The Medieval Studies Research Group are delighted to announce this talk from our visiting scholar, Elias Carballido Gonzalez.
Title: Being Alone in Early Medieval Small Worlds: The Challenge of Labelling, Understanding, and Feeling Solitude
Topic: Early medieval local communities have been analysed from multiple perspectives that make visible the internal dynamics of their social fabric. The centrality of the notion of community and the reduced spatial scope of action of these in the early medieval rural world has led us to think less about a reality that would have existed even in these small worlds: solitude. In this paper we propose some theoretical and methodological reflections to study the physical, social and emotional experience of loneliness in these communities, taking into account the overlapping discourses, like the religious, legal and or the social, among others, that make it something complex to label from a terminological point of view, difficult to trace from a documentary point of view and, for certain authors, impossible in a pre-modern and rural world.
Speaker: Elías Carballido Gonzalez (Universidad de Oviedo)
Biography: Elías is a predoctoral fellow in Medieval History at the University of Oviedo, where he combines teaching and research work. His main lines of research have to do with internal differentiation in Early Medieval rural communities, focusing on the social and emotional experience of being alone, including from a gendered perspective. He holds a Master’s degree in Gender and Diversity from Oviedo, and is a member of the LLABOR-LANDS Group, dedicated to the studies of the medieval rural communities and led by Margarita Fernández Mier.
12 November 2024, 17:00, Alfred Tennyson Building 109, and online
The University’s Medieval Studies Research Group recently took over the editorship of the peer-reviewed annual, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources (formerly the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History, est. 1964). To celebrate and showcase the diverse range of research that we do here on written, visual, and material sources, our first volume included contributions by nine members of University of Lincoln staff. We are delighted to report that this has now been published Open Access by ARC Humanities Press, thanks to the support of the University , especially Professor Stuart Humphries, and to the help of Claire Arrand at Lincoln Cathedral Archives: Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts (oapen.org)
Edited by Dr Graham Barrett and Prof. Louise Wilkinson, Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts: Supplementum to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources, features peer-reviewed essays by nine Lincoln classicists, medievalists, and an early modernist. The essays cover topics including early doctrinal controversies, early Church councils, the Greek alphabet, disputes in thirteenth-century Rutland, the charters, letters, and seal of Lady Nicholaa de la Haye, castellan of Lincoln and sheriff, the proprietary queens of Jerusalem’s documents, the law and liturgy of trial by water in early medieval Iberia, a fourteenth-century aisled base-cruck building at Ketsby House Farm, and Mayflower materials in the Wren Library of Lincoln Cathedral.
The Lincoln-based contributors were: Drs Michael Wuk, Giustina Monti, Robert Portass (now Cambridge), Anais Waag (one of our Leverhulme ECRs), Graham Barrett (now Durham), and Profs Mark Gardiner (with Jenne Pape), Anna Marie-Roos, Louise Wilkinson, and Jamie Wood (with Marta Szada).
Join The Historical Association: City of Lincoln Branch and the Medieval Studies Research Group for a paper by Dr Michele Vescovion The sacred landscape of the Camino to Santiago
The Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has captivated travellers for centuries. This paper delves into the multifaceted layers of its sacred landscape, exploring how natural objects and artefacts, scattered along the Camino, became associated with a sacred history of saints and warriors. We will consider these objects as narrated in medieval sources, focusing on their sacred genesis, function, and agency, showing how their material qualities engaged with the sensorial sphere and the imagination of beholders.
Speaker bio: Dr Michele Vescovi is Associate Professor in Medieval Art and Architecture at the University of Lincoln. He works on the transmission of cultures, visual translations and the creation of identities in exchanges between East and West, and North and South during the Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on the eleventh and the twelfth centuries.
