedi scripture pages.

One feature of the Jedi texts parallel to Arabic is the writing of words over top of colored backgrounds, known as illuminated script. Examples appear in manuscripts like the fifteenth-century Quran in Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.562, folio 2b.

Here the illuminated Arabic writing is used for the title of surah (chapter) 78 of the Quran. Of course, decorated initials of individual letters exist in Western European manuscripts, but more Arabic manuscripts contain extended writing within illuminated panels like these. A similar type of illuminated script is especially pronounced in the Jedi texts on the last page (without any drawings). A few other initials and smaller units of writing appear on the other pages, too.

In a related way, but more generally than my previous points, the last page of the Jedi scriptures resembles incipit pages. These types of pages appear in medieval manuscripts from both East and West, in many different forms and layouts. Common elements include flares like decorative borders, illuminated initials or words, and high-grade display script. All of these features prominently signal the start of a new section or major part of the manuscript. The above folios from Quranic manuscripts give examples of incipit pages from the Muslim world. Another famous example, from Western Europe, is the opening of the Gospel of Matthew in the eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D., folio 27r).

A Final Speculation

One final note about the Jedi manuscripts rests on another piece of lore about a scene in the movie: the chant that Rey hears from the tree library. In an article on Slashfilm, Matthew Wood and Ren Klyce, sound supervisors for The Last Jedi, provide more insights into the scene. Apparently the chant comes from the Jedi Code, found in works from the expanded universe of Star Wars Legends. This Code says:

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.

As Wood and Klyce reveal, these mantras gave way to the words Rey hears. Even more telling, Klyce says, “It’s like the book is speaking.”

Medieval sacred chants were also prevalent, yet another way that books spoke in the medieval period. After all, chants were needed for Christian worship in monasteries and churches throughout Europe. The example above is for the Ferial Office, from a two-volume breviary composed in Notre Dame, Paris, around 1300, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 15181, folio 11r.

Perhaps this type of chant for the Jedi Code is meant to be represented in the last page of the Jedi scriptures seen in the artbook. With such an illuminated incipit page, it’s certainly the sort of text we would expect.

In the Star Wars galaxy, filled with spaceships and laser swords, a world of computers created for hyperspace jumps, the appearance of books holds special meaning. In The Last Jedi, the manuscript is an old technology made new. Just as medieval manuscripts have continued to hold the attention of those who have encountered them over the centuries, the Jedi books will surely continue to hold the fascination of Star Wars fans.

The recent launch of Parker Library on the Web to the public via a new platform signals big news for medieval studies at the start of 2018. This 10th-anniversary upgrade to 2.0 brings with it compatibility with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and a Creative-Commons Non-Commercial License, so images and other data are available to use and download for free.

Parker on the Web’s new platform and license herald major shifts for those who specialize in medieval England. The Parker Library boasts one of the most significant collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts written in Latin and Old English as well as impressive holdings in Middle English and Anglo-Norman literature. Open access to those manuscripts means greater opportunities for research and teaching.

Good news about Parker on the Web’s commitment to open access also prompts consideration of access to resources more generally–for medieval studies and more generally. The moment is right to assess issues of access, power, and equity with scholarly resources in the digital age.

Of Paywalls & Power

It’s a matter of pride for many medievalists that scholars of the Middle Ages engineered some of the earliest digital humanities projects like the Index Thomisticus. Still, some of the most useful resources in the field remain closed behind expensive paywalls. Some notable, high-profile instances include Brepols databases like the International Medieval Bibliography, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS), and Latin Library of Texts, as well as Chadwyck-Healey/Proquest databases like the Patrologia Latina and Early English Books Online.

Additional subscription-based resources online could be mentioned, maintained by commercial publishers, non-profit presses, institutions of higher education, or other well-meaning organizations. Excellent projects with paywalls exist, and many necessarily follow subscription models to fund inevitable costs. Indeed, this was the case for Parker Library on the Web for ten years before its 2.0 launch. Not all paywalls are based on commercial desires for profit. They do limit access to the privileged nonetheless.

