The database lists over 2.5 million academic books and articles on medieval topics, searchable by author, title, and thematic tags. Since it is limited to medieval research, even a search for a single word (e.g. ‘counsel’, ‘gestures’, ‘kingship’) tends to be much more fruitful than searching the entirety of a research library catalogue. While not exhaustive, the database is regularly updated and is therefore an excellent tool for investigating what research has already been done on any particular topic.
While writing a treatise for king Louis IX of France in 1259, advising him how a Christian ruler ought to behave, the Franciscan friar Guibert de Tournai pens a lyrical passage explaining the value of books and the knowledge and examples they provide:
“If the king who sits on the throne of judgement is hard pressed to disperse evil by his look,* it is necessary for him to know the sacred writings [i.e. Scripture]. By these the kingdom is ruled, and from these legitimate laws are derived.
“For if the commonwealth is to be ruled, if battles engaged, if fortifications measured, if engines erected, if ramparts restored, if bulwarks made; if the calm of liberty, the cultivation of justice, reverence for laws, and the friendships of neighbouring peoples are to be preserved, books teach all these things for their achievement.
“For who would not have Vegetius, if arranging to protect or besiege castles or cities? Palladius plants, Vitruvius builds, Euclid measures, Socrates classifies, Plato explicates, Aristotle complicates, Aeschines soothes, Demosthenes enrages, Cato persuades, Appius dissuades, and Cicero convinces. From these together is modelled a way of speaking, and within them are sometimes given examples of living.”
With research libraries across the world now closed for an indefinite period and many of us hunkering down into self-isolation, I thought it might be useful to gather together some of the more useful free and publicly accessible websites I’ve found for getting my research done online. For primary texts, these will not always be the most recent scholarly editions, but they are still useful in a pinch.
archive.org – This is usually my first port of call for books and textual editions in the public domain (i.e. published before 1923). It’s particularly good for those indispensable nineteenth-century editions such as the Rolls Series. I find the interface easier to use than that of Google Books, and it allows you to download the text in a variety of formats.
Occasionally, I have also come across useful books still in copyright which can be virtually ‘borrowed’ via the site – the waitlists for these have currently been waived for the site’s National Emergency Library.
For finding brief sections or reference information for books currently under copyright, Google Books or Google Scholar may prove useful.
Corpus Corporum: Maintained by Universität Zürich, this website pools together texts from a number of public-domain text series (most notably, the Patrologia Latina) and adds some fairly sophisticated search functions.
Patrologia Latina / Graeca(patristica.net): Provides links to PDFs of every Patrologia Latina and Graeca volume (mostly hosted online by either archive.org or Google Books).
Corpus Thomisticum: A range of Aquinas resources, including the Opera Omnia (Latin text). An English translation of the Summa Theologiae (Benziger Bros. edition, 1947) can be found here.
The Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library: Brings together publicly accessible electronic resources for the study of medieval canon law, from Carolingians through the decretalists.
The Latin Library: Predominantly classical and Late Antique texts by well-known writers, but it includes some medieval texts as well.
Logeion: Includes various Greek and Latin dictionaries, including Lewis & Short and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS).
Finding Digitised Manuscripts: Many libraries, particularly national ones, now have extensive digital collections of their manuscripts freely accessible online. See, for example, the British Library, or Gallica (the digital collections of the BnF in Paris). This website on Early Medieval Monasticism has collected links to digital manuscript collections from archives and libraries around the world.
Academic Library Subscriptions: Those with access to the online resources of academic libraries are likely to benefit from a number of useful digital subscriptions, such as (to name a few I currently use regularly) Oxford Scholarship Online (which includes the Oxford Medieval Texts series); Latin Series A and B from Brepols (with texts from Corpus Christianorum and other leading series of primary text editions, albeit in an interface more appropriate for text searches than reading large portions of text); and the Loeb Classical Library, as well as countless digital journal articles and ebooks.
Although most historians are secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) convinced that their period of study is definitely the most interesting, we’re certainly not beyond geeking out over intriguing historical vagaries as we encounter them in other periods.
Recently, as I’ve been working as a research assistant on an eighteenth-century project, looking predominantly at medical texts, I’ve been encountering all sorts of new bits of information: not just the myriad of horrible ‘cures’ one could undergo in the 1700s, but peculiar bits of orthography, idiomatic expressions (‘putting a period to one’s existence’), etc.