This talk will take place on Monday 7th October 2024 at 6.15pm, with refreshments beforehand and questions afterwards. It will take place at the University of Lincoln in the Co-op lecture theatre (Minerva Building, MB0312). Register: here
In recent weeks, our Lincoln Record Society-funded PhD student, Jessica Holt, has been working with Dr Nicholas Bennett of the Lincoln Record Society, the University of Lincoln’s Conservation Team, Lincoln Cathedral and the Lincolnshire Archives. Using multi-spectral imaging, they have managed to recover lost text in the registers of Bishop Thomas Bek of Lincoln (1342-1347).
During the nineteenth century, canon G. G. Perry applied a chemical reagent to several folios from MS. 209, a late fourteenth-century manuscript held at the library at Lincoln Cathedral. (5) This manuscript contains one of the only two surviving copies of Richard Rolle’s Officium et Miracula. (8)Regrettably the chemical reagent caused irreparable damage and rendered some of its’ text illegible as evidenced in the image of f.3 r. below. Perry was later named and shamed for his deed in 1866 in an edition of the Early English Text Society. (3)
Image 1: Lincoln Cathedral, MS 209 f.3 r. with the kind permission of the Dean & Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral.
The challenge of trying to decipher faded court hand is not unfamiliar for those working directly with manuscripts. Whilst today, UV lamps can be used to combat this problem, researchers in the nineteenth century were forced to seek out another solution. (4) Several attempts were made using different chemical reagents to enhance the legibility of metallic inks. (1) Contrary to their original intent, however, these substances have now rendered many documents unreadable, as these substances later darkened, coating their original texts with dark brown, black, or, in some cases, blue staining. Of these chemical reagents the most common were:
Tincture of Oak Gall (an alcohol-based tincture that utilises essence of oak galls)
Sulphuric Tinctures (mixtures typically comprised of calcium carbonate, calcium polysulphide, and calcium sulphate)
The ‘Giobert Tincture’ (mixture comprised of water, hydrochloric acid, and potassium hexacyanoferrate) (1)
Despite the clear damage these substances were causing to manuscripts across the course of the nineteenth century, these methods continued to be used as late as 1914, when Hugo Deunsing and Martin Flasher applied sulphuric tinctures to manuscripts stored in the library of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. (1)
Doctoral student, Jessica Holt, was forced to grapple with the damage caused by these chemical reagents when examining the registers of Bishop Thomas Bek of Lincoln (1342-1347). It quickly became apparent that several folios of register 6 had been damaged by an unknown nineteenth-century reagent. (6) Hope, however, laid with a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). MSI is a non-invasive scientific imaging technique that can be applied to manuscripts to recover lost text. (2, 7) This technique was also successfully used by the British Library in 2017 to recover script lost through fire damage, natural degradation, and chemical damage. (2) With the kind permission from the bishop of Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral, and the Lincolnshire Archives, and the wonderful support of Claire Arrand, Dr Nicholas Bennett, and Professor Louise Wilkinson, we were able to transfer register 6 from the Lincolnshire Archives to the University of Lincoln, where we were able to use MSI to successfully recover the contents of the lost text with aid from Dr Philip Skipper and the conservation department.
Regrettably, unlike the damage caused to f.3 r. of MS. 209, the identity of the culprit has been lost to time. The positive results of MSI ultimately present an optimistic future for other researchers examining manuscripts similarly altered by nineteenth-century reagents.
*Jessica Holt is fortunate to have been awarded the Nigel Burn Memorial Postgraduate Studentship from the Lincoln Record Society to support her PhD.
References:
(1) Albrecht, Felix. ‘Between Boon and Bane: The use of Chemical Reagents in Palimpsest Research in the Nineteenth Century’, in M. J. Driscoll (ed.), Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 13 Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Seminar held at University of Copenhagen 13th-15th April 2001 (Brooklyn, 2012), 147-165.
(2) Duffy, Christina. ‘Multi-Spectral Imaging at the British Library’, 2018 3rd Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHERITAGE) held jointly with 2018 24th International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia (VSMM 2018) (San Fransico, 2018), 1-4.
(3) English Prose Treatises of Richard Hampole, ed. G. G. Perry (1866).
