A Change in Seasons (2nd Week, MT)

Autumn has arrived in Oxford. The last of the lilacs have fallen in the Christ Church College gardens, and Magdalen Bridge is shimmering under a swirl of falling leaves. There’s also a decided nip in the air, and more than one morning over the past few days has dawned weakly under clouds of chilly rain.

The second week of full term has fallen into something more of a pattern: trotting off to the Weston Library every morning to peruse manuscripts, then lunch and librarying (if that’s not a verb, it should be!) until any afternoon classes or seminars. One afternoon a little group of us took a much needed break for tea in the cosy armchairs at the Turl Street Kitchen, eating cake and discussing the dangers of historical myopism and reasons for studying history. (I quoted a great line from John Arnold about history providing us with the tools to dissent–only of course to attend a seminar the next day where the man himself was presenting a very interesting paper on heresy in the Languedoc!)

It’s incredibly energizing to emerge for air from one’s own research to trade ideas with classmates and listen to them debate Anglo-Saxon frontiers (or whatever the topic might be).

Surviving the Beginning (0th and 1st Week, Michaelmas Term)

The last two weeks have flown by in a whirl of activity and (moments of) panic.

Figuring Out the Course.There are many, many reasons why the University of Oxford is a brilliant, world-famous university, but I would hesitate to count administrative organization amongst them. After a 0th week full of inductions from both my college and the History Faculty, I still wasn’t entirely sure what classes, seminars, or lectures I was meant to be attending, when, or where. One of my language classes was moved to avoid one conflict only to land right on top of another one of my required modules – and unlike my undergraduate days, these aren’t courses that will come back around in the schedule next term. Your lifeline in these circumstances are your fellow students – sooner or later, more-or-less correct information disseminates amongst you and you all figure out where you are supposed to be.

A Historian’s Responsibilities

I am instinctively wary of formulaic approaches that risk imposing patterns on—and hence, in my judgement, doing violence to—the sources . . . [This does not] mean that I accept uncritically whatever our sources tell us. While no disciple of Postmodernism, I have tried to stand outside the source material and to remember that historians can never hope to retrieve ‘what actually happened’—though that does not, in my view, absolve them of the responsibility of trying to get as close as possible to it.

Peter Jackson, Introduction to The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410

“Benign Anarchy” (-1 Week, Michaelmas Term)

I attended International Student Orientation today, which felt very official and welcoming after two weeks running around as a kind of quasi-enrolled student. It was held in the Examination Schools, a tremendously elegant 19th century building on High Street with broad stone staircases and impressive portraits on the walls. (The building’s name comes from its primary purpose as the building to which Oxford students, particularly undergraduates, come dressed in their academic gowns to sit the examinations for their degrees.)

The Historian as Artist?

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’

Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript.

Preface to English translation of A. Cappelli’s The Elements of
Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography (1982) 

A very helpful resource which I had vaguely been aware of for a while but which I have only recently starting using more regularly is the Regesta Imperii OPAC Literature Database for the Middle Ages (RI-OPAC), available in English as well as German.

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.

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.

https://www.hmmlschool.org/

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and is one of the best freely accessible digital archives online, crammed full of brilliant historical sources. It’s fairly easy to navigate, and you can register to save documents and books to your digital workspace.

I’ve personally been using it a lot lately to access all the 19th-century editions of my medieval primary sources from the comfort of my bed, instead of having to trot all the way out to the Bodleian Upper Reading Room!

Word Tools: Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there are now various Latin word tools that will tell you not only what any Latin word means, but also that it happens to be a genitive singular future passive participle, or whatever the ‘case’ may be.

Whitaker’s Words – My personal favourite, partly because it does take into account some medieval spelling and vocabulary changes)

Perseus Latin Word Study Tool

Health Advisory: While brilliant for making your way through a tricky translation, I would recommend using online word tools sparingly when it comes to actual Latin study – it’s easy to get dependent and forget to actually learn the vocabulary and grammar yourself, which comes back to haunt you later . . .

Dictionaries: Most Latin-English dictionaries only reflect classical usage and vocabulary. The best dictionary for medieval Latin is the recently completed Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) published by Oxford University Press, which is also available as a subscription service online and through the Latin/Greek online dictionary search Logeion.