The other day, I was cataloguing some French texts when I came across this title page:
I didn’t think much of it until I was searching for a publication date and realised it must be somewhere in that bottom line:
The format puzzled me, as the other French books I had catalogued had used a standard Gregorian year in Roman numerals, like this from from 1782:
It wasn’t until I came across this title page with the year in a dual format that the light began to dawn:
Between these two publication dates, I now recalled that not only had there been some substantial political changes in France, but some substantial calendrical reforms as well. A bit of judicious Googling, and I had been (re)introduced to the wonderfully bizarre world of the French Republic Calendar.
In turns out, shortly after the French Revolution began in 1789, a decision was made to devise a calendar stripped of royalist and religious influence and based upon rational metric principles. So, the year was divided into twelve months of 30 days, each divided into three ‘weeks’ (décades) of ten days apiece. An extra five days of holiday (six in a leap year) brought the total days of year in line with the solar calendar. The months were named after the climate and seasons: ‘Thermidor’, which begins 19/20 July, refers to the summer heat. (After some debate, the beginning of Year I was fixed to 22 September 1792, the beginning of the French First Republic.)
Writing in 1812, some years after the Republican calendar had been abandoned, the Englishman John Brady not only accused the French of plagiarising the months’ names from the Dutch, but cites an English wit who ‘disgusted with the “namby pamby” style of the French calendar’, proposed his own sarcastic English translations: Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Slippy, Drippy, Nippy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, and Poppy (Brady, Clavis Calendaria, p. 38).
In an attempt to wean people off the liturgical calendar of saints’ days, an agriculturally-based ‘Rural Calendar’ was also devised with a different plant, animal, mineral, or agricultural tool assigned to every day of the year. December 25th, for example, was the day of the Dog (Chien); August 15th (Assumption of the Virgin) was assigned the Lupin flower.
There were even attempts to shift to ‘decimal time’: 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 10 hours to the day. So noon became 5 o’clock, and 11:57:00 became 4h97m91s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, decimal time never really caught on and soon fell out of use.
One of the inadvertently lingering affects of the Republican calendar is down to the fact that the counter revolution against Robespierre and his associates happened on 27 July 1794 = 9 Thermidor II, giving it the rather wonderful title of the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’. (Tell me there’s not a Doctor Who episode in there somewhere…)
The Republican calendar did not long outlive its Republic. It was soon abolished by the Emperor Napoleon, 10 Nivôse Year XIV was followed by 1 January 1806, and French title pages immediately return to the conventional, if slightly dull, Gregorian format:
(Today, if you were wondering, would have been 8 Messidor CCXXVII.)
Because what’s a party without a game of ‘Guess the medieval Bible story’? (Scroll to the end for the answers.)
(1) British Library, Kings MS 5, fol. 2r Clue: It helps to know that Moses is often portrayed in medieval artwork with horns, based on Jerome’s literal translation of the Hebrew word ‘qaran’ as ‘cornuta’ (‘horned’) to describe the shining of Moses’ face after speaking with God on Mt Sinai (Ex. 34:29).
Last week, I passed yet another milestone in my DPhil career: delivering my first undergraduate lecture. There was definitely a thrill to walking into the Victorian grandeur of the Examination Schools to see my name and lecture up on the screen, directing interested audience members to Room 2.
Admittedly, such interested parties were few in number: a couple undergraduates and a friend providing moral support. I also have a feeling my best intentions of a conversational pace and plenty of pauses were quickly overshadowed by my desire to just get through the thing in one piece.
Still, as first lectures go, I think I’m fairly pleased.
I gave the lecture as part of a Faculty scheme to allow advanced DPhil students an opportunity to prepare and deliver a single lecture in Trinity term, for the theoretical benefit of third-year undergraduates revising for their final examinations. The titles of the DPhil lectures are posted along with everything else on the lecture list, but otherwise not particularly advertised (from anecdotal evidence, having 0 to 3 actual undergraduates in attendance seems to be about the norm).
Despite its minimal impact in terms of audience numbers, though, it did turn out to be a useful experience and one I’m glad I took advantage of. Writing the lecture was certainly more difficult than I had anticipated.