(4) Kiernan, Kevin S. ‘The State of the “Beowulf” Manuscript 1882-1983)’, Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984), 23-42.
(5) Lincoln Cathedral Library. MS. 209.
(6) Lincolnshire Archives. DIOC/REG/6-7b.
(7) Machain, Padriag O. ‘The Digitisation of Irish Manuscripts: Beyond and Beneath the Visible Image’, Studi Irlandesi 12 (2022), 43-56.
(8) The Officium and Miracula of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. Reginald Maxwell Wooley (Cornell, 1919).
Lincoln was home to an important and vibrant Jewish community in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Fortunately for us, this community has left behind a remarkable trail of evidence in our national and regional archives. Past histories of Lincoln’s Anglo-Jewish community have been dominated by the story of Little Hugh of Lincoln, for whose death 19 innocent Jews were executed in 1255. While evidencing the increasingly difficult circumstances in which the Anglo-Jewry lived prior to their expulsion from England in 1290, the surviving records provide some fascinating insights into the dynamics of Jewish life, the Jews’ religious, social and business interactions with one another, and their encounters with their Christian neighbours, the Cathedral clergy and the Crown’s officials.
For many years now, Lincoln has been home to the Lincolnshire Archives, one of the UK’s largest regional collections, which preserves the manuscript records of the medieval city, cathedral and diocese of Lincoln. In 2023, Professor Louise Wilkinson of the Medieval Studies Research Group received funding from the University of Lincoln’s QR Collaborations Scheme for a pilot project to survey the archival holdings relating to the medieval Lincoln Jewry that are held locally. She received valuable assistance from Dr Dean Irwin, our visiting fellow, who acted as academic advisor, from Simon Neal, our archival researcher, and from Jessica Holt, our research assistant. The project surveyed and compiled a handlist of documents relating to the medieval Jewish community that are held in Lincoln. We also hosted a free talk and document workshop at the Lincolnshire Archives in June 2023 to showcase its remarkable collections. In the longer term, we hope that this initiative may aid long-standing plans for an exhibition that is warmly supported by the head of Lincoln’s Jewish community.
A major output of our project has been the first handlist of documents held in the Lincolnshire Archives on the medieval Jewry. Simon Neal has produced English summaries of the Latin documents (some of which also contain Hebrew or have Hebrew records associated with them) that contain references to members of the medieval Jewish community. Simon worked carefully through a range of original single sheet deeds, as well as entries in cartularies and other miscellaneous documents. He also consulted microfilm copies and transcriptions of cartularies for Lincolnshire religious houses held elsewhere that are also available for readers to consult at the Lincolnshire Archives. The records of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral proved to be particularly fruitful, since they contain references to local Jewish families, their neighbours, their associates, their business partners and their residences. These include, for instance, a portion of a thirteenth-century chirograph that recorded the notification of a grant by Robert le Turnur to Jacob, son of Leo, a Jew of Lincoln, of some land in the parish of St Michael on the Mount, which lay next to Jacob’s house (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/47). A notification of a grant by Lincoln’s famous female castellan, Lady Nicholaa de la Haye (d. 1230), to Peter the Woad Seller, of her land and houses in the parish of St Michael also carefully recorded how this property lay near the land formerly of Moses son of Benedict, a Jew of Lincoln (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/22).
This image shows a notification of a grant of property by Nicholaa de la Haye (‘Nichola de la Haie’) to Peter the Woad Seller, mentioning the nearby land formerly of Moses son of Benedict, a Jew of Lincoln: Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/22. Copyright belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral. Please note that reuse of this image is not permitted. We are very grateful to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral for granting us permission to use this image. We are also grateful to Claire Arrand, Lincoln Cathedral’s Librarian, and to the staff of the Lincolnshire Archives for their assistance.