At the heart of such considerations lie questions about access, control, and equity. As I’ve previously written:

Issues of open access and equity go hand in hand (also see this post, especially the latter part). This point is especially apparent in an age of predatory publishing, for-profit companies taking advantage of scholars, and shady online repositories.

Yet commercial publishers still hold the reins, and that situation has serious implications for equity in access.

Many individuals and institutions lack the ability to pay steep fees to maintain subscriptions to commercial databases. In the economic recession of the past 10 years, and with subsequent budget cuts to libraries, the ability to pay for expensive subscriptions has only decreased.

Problems with reconciling library acquisitions between these cuts and rising subscription rates affect not only smaller institutions but also large research universities–as well as students and teachers across the world of higher education.

Individuals rarely have much say in institutional budgetary decisions, and access to subscription-based resources is even less possible for contingent and independent scholars. Closed access models perpetuate hierarchies (individual and institutional), marginalization, and the contingent precariat of academia made up of graduate students, adjunct faculty, alt-ac staff, and others. Access in a world of subscriptions corresponds to privilege.

A striking case that brings these considerations into focus was the scholarly fervor that erupted around the 2015 #ProQuestGate. When members of the Renaissance Society of America were told that they would lose members’ access to the ProQuest EEBO database, outcry was strong. The controversy prompted reflection on the state of resources and the role of commercial publishers in relation to open-access equity. For many, it was a sobering reminder of who controls access and holds power over academic resources.

The irony, of course, is that in many cases commercial publishers only hold rights to their specific platforms, since the contents of databases often predate modern copyright and related intellectual rights issues by hundreds (or even thousands) of years.

Equity in Access

Not all news is dire, though.

Some projects have opened the gates to offer fresh paths toward equity in access. Even open-access alternatives to databases already mentioned exist. Logeion, for example, provides searches of multiple indispensable Latin and Greek dictionaries like DMLBS. Similarly, the Corpus Corporum provides a searchable database of much of the text of the Patrologia Latina.

Non-profit publishers also pose new opportunities for those seeking equity in access. Presses with interests in medieval studies like punctum books and journals like Digital Medievalist and Interfaces have shown the possibilities of publishing traditional and non-traditional types of scholarship with open-access licenses and hybrid models. The Medieval Academy of America has recently experimented with an open-access supplement to its flagship journal Speculum (available to members and subscribers). These shifts are evidence of larger trends toward open-access publishing in the humanities.

The Parker Library on the Web joins a host of institutions and projects offering public access to digitized medieval manuscripts online, and many of them have open-access licenses. For the first time ever, the general public now has free access to manuscripts containing a thirteenth-century manual for female anchorites known as the Ancrene Wisse; fantastical apocrypha about Jesus’ life like the Gospel of Nicodemus and Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; an account of the trial of Joan of Arc; and Muslim works like a Quran and theological treatises by Arabic scholars. Such witnesses demonstrate the fundamental diversity of the global Middle Ages.

Pointing toward open access as the way of progress is certainly nothing new. Neither is decrying subscription-based models by for-profit commercial publishers. In some ways, the latter is standard fare in critiques about higher education in relation to neoliberalism and late capitalism. Open access, however, is not a savior for academic publishing: there are serious advantages and disadvantages to consider in any model. There’s certainly room for reconsidering the author-pay model of open access. Yet dwelling on these critiques (however warranted) can also foment certain types of apocalyptic rhetoric with little hope.

Instead, I want to gesture toward open-access resources as integral to how we tell stories for the public. This is, in many ways, one of our duties to make scholarship more relevant, and it is deeply connected with equity in access.

Those interested in telling stories for the public need to be interested in equity. After all, telling stories about the past is much more difficult when access to sources is closed, controlled, and only available to those at the top of a hierarchy. Stories don’t belong only to the privileged.

Equity matters in terms of how we access the very materials of the past. This is as true for academics as it is for the public. Academics without access to specialized resources like Brepols and Proquest databases also lack access to those caches of stories to tell the public. At a time when so much of academia faces the need to diversify and decolonize, the hoarding of resources by commercial publishers poses a major obstacle.

Many are already concerned with equity in access, especially as they relate to representations of the past. As the problems of white supremacists’ love of the medieval period has recently been thrust into the spotlight, it’s increasingly clear that representation in stories about the Middle Ages certainly matters. It should be obvious that this problem isn’t unique to medieval studies. In the desire to tell better stories for the public, equity in access promotes better representation.