It’s difficult to pitch for an unknown audience – when you’ve spent three years buried in a particular vein of research, you tend to lose perspective on what is or isn’t common knowledge. What exactly will the faceless undergraduate know or not know? At 50-minutes, it’s also an unfamiliar length for those of us accustomed to 20-minute conference papers. And of course, in a one-off lecture, rather than a lecture series, there’s always the temptation to slip things in you feel they really ought to know, or that you know to be interesting, even if it doesn’t precisely fit into the line of your argument.
My hastily selected lecture title–composed while jet-lagged at a conference in Australia–had me exploring the intersection between intellectual and political culture in the High Middle Ages. Given the nature of my own research, I decided the most interesting approach for the students would be by way of the intellectual sources they generally have less exposure to.
I have to admit, I initially got a little carried away with far too many pretty pictures from the Liber Floridus, but many (many!) drafts later, when all my favourite illustrations and virtue diagrams were strewn across the cutting room floor, I had finally settled on a more streamlined approach.
The final lecture took just a few types of often understudied ‘intellectual’ source types–biblical commentary, sermons, and mirrors for princes treatises–and used them to demonstrate how ideas could filter through from intellectual to political culture, with examples from my own research on counsel. In essence, the concept I most wanted to communicate was that ‘ideas matter’, and that the excitement of doing this sort of history is figuring out which ideas, how much, and to whom.
And the great thing about the lecture writing process (all stress and existential crises and tiny audiences aside) is that trying to get undergraduates excited about something restores some of your own excitement. The sources I was most comfortable discussing in a lecture were definitely those that I had myself discovered in a ‘Eureka’ moment, or painstakingly transcribed and translated from the original manuscripts – sources which I was uniquely equipped to convey to students who might one day go on to acquire the skills to do the same thing themselves.
And I suppose the whole thing just makes one feel like a historian!
[Image: ‘Prudence’ in Laurent d’Orleans’ La Somme le Roi, from British Library, MS Royal 19 C II, f. 48v (14th c.)]
England, it must be said, is not at its best as it enters February. The snowdrops and daffodils have generally yet to make an appearance, and everything is cold, damp, and dreary. So, when someone offers you the opportunity to escape all that in favour of sunnier climes, you grasp the opportunity with both pale, sun-deprived hands.
And having long endured fellow students’ social media photos of sun-drenched cafés outside their Mediterranean archives, I felt like I had finally got my own back when I received an invitation from a colleague to join a panel on ‘the forgotten virtues’ at this year’s conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Society (ANZAMEMS) being held in Sydney.
My enthusiasm was slightly dampened upon typing ‘London-Sydney’ in Skyscanner, which resulted in flights daunting in both length and cost, but the lure of an Antipodean adventure was strong and I had some virtue diagrams I was dying to show off, so I got to work on honing that key skill of the doctoral candidate: begging for money.
Having already met with some success getting funds for a research trip to Paris last summer (where I wrote my abstract for the Sydney conference sitting in the gardens of Versailles – what a life!), I entered into the process again with a bit more optimism. I still find the applications a bit fraught, even beyond the cringe-worthy exercise of trying to ‘pitch’ yourself and your research. For example, do you stick to a threadbare budget estimate in hopes they’ll find you prudently thrifty, or add in every conceivable expense in hopes they’ll be disposed to help you cover it? Anyway, in the end it was well worth the administrative hassle, as between my college, the Faculty, the Royal Historical Society, and the conference itself, I eventually managed to get all my major expenses covered. Sooner than seemed possible I was making my way through snow-covered streets to Heathrow, headed towards summer.
Sydney is a stunning place, and well worth the outrageous flight time. The city was dazzlingly bright and colourful, and even the soundscape was tropical, with all sorts of fauna I’d never heard before. Mindful of the jetlag, I’d arrived a couple days before the conference and had time for a few leisurely rambles around the city, especially the beautifully lush Botanic Gardens.
State Library of New South Wales
I also had the pleasure of joining a tour of the State Library of New South Wales the afternoon before the conference began, a tour which I was amused to note began with ‘We may not be Oxford, but …’. And indeed, while the age and size of collection might not compare to its European counterparts, the intentionality, both in the creation of the building and the curation of the collections, was very impressive. (I’m still envious of the cozy Friends of the Library room, equipped with periodicals and tea-making facilities and curiously – dare I say quixotically? – stocked with every edition of Don Quixote ever printed.) We were even shown some of their lovely medieval and early modern manuscripts and incunabula.
