Short talk on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of St Andrews Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 25 September 2017

1. Medieval Studies: Some
Hopes and Fears for the
Future
Andrew Prescott, University of
Glasgow
Illustration: 15th century misericord in St Mary Ripple,
Worcestershire, showing a man sowing seed, the labour of the
month for March

2. Congratulations to the St Andrews Institute of
Medieval Studies on ten years of achievement,
building on the long standing reputation of the
University of St Andrews as a leading international
centre for the study of the middle ages
Illustration: Crucifixion of St Andrew
from the Neville of Hornby Hours,
England, c. 1325-75. British Library,
Egerton MS 2781, f. 76v

3. • A moment which profoundly influenced my
interest in medieval studies as schoolboy in
1969
• Peter Maxwell Davies’s L’Homme Armé
began as completion of 15th-century mass
based on a popular song
• Inspired by the Cyclops episode in James
Joyces’s Ulysses, Maxwell Davies used the
mass for series of parodies: Monteverdi,
Victorian hymns, Delius, even foxtrots
• Maxwell Davies had been told as a student
not to listen to anything earlier than 1550
• Uses the unfamiliar sound world and
techniques of medieval music to interrogate,
dissolve and disrupt our conventional views
of western art and civilisation.
• Celebrates the otherness of medieval
culture.
• Sound sample: http://tinyurl.com/yasu77k9

4. Peter Maxwell Davies at his home in Orkney:
Roz Drinkwater
• My encounter with Max’s work led me
not only to exploring the Martyrdom of
St Magnus, Wakefield Play Cycle,
alchemy, and the Goliards but also
Indian music and Byzantine chant
• My first acquaintance with the middle
ages, mediated by Maxwell Davies,
showed how they can promote a
diverse, inclusive and eclectic view of
culture and civilisation which challenges
complacent and linear historical
narratives
• The experiences of my medieval
ancestors constantly challenge my own
preconceptions and prejudices
• I hope that medieval studies will
continue to be challenging and to show
how everything is always more complex
than it at first seems

5. Matthew Paris’s use of visual indexing in
his Greater Chronicle: Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College Library MS 1611,
f. 141r
Indexing symbols for the chronicle of
Ralph of Diss, British Library Royal
MS. 13 E.VI, f. 1

6. 13th-century tally sticks: The National Archives, E 402/2The oldest surviving pipe roll, 1129-1130: The National Archives, E 372/1, m. 9

7. Fifteenth-century plea roll of the Court of Common Pleas. This
roll records hearings for a single law term.

8. Indictments against those accused of joining in the Revolt of 1381 in West Kent taken
by a commission headed by Sir Thomas Trevet within three weeks of death of Wat
Tyler: The National Archives, KB 9/43

9. King’s Bench files from the
1380s, recovered from
unsorted sacks by C. A. F.
Meekings in the 1960s and
1970s. The recorda file for
Richard II contained the most
detailed account of the rising in
Essex, previously unknown

10. Kontron ProgRes 3012 digital camera
used between 1993 and 1998 to image
readings in the Beowulf manuscript at
the British Library concealed by
conservation work

11. The early Mosaic Browser for the World Wide Web in June 1993

12. Online version of announcement of Electronic Beowulf project by Kevin Kiernan in 1993. We thought that the
use of inset illustrations would presage an era of more richly illustrated scholarship which would directly
incorporate primary materials in innovative fashions. Progress on this over the past twenty years has been
disappointing.

14. • The dominance of the pdf of the journal article is exacerbated by open
access requirements
• E-versions of monographs are basic textual renditions
• Publishers become more interested in content that can be recycled via
companions and encyclopaedias
• Libraries and archives under funding pressures either focus on commercial
partnerships or lock down digital content
• Our access to scholarship is more mobile, so I can write this presentation
on a train, but the resulting scholarship is less media rich and exciting than
that I used as a student in the 1970s
A Dystopian View of Our Future

15.
curation as augmented scholarly practice
Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines.
Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a
secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the
Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching
landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar, and, in so doing, sets out both to
reinvigorate scholarly practice by means of an expanded set of possibilities
and demands, and to renew the scholarly mission of museums, libraries,
and archives. A university museum worthy of its name must
become at least as much a laboratory as, say, a university library. An
Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: http://humanitiesblast.com/publications/

16. Annotation of medieval documents with hypothesis.io. This can be a shared activity, and
results can be saved in a variety of text formats

17. http://www.researchspace.org/

18. 3d printed replica by Nils Andersson of a 6th-
century sword from Snartemo in the National
Museum of Norway
3d printed model by Bill Endres of a text block in the
8th-century St Chad Gospels. The model shows the
warping of the vellum and enables stress on pigments
to be assessed

19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYn7oQlLiA
Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System (2012). The use of conductive ink, a
type of ink that conducts electricity and allows you to draw circuits, means that a
painting (and a manuscript can become an interactive sound system).

20. https://chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com/album/in-st-
cuthberts-time

21. As medieval studies becomes increasingly
dependent on the internet, and our
professional and public links and
connections become mediated by the
internet, the health of the internet will
increasingly matter to us and we will need
to engage with campaigns to keep it open,
inclusive, decentralised, safe and
accessible

25. Recent troubles in medieval studies raise questions as to how we use social media and the extent
to which algorithmic control and group manipulation in social media like Facebook make it
inappropriate for scholarly and professional exchanges

27. Liberties of the Savoy film: https://vimeo.com/54517074