Beginning of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 288, fol. 65v.

There’s no doubt that some of the most successful medievalists at reaching the public are those who offer engagement with sources drawn straight from the Middle Ages. For example, Chaucer Doth Tweet, Erik Kwakkel, Emily Steiner, and the Medieval People of Color activist present medieval languages, manuscripts, and art to thousands of eager followers. Their examples rest on open-access sources, and their engagement would be much more difficult without access to those sources in the first place.

As may be seen from the above examples, manuscripts of the Parker Library testify to the wide array of stories about medieval people, authors, readers, and books that circulated throughout the Middle Ages. Hopefully more projects will also open their repositories via open-access licenses in the future. After all, many more storehouses hold untold stories that need to be released.

This semester I’m teaching a History of the English Language course, and it’s offering no end to delights in my life. I taught a HEL course only once before, as a two-semester grad seminar, with about 10 students. My course this semester is a 400-level undergraduate class with 22 students. So this time around is very different.

Last week, we started looking at sample texts in Old English. My goal was to show students an actual text, play a recording of it to get them used to the sounds, and talk through some of the features that they noticed together, as a way to show them the continuities and discontinuities between Old and Present Day English. So I pulled out the first several sections of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, with a facing translation (you can see the version I used here, which is not my own).

Students identified a number of features that they picked up on right away. Along the way, they commented on the tricks that reading aloud open up, like differences in the look of words, but similarities in sounds; some words that have remained relatively the same in spelling and function; and plenty of things that raise questions for those who have never delved into Old English before.

One of my favorite excursions during the class was when a student asked about the word “antecrist” (“Antichrist”) in the text. Here’s the passage, with the translation I provided:

(2) & þy hit is on worolde aa swa leng swa wyrse, & swa hit sceal nyde for folces synnan fram dæge to dæge, ær antecristes tocyme, yfelian swyþe.

(2) And therefore things in this world go ever the longer the worse, and so it must needs be that things quickly worsen, on account of people’s sinning from day to day, before the coming of Antichrist.

Off we went. This word in this text, it turns out, offers a number of interesting ways into thinking about Old English and the broader history of the language.

Thanks to my student Lauren Cloutier for taking this photo of the board after our excursion.

A primary feature that one student was quick to point out is the spelling. Considering Latin (which he studied in high school), he wondered why it’s spelled “ante” (before, as he said) and not the expected “anti” (against). I noted briefly that this had to do with dialect, but that we had more work to do before we could tackle that. Through a series of questions, I led them through the etymology of the word, from Greek to Latin, with a digression on the chi-rho, to the importation of the term into Old English as a loanword.

Tracing the roots of the word also allowed us to tackle the differences of inflectional suffixes in different languages (which we had already discussed in relation to Old English). The moves from Greek to Latin to Old English that the word took also necessitated a shift in how the word would be used in each language. Most notably, this meant dropping the Latin -us for a subject and replacing it with the necessary Old English inflectional ending. So we were staring at the -es inflection of the word, not a Latin inflection held over. That led us to figuring out what that particular inflection indicated in this grammatical instance (it’s the genitive case), and how to parse the functional grammar of something like a genitive that indicates a possessive sense.

And here’s where my student’s observation of the ante-/anti- spelling came up again. Just like the change to the inflectional ending from one language into a new system, and for each new grammatical context, the spelling also had shifted. This has to do with dialect instead of grammar.

Here’s what I argued I think happened. In this case, the word Antichrist was no longer understood as a loanword by the scribe of this text when he wrote it down. The term had become embedded in his language to the point that dialect became apparent in this instance. In other words, the originally Latin term Antichrist was, in the scribe’s mental framework, just like any other word in the Old English language at the time. Antichrist was part of his mental furniture like other vocabulary.

From this argument, what seems intriguing to me is that the scribe handled writing it down like he would any other word in his head: as it would be pronounced in his own dialect. He spelled it out, as Anglo-Saxon scribes did, as it sounded to him. And this necessitated a change from the received Latin form Antichrist to the variant here, antecrist.