There are also references among the documents in the Lincolnshire Archives to the properties of Jewish women like Belaset of Wallingford, who was hanged for clipping the king’s money (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, A/1/8, fol. 107, no. 290), and Floria of London, who went into exile in Edward I’s reign (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/75/2/27). In fact, there are some extremely interesting post-1290 grants of former Jewish property that enrich our understanding of the local context of the sad events surrounding the Expulsion.
Researchers are welcome to contact Louise Wilkinson to request a copy of the handlist.
This new major project aims to digitise 80 manuscripts and 200 documents related to medieval and renaissance women from all over Europe. These include illuminated and finely decorated manuscripts, medical treatises and religious works (e.g., psalters and books of hours), as well as a variety of charters and documents concerning different aspects of women’s lives. This is a wide selection that showcases the various roles of women as patrons, readers, book-owners, collectors, and writers. The manuscripts and documents will be catalogued and made accessible to the wider public through the British Library website, contributing to enlarging our current knowledge on the history of medieval and renaissance women.
During the six months, Paula will catalogue several of the documents and manuscripts, write blog posts for the British Library, and promote this new and exciting project focused on women’s history; before re-joining the University of Lincoln to continue with her PhD thesis in History on “The Queen’s Household in the Thirteenth-Century: An Anglo-Iberian Comparative Study”, supervised by Prof. Louise Wilkinson and Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo.
Well done, Paula! This is a wonderful achievement.
The Medieval Studies Research Group is delighted to announce that two students from the School of English and Journalism, Abigail Laycock and Elizabeth Egan, supervised by our own Dr Renee Ward and Mrs Claire Arrand, have been awarded the Dean’s Choice Award from the Dean of Lincoln Academy of Teaching and Learning (LALT), Dr Kate Strudwick, for their Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS) project, ‘Excavating the Archives: Making Lincoln Cathedral Library’s Middle English Manuscripts Accessible’. Over the summer, Lily and Abbie undertook research on the archive’s collection of manuscripts in or with Middle English texts and prepared materials (text and image) that will be housed on University Library’s Special Collections LibGuide as well as on the Lincoln Cathedral Library’s website, making the content available to both public and academic audiences. To read more about the project, please follow the link here. The award is a splendid achievement and reflects the University’s close relationship enjoyed by its staff and students with Lincoln Cathedral and its collections.
What happens when we focus our attention on people who aren’t named in our sources? This is the question that one of our undergraduate students has grappling with over the summer. Annabelle Mansell, a second-year Classical Studies student who had been successful in securing a bursary from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS), worked with Hope Williard and Jamie Wood on a project called ‘Invisible Agents: Networks of Learning in Late Antiquity’. Annabelle has written a blog post on the experience:
The aims of this project were to begin to understand how low-status, often unnamed individuals functioned within the broader educational network of Late Antiquity. We examined many of the letters of one well-connected teacher, Libanius, and transferred the key relationships discussed into an Excel spreadsheet, which allowed the creation of visual depictions of Libanius’ networks through graphs. With the information being presented in this digital, visual format, it is possible to do specific enquiries into Libanius’ networks. For example, one could see the centrality of an unnamed pedagogue (an enslaved person entrusted with overseeing the education of their master’s children) within a given family cluster by looking at a specific dossier of letters, or one could investigate the changing shapes of the network chronologically. The data being in this form allows for further investigations and a visual presentation of relationships which was not immediately available before. The graphs that have been generated already from the research begin to show how unnamed individuals’ centrality within a network can shift depending on the size of networks, and have begun to reveal more about the nature of the positions of and attitudes towards pedagogues. This project has started to lay the foundation for this area of enquiry, illustrating the value in transferring texts into data that can support visualisations.
This project presented unanticipated challenges. Learning how to operate Microsoft Excel and ConnectTheDots took more time than expected, and technical issues caused large losses of data on multiple occasions, which massively delayed progress. This had an impact on how targets were set and achieved, as I had to learn to create a flexible schedule which allowed for surprise setbacks. A second issue was the large quantity of data available to me throughout this project, making it difficult to complete analysis of all of the letters that I had initially planned.