Old Quad, University of Sydney
The conference itself took place at the heart of the University of Sydney campus in the Old Quad—essentially an Oxford college transported into tropical climes, complete with kangaroo and kookaburra grotesques.
As I told my supervisor on my return, I found the whole conference to be wonderfully refreshing intellectually. My colleagues and I were fortunate enough to have our panel scheduled in the first slot and so spent the rest of the conference just enjoying everything on offer. Covering both the medieval and early modern, there was a broad array of subjects on offer, and I sampled widely, from the Merovingians to Hobbes. The keynotes were also quite diverse and left much room for thought and debate.
On top of it all, the general atmosphere was one of the friendliest and most supportive I come across so far at an academic conference, particularly in its engagement with postgraduates and independent scholars. It was also interesting observing both the differences and similarities between Australian/Kiwi and British academic culture—of particular note was the awareness of their respective indigenous peoples, from the repeated acknowledgements that the University is situated on Aboriginal tribal land to mentions of local Maori interest in a fifteenth-century English genealogical roll.
All in all, I had a marvelous time, and I returned to England from the conference with revitalised levels of Vitamin D and a new excitement for my research.
I recently came across these excellent guides to palaeography from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (St John’s University). As well as access to a number of helpful resources, they have virtual courses in Latin, Syriac, and Arabic scripts, as well as guides for manuscript transcription.
Sitting at home, planning a research trip seems like a fairly straightforward matter. You draw up your list of manuscripts, check the library opening hours, and book the nearest AirBnB, confidently promising valuable results your supervisor and anyone willing to give you money.
On the ground, things are a different matter: catalogues were wrong, the microfilms are awful, your bibliothecal vocabulary in the required foreign language is distressingly limited, all while you try to navigate a strange new system with surprisingly numerous slips of coloured paper.
I don’t expect too much from a medieval scribe. I accept that he may not always know the correct spelling of a classical name or whether he needs a subjunctive and he might occasionally have to fudge it a bit. I accept that he contents himself with only writing about a quarter of the letters, leaving me to fill in the rest. I accept that his speed of writing may result in a certain loss of legibility.
I would, however, expect him to write from left to right in a reasonably straight line.
Introduced last year, the online catalogue Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries provides descriptions of the 10,000-odd Western medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, as well as those of a few Oxford colleges, and saves one entering the somewhat bewildering world of the Bodleian’s print catalogues.
The first duty of a historian is to produce works of art. By this I do not primarily mean works that are finely written, but works that are emotionally and intellectually satisfying, that combine a clear unity of conception with a vivacity of detail, and portray people whose actions are intelligible within the framework of their circumstances and character. It is thus that one might describe as the aims of a Balzac or a Tolstoy: I say therefore that a historian should aim at satisfying the same emotional and intellectual needs as a novelist or poet. How he is to do this within the limits of the available data is the great question.
R.W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of History Writing’
Lest I paint too grim a picture of the doctoral student’s life and efforts, I should clarify that while there are days when researching with medieval manuscripts feels like a very slow attempt to squeeze meaning from a stone, there are at least, in compensation, the days when you actually find something, even the something, that makes the previous weeks of fruitless research almost worthwhile.
I have to confess, prior to about a month and a half ago, I hadn’t ever read much Aristotle. Not only that, but while I would confidently nod my head in agreement when someone else mentioned ‘the significant impact of the translation of Aristotle’s works in the thirteenth century’, I only had a somewhat vague idea of what this impact actually was (unaided by the fact that many medieval historians writing on the topic seem to assume you already know and therefore spare themselves the effort of going into any detail).
This gap in my knowledge became readily apparent when I attempted to summarize medieval virtue ethics in an essay for my supervisor and more-or-less concluded with the formal essay equivalent of ‘…. and then Aristotle happened, and … things?’
Needless to say, I was sent away to acquaint myself with the Philosopher, more particularly with his Nicomachean Ethics.
I’ve only just stumbled across this website, run by Oxford University Press. It provides annotated bibliographies on a whole host of medieval topics, from ‘Anglo-Saxon Art’ to ‘Women’s Life Cycles’ – particularly useful if you are making a foray into a new topic or genre, such as medieval liturgy, and need a brief guide to the state of the primary sources as well as recommendations on the best entry secondary sources.
Scrawling Spires 