This particular instance of the word antecrist, then, is a fascinating example of language for a few reasons. First, it shows how loanwords work, which is a major feature of English across the centuries. It also offers an example of dialect and phonology winning out over any notion of standard spelling, which didn’t come into play until centuries later.

Even more, the word is most compelling to me because it demonstrates how a word can be borrowed into a language, accepted into someone’s basic mental categories, and then conforms to the general uses of any linguistic feature. And this is one of the most fascinating parts about studying language as a window onto the human past.

Call for papers: Panel and Roundtable at the North American Conference on British Studies, Providence, Rhode Island, October 25-28, 2018

Decolonizing (Medieval) Historiography

Since before Albion was folded into Journal of British Studies, scholars of Britain’s medieval past have struggled to find a place within the field of British Studies. Surely our time has come. Today, England’s medieval colonial history is widely recognized. At the same time, scholars from literature, Iberian Studies, Art History, and other disciplines explore links between medieval England and west and north Africa, the Levant, and beyond. These interactions predate the period of British global colonialism and provided a cultural foundation for it. Scholars even consider the medieval past as having been colonized by more recent history: the English notion of the medieval was invented in direct connection with the legal construction of the Indian subaltern. The British Empire deliberately rooted itself in its medieval past, and created cultural, social, and legal narratives based on the story it told of its own history.

In short, perhaps the wider field of British Studies needs to reconsider scholars of its medieval past and the work that we do, as we actively labor to decolonize its very historiography, and begin to imagine a new, inclusive future for the field.

We seek presentations from scholars in any discipline who consider medieval British historiography and the roles colonialism plays within it. We also welcome scholars crafting this new historiography, who consider concepts like the global Middle Ages, periodization, medieval diversity, medieval studies as medievalism, modern medievalism, and modern appropriations of the Middle Ages.

Some possible questions:

How does the historiography of British studies fit into the broader endeavors of medieval studies, and related fields beyond that focus?

What is the broad scope of “British studies” and how can we engage with those who work outside of traditionally defined fields around this concept?

How can we link the historiography of medieval British studies and the wider, global Middle Ages?

What is the role of colonialism in medieval British historiography and how can we address it?

How might we redefine “the Middle Ages” as an object of study, and “medieval studies” as a field?

How might we reconsider periodization in light of colonial appropriations of the Middle Ages?

How might we consider “medieval studies” and “medievalism” in more sustained, critical ways?

We hope to host both a panel of papers and a discussion-oriented roundtable at NACBS. Please send abstracts (250-300 words) for papers or roundtable presentations by March 23 to Brandon Hawk, at bhawk AT ric.edu and Kathleen E. Kennedy at kek16 AT psu.edu.

My article on “The Fifteen Signs before Judgment in Anglo-Saxon England: A Reassessment” is set to appear in JEGP later this year, after several years of working on the piece on and off. As I’ve mentioned before, the Fifteen Signs legend fascinates me, and I’ve revisited it at different times since I first came across it in graduate school. This article includes my work on the apocryphon so far, presenting new approaches that shift our understanding of the early transmission of the text.

Below I provide my introduction to the article (without accompanying notes) and an outline of the following sections.

The Fifteen Signs before Judgment (XV signa ante diem iudicii) presents a list of omens that are expected to occur on each of the fifteen days preceding the Last Judgment. Several versions of the text are known, each distinguished by the specific signs included and the order in which they appear. Early examples tend to be relatively short, while later examples (particularly those composed in vernacular languages) are sometimes adapted with lengthy expansions. Although the Fifteen Signs has been studied since the nineteenth century, William W. Heist’s 1952 monograph was the first to explore the full range of evidence known at the time, and subsequent scholarship largely rests on this work. According to Heist, the tradition of the Fifteen Signs legend ultimately derives from the sequence of seven signs on seven days before Judgment in the Apocalypse of Thomas, which was composed sometime between the fourth and fifth centuries. The earliest Latin forms of the Fifteen Signs proper consist of:

1) a version included in a florilegium known as the Collectanea Pseudo-Bedae, which Heist dated to the twelfth century;

2) a version that Peter Damian (d.1072/3) included in his Epistola 92 (to a hermit named Adam, also known as De Novissimis et Antichristo and Epistola de die iudicii) and Epistola 93 (to one of his sisters, an abbreviated version of the preceding letter), both composed around 1062; and

3) a version included in the Historia scholastica by Peter Comester (d.1178).