My supervisors have been invaluable to me throughout this project. The wealth of experience and knowledge they possess (both regarding Late Antiquity and the procedures of research) have been a huge help, and without their guidance and support I could not have achieved as much as I did. Our meetings were always beneficial and encouraging, and even when I was struggling most I was flooded with support and further avenues to explore. It has been a privilege to work on this project together, and an invaluable introduction to collaborative research.
This experience has been a unique opportunity which has allowed me to explore areas I am interested in pursuing further, as well as introducing me to new ideas and burgeoning approaches to handling historical textual data. I have gained technical skills in digital literacy and network analysis tools such as ConnectTheDots. This experience will help with my future study as I have learnt how to extract important data from texts efficiently, and how to use more visual methods to analyse it. It has given me ideas for further possible related research and applications for this data, as we could use it to create maps and timelines, as well as more expansive graphs.
Here, Holly Shipton, a former University of Lincoln student, shares news of her recent funding success and reflects upon how her experience at Lincoln helped here:
‘Having completed my BA History and MA Medieval Studies at the University of Lincoln I knew the next step for me was to complete a PhD and continue with my academic career. I will begin my PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in October 2021, funded by the DfE research studentship. My doctoral thesis is entitled Landscape, Ecology, and Agriculture in Medieval Ireland: Management and Decision-making on the Manors of Roger Bigod, and will ultimately address questions concerning the issue of agricultural sustainability and ecological sensibility in late medieval Ireland, and will address key gaps in our understanding of manorial management, agricultural production, and English lordship in Ireland during this period.
Studying history at the University of Lincoln provided me with not only an incredible support base, but also a number of skills which set me apart from other students when applying for a PhD. Being able to learn Latin and palaeography in such a specialist environment enabled me to complete a research topic I would not have been able to had I not learnt those skills, as I was able to translate and transcribe thirteenth-century manorial accounts written predominantly in Latin. The range of modules available to me also helped me develop these skills within a number of historical contexts in which I was less familiar, expanding my breadth of knowledge of the medieval world – including topics such as the economic history of North-western Europe and the medieval cult of saints.
When deciding what I wanted to study for my independent project as an undergraduate, and then for my Dissertation at MA level, I knew I wanted to study a topic that was not related to the modules available at the University of Lincoln, but the wide range of medieval specialists meant I could find the perfect supervisor and thus find my own academic path. My MA dissertation won the Lincoln Record Society award for best MA Medieval dissertation 2020, and I was subsequently asked by the LRS to write a short piece about my research for their review – an incredibly opportunity I would not have been afforded had I not studied at Lincoln.
I am extremely grateful to all the lecturers and researchers I interacted with during my time at the University of Lincoln, but I am especially grateful to Dr Mark Gardiner who supervised and supported me through both my dissertations and helped me enormously, along with Dr Jamie Wood, in applying for my PhD and funding.’
Following on from the success of our Medieval Week, the Medieval Studies Research Group of the University of Lincoln are delighted to invite you to our free Annual Medieval Studies Lecture on Thursday 3rd June 2021 at 6pm (on Zoom).
This year, our speaker will be Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, a leading writer, broadcaster, and medieval historian who works on religious cultures and identities in the Middle Ages. She is the highly acclaimed author of several important books, including: Mother of God. A History of the Virgin Mary (London, 2009); Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. with an introduction by Miri Rubin (London, 2014); and Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2020).
The title of her talk will be – ‘Who were the Strangers of Medieval Cities?’
Abstract (in the words of Prof. Rubin): The title of my recent book Cities of Strangers (2020) prompts me to reflect with you more explicitly on the category ‘stranger’. Current research is showing just how diverse medieval cities were, but also how constitutive of urban flourishing this diversity was. It is appropriate therefore to consider how the differences between groups were managed and understood. Was it safe to be a stranger? How made it a beneficial state of living? How did strangerhood relate to ideas about identity? How did all this change over time?