For Heist, the tenth-century Irish Saltair na Rann stands as the mediating text between the Apocalypse of Thomas and the Fifteen Signs in these early Latin recensions as well as the many vernacular translations that derive from them.

Heist believed that new archival evidence would not alter his propositions, but recent findings have called his reconstruction of the history of the Fifteen Signs into question at both the general and specific levels. As a contribution to the subject, this article reassesses evidence for the existence and influence of the Fifteen Signs tradition in Anglo-Saxon England. The evidence presented suggests both an earlier date for the origin of the Fifteen Signs and a history of more widespread knowledge of the legend in Anglo-Saxon England than previously accepted, including a hitherto unidentified association in the Old English poem Judgment Day I.

The article then includes the following sections:

I. Reassessing Evidence for the Fifteen Signs
II. Early Transmission of the Fifteen Signs
III. Water and Fire in Judgment Day I

Recently somebody I’m collaborating with on a project asked me if I had a GitHub repository. It came as a bit of a wake-up question for me. Why yes, I do, and I had mostly forgotten about it. In the back of my mind, I knew that my account was there, and I vaguely knew what was there, but I haven’t touched it for at least a few years.

But it also dawned on me that I could make GitHub more useful. I’ve regularly caught myself wondering where I can put data for projects I’m working on, and I usually end up just falling back on my Google Drive or sharing from what’s in my ever-synced Dropbox. But GitHub has so much more going on, especially for sharing data and seeking collaboration. So I’ve gone back to my account and I’ve done some cleaning up. You can find my GitHub here.

Some things you’ll find in my GitHub:

First, on the older side of things, is all of the data from my project titled “Studying Judith in Anglo-Saxon England.” (Read more in this piece in the Old English Newsletter and the blog, which hasn’t been updated in a long time.) This project hit something of a stopping point out a few years ago, partly because I had built an online archive that would continue to remain, and partly because I had done some research that I was able to put out into the world that said what I wanted to at the time. But also because I wasn’t sure exactly what to do next. Unfortunately, the online archive has now been taken down (because I’m no longer at the hosting institution, UConn, and they apparently needed to make room on their server). I’m still working on that last piece, and I intend to return to the project again. For now, all of the text data and other information is still available on GitHub.

I was also happy to find all of the data from my experiments a few years ago using OCR on medieval manuscripts. My post about those experiments has received a good amount of attention over the last few years, especially in the last several months, since it was featured on the Hacker News aggregator. Happily, that post also led to a collaboration with others that is just finished its first stages, and we’ll hopefully be putting our results out into the world before the year’s end. For now, you can read the original post and see the data for my results still in the original repository.

Finally, I just added two repositories specifically for the data behind my most recent work tracing the circulation and transmission of apocrypha. In one of the repositories, you’ll find the data that I used for chapter one of my book, Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England, which is all about networks of apocryphal texts in early medieval preaching collections. You can read more about my data and how I used it in this post.

In another new repository, I’ve put another set of data for my current research on the circulation and transmission of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. I’m doing similar work with network graphing to understand how this apocryphal gospel moved around, which manuscripts included it, alongside which other texts. In the first stage of this research, I’m mainly concerned with the earliest set of manuscripts for each of the four major recensions (A, P, Q, R). What can they tell us about how Pseudo-Matthew traveled around, how people understood it, what other texts it traveled with, and the manuscripts that contain it?  I’ll be presenting some preliminary thoughts about this at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo) in May, so consider this data set a sneak peek.

Feel free to check out the repositories sometime–hopefully there’s something of interest there.

Apparently old books in pop culture media are becoming increasingly cool, or I’m just noticing them more lately. I get fired up every time I see manuscripts and early printed books in movies and television shows. A few recent examples include Athelstan’s Insular gospel-book in the Vikings television show, a book written in runes in Disney’s Frozen, and ancient manuscripts in The Last Jedi. In these and other media, it’s always exciting to see books getting their due attention.

You might be a classicist if you start screaming during television shows when you think you see Loebs on a bookcase. pic.twitter.com/dmryBtlTts

— Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond) April 1, 2018

My latest obsession is with a made-up old book in the Netflix comedy Santa Clarita Diet.

The main plot of the show (beware of some spoilers below) is that a suburban family’s life is turned upside-down when mom inexplicably goes full-on zombie. It turns out that this is linked to a mysterious disease, and the legendary origins go back several centuries to Serbia. This is where the book comes in.

When the book is introduced–in an episode titled “The Book!” (season 1, episode 9)–its origins are said to be sixteenth-century Pozica (see a transcript here). No town by this name exists, but Serbia does have towns named Božica and Požega. The main characters also encounter a few other pages that seem to be leaves from another copy.

While the book is a plot device, pointing to the mysteries of the disease’s origins centuries before, its details are a treasure for book nerds. The book is most prominent in the episode where it’s introduced, but it also keeps appearing throughout the two seasons of the show released so far. A few times, the main characters go back to it to consult for more clues about the zombie disease. (I screen-captured most of the photos in this post from season 2, episode 4, “The Queen of England.”)

Some photos of the book (which I’ve used below) are rather popular on imgur. There’s good reason; in the few glimpses we get of its pages, it’s a beautiful, fascinating book.

Just look at that tome.

The layout alone is enough to excite book nerds: decorated frames, red rubrics, and colored images interspersed with the text.

Full-page woodcut images also appear in this book, as with depictions for the different stages of the zombie disease: illness with vomiting, zombie lunch, followed by a potion cure. Some fans on Reddit have worked out that the text records a type of recipe, which fits what happens in season 1 of the show as well as the last full-page image here.

A few moments when the show’s characters leaf through the book offer tantalizing glimpses of what we’re not directly shown otherwise.

Many features of this Serbian book seem to indicate that it’s printed, but there are elements that also betray its reliance on manuscript culture. Details like variations in the ink lines pressed onto the page, minor smudges, and other features like shadowy doubling of printed bits (lines and letters) indicate the remains of the press’s imprint in the process of printing.

Red rubrics and colored images indicate that it’s more of a mixed-media book that brings together the technologies of both manuscript and print. Details in the letters of the red rubrics provide clues for some handwritten elements. For example, the script sizes between the left-hand (verso) and right-hand (recto) pages appear to be different. While I’m not especially experienced with Cyrillic orthography and scripts, the descender of the letter Ka (К) on the right side of the page seems to drop below the line further than the same letter on the opposite page. Other discrepancies in the sizes, ascenders, and descenders of the various rubrics bear out the same conclusion that they’re handwritten rather than printed.

Image from a hand-colored medical commentary by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, printed in Prague in 1562 (see full details here).

The colored images also give away the mixed media of this book. While colored images became part of the printing process later, in many early printed books we find hand-colored woodcuts like these. After all, from Johannes Gutenberg’s creation of the moveable-type printing press around 1440 through the sixteenth century, the early age of print was filled with quickly changing media technologies.

Both Sarah Werner and Heather Wolfe have highlighted these types of books in the early modern collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Such examples combine printed text and woodcuts alongside handwritten and hand-colotred features. Aptly, Werner calls them “media transitions,” while Wolfe discusses them as “hybrid books.” The image to the right, from Werner’s collection of examples, is an appropriate parallel to the images of plants in the Santa Clarita Diet book. Although this text is not Serbian, this page also exhibits the uses of plants for medicinal purposes in the early modern period–a holdover from ancient and medieval practices.

With so many early modern codices digitized, it’s not difficult to find numerous analogues for the images in the Santa Clarita Diet book. One hilarious parallel to the woman vomiting is found in this woodcut from a book on anatomy by Johann Dryander, printed in Frankfurt in 1542. Of course, the reason for these men being ill is obviously quite different from a zombie disease.

Perhaps the most famous example of a hand-colored early printed book is the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in Nuremberg in 1493.

In various copies of this book we find many hand-colored woodcuts, such as these fabulous images of the Byzantine generals Belisarius and Narses stylized as knights (folios 145r-v). It’s not a far leap from these types of depictions to the one we see of a knight in season 2 of Santa Clarita Diet (in the episode titled “The Queen of England”).

Fortunately, we can compare the Santa Clarita Diet book with some excellent examples of actual sixteenth-century Serbian books in the Digital Matica Srpska Library. Various parallels may be seen in a liturgical book (a book used for worship) printed in Venice in 1536. A few sequences of pages offer striking resemblances in some of the details. Folios 110v and 111r present a depiction of the Annunciation to Mary and the decorated beginning of a new section of text opposite each other.

Folios 162v and 163r present a similar sequence, with a depiction of the Crucifixion opposite another new section of text with similar decoration.

In both examples, we find a few notable parallels to the Santa Clarita Diet book: hand-colored woodcuts, decorative framing techniques for both images and text, and red rubrics demarcated from the other text. The hand-colored pages here are all the more striking when compared to other pages with woodcuts in the same volume. For instance, folios 182v and 190v have woodcuts of saints that aren’t colored at all.

Such hybrid books are unique in many respects because the process is not the same for every page or every copy of the same book. Mixed-media manuscript-print books are complex artifacts. This is certainly the case with the types of books highlighted with the examples used in this post. From what we’ve seen of the extensive details in the Santa Clarita Diet book, we’re meant to assume that a lot of labor and attention went into its creation. No doubt other fabulous details not yet revealed also fill the pages within its binding.

This post is essentially a teaser for my upcoming presentation at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo next week. I’ll be presenting a paper titled “The Afterlife of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew” on session 41, “The Scripturesque Middle Ages: Uses/Reception of Apocrypha along the Medieval North Sea,” organized by Stephen Hopkins, in Sangren 1320, on Thursday at 10am.

Here’s an abstract for my paper:

More than almost all other apocrypha, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew enjoyed fame and popularity throughout the Western European Middle Ages as one of the most widely influential works of extra-biblical literature. It was especially central to the development of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, as it sparked the later adaptation known as the Nativity of Mary, likely composed around the year 1000, which was central to the rise of the Feast of the Nativity of Mary in the eleventh century. Pseudo-Matthew also saw a number of additions in the late medieval period, as many manuscripts began to include expansions about Jesus’ childhood. Among these, the most prominent expansion was a Latin translation of the Greek Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which appears appended to Pseudo-Matthew in manuscripts from the twelfth century onward.

Pseudo-Matthew also survived in manuscripts alongside a range of works across medieval genres. Using data visualization aided by bibliographic and media studies, this paper specifically seeks to examine associations between the apocryphal gospel and other works, situating them together to understand how medieval readers perceived this text as part of a more general literary landscape. Indeed, this aspect of the transmission of Pseudo-Matthew also relates to its wider influence on literature and art, as the narrative and visual depictions of it are found alongside biblical, apocryphal, hagiographical, and historical works in many manuscripts. Significantly, through studying its transmission history, we see that Pseudo-Matthew found a place in medieval culture not as a curiosity of apocryphal lore but as an important part of the narrative of Christian salvation history.

Here’s one network visualization of my data about manuscripts that I’ll discuss:

Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to delve deeply into the details of the sources, text, manuscripts, and larger tradition of Pseudo-Matthew because of my work on a new translation and commentary. I’ve learned much through this work, and it’s given me a lot to work with in tracing its afterlife in the medieval period. So I’m using what I’ve learned so far and pursuing new avenues for understanding the circulation and transmission of this apocryphon.

In many ways, this current research is an extension of what I wrote about in Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England–which attendees should be able to order at the UTP booth in the book exhibits. I’m asking similar questions about apocrypha, the circulation and transmission of extra-biblical works, and the uses of media studies and network theory for gaining answers. My present work, however, focuses on a longer history for a specific text, rather than the cumulative evidence from many texts.

Here’s another preview of some things I’ll discuss about manuscripts containing the A-text of Pseudo-Matthew (the earliest surviving version):

All of my data for this research is posted on this GitHub repository, so you can see even more before the conference. But there’s much more to come in the presentation of this data and my conclusions–so I’ll hope to see you in the audience next Thursday morning!

My book Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England will be out from the University of Toronto Press in July (pre-order at that link for 25% off!), so lately I’ve been thinking about the project as it’s developed over the years. Over the next several weeks before the release of the book, I’ll be posting some reflections about it.

In this post, I want to focus on the inception of the project. First, there’s a little background to fill in.

When I started my master’s degree in Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut, I knew I wanted to focus on Anglo-Saxon literature, especially Old English. I was also interested in religion, but at that point I didn’t know how it would play out. My first semester, I took a seminar with Tom Jambeck (who co-authored Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader) learning the Old English language, and I wrote a seminar paper on a few of Wulfstan’s homilies.

I fell in love with Old English preaching.

I found pleasure in the style, the ways of expression, the imagery, the connections to other Anglo-Saxon literature and cultural contexts. I discovered the web of Old English texts, versions, and manuscripts that survived with sermons in them. I started to think about and read works by Ælfric of Eynsham, Wulfstan of York, and the anonymous authors so often juxtaposed against them. While my grad school friends found these sermons and my interests in them odd, and veered toward things like Old English poetry, I became that guy who loved Old English preaching.

About a year and a half later, in my last semester of MA coursework in spring 2009, Bob Hasenfratz (Tom’s co-author on Reading Old English) offered an advanced Old English seminar on the Vercelli Book. For me, this was the perfect seminar. I loved the Vercelli Book poetry before (especially The Dream of the Rood), fell in love with the sermons during the seminar, and still love the codex to this day. I continue to believe that the Vercelli Book is the greatest Old English manuscript from Anglo-Saxon England.

While in that Vercelli Book seminar, I continued to focus on the sermons, and began to research the sources and ways they were composed. What I quickly found were the various biblical apocrypha that lay behind the Vercelli Book poems and sermons. I recently found the notebook I used when I began research for my seminar paper. Here’s the first page:

I was familiar with some apocryphal literature already, but I started to dig more deeply. I began reading works that can be found in collections like The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H. Charlesworth, and The New Testament Apocrypha, edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher.

I started to see apocrypha everywhere.

A page from the notebook I used for research notes for my Vercelli Book seminar paper, spring 2009.

I found echoes of apocrypha in Old English literature specifically and medieval literature more broadly. I quickly discovered the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture volume on Apocrypha, edited by Fred Biggs, who had been my professor in a few other courses already. As I researched apocrypha in the Vercelli Book and talked more with Fred, I began to develop my ideas about the subject.

I made obsessive lists like these:

It’s teleological to think back now, in hindsight, and see it this way, but my scholarly career seems to have coalesced in that Vercelli Book seminar.

That seminar and the paper I wrote for it set my future research trajectory. I eventually revised a part of the paper into an article in Anglo-Saxon England. (You can see the start of that project in the above photo, where it says, on the left-hand page, “Cross in the Sky.”) I solidified my desire to write a dissertation about Old English sermons. My interest in apocrypha pushed me to branch out in my PhD coursework to explore Judaic studies. I started forming more of a working relationship with Fred, who would become one of my co-advisors for my dissertation. Most of all, I started to conceptualize big questions about apocrypha and Old English sermons.

Heading toward a conclusion to this post, I’ll quote part of my seminar paper on the Vercelli Book. That paper includes ideas that served as the seed that grew into my dissertation, which I later revised into my book, like this one:

[I]t is clear that apocryphal materials are woven throughout the Vercelli Book, with specific threads appearing in both the homiletic and poetic texts. What I aim to demonstrate in this paper is threefold: first, to propose apocryphal influences in the apocalyptic motifs of two of the least scrutinized homilies, II and XXI; second, to argue that the Vercelli Book compiler did not distinguish between biblical and apocryphal materials as modern scholars would, but instead used works derived from both forms in order to create a unified codex based on traditional authority; and, third, to examine the implications of these apocryphal sources used as authoritative biblical materials for our understanding of the Vercelli Book within the intellectual context of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England.

I still stand by these assessments. Yet, as I argue in Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England, these ideas go well beyond the Vercelli Book to encompass the much wider corpus of Old English preaching texts, and the implications are even more significant for considering apocrypha in early England.