Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Map, v 2.0

I recently had the pleasure of presenting my mapping project at SHARP's Digital Projects Showcase. I'm in the middle of writing a reflection/call-to-arms on my experience there, but wanted to share my materials sooner. So here they are: images from my handouts and the newest version of the map.

WHAT IS THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE?

A group of annalistic texts begun in the 9^th century and, in one case, extending until the 12^th.

It includes a variety of events: birth of Christ; natural and supernatural phenomena; royal births, coronations, deaths, and burials; consecrations; invasions; laws; property endowments; international and inter-family drama; the building (and burning) of towns.

A: the earliest surviving manuscript of the Chronicle; end date 1001; significant interest in Winchester

B: irregular annal numbers; end date 977; updated regnal list from A

C: “chronicle of chronicles” because of its sources; ends in the middle of 1066

D: integrates/conflates sources incorporated by C as one chunk; ends 1079; northern interest

E: longest chronicle version; end date 1154; begins in Old English and ends in Middle English

F: Bilingual

G: Copy of A

WHY MAP THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE?

In content alone, the Chronicle is an important part of early English history and literature (listory? histerature?) And unlike its contemporary chronicles on the European continent, it is uniquely vernacular. Some versions contain important regnal lists; some include poetry; they all tell a different story of England, documenting in varied narratives of the arrival of Brutus, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, missionaries, and bishops. Version D has the longest treatment of a woman in it, describing (and perhaps defending?) Margaret of Scotland’s marriage. The same version (D) actually ends mid-word in the annal entry for 1079; version C ends halfway through the entry for 1066—on the Stamford Bridge—and before the Battle of Hastings.

Although annals seem to be primarily focused on time, these are actually just as preoccupied by space. Indeed, location is so important to these texts that until recently, most were referred to as the chronicle of a place name: Winchester Chronicle, Abingdon Chronicle, Worcester Chronicle, and Peterborough Chronicle.  But these names didn’t only show the onomastic interest of the chronicles’ contents; they more accurately reflect the scholarly effort to trace their transmission history—multi-layered narrative.

TEACHING WITH THE CHRONICLE MAP

PROBLEMS WITH MAPPING?

There are plenty of issues surrounding the cartography of complex texts. Here are some that I dealt with in Google Earth: 

1) The map of Anglo-Saxon "England" changes over the course of these texts:

 2) The transmission histories are complicated, at best:

3) There are practical issues of data selection and entry when not all annals have traceable place-names:

So, 

But Google Maps Engine has just come out, and that's allowed me to sort and change displays. 

BEHOLD, THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE MAP 2.0!

It sorts data by date and label by event (or vice versa):

It layers multiple versions (10th century A and E shown here, labels hidden):

It allows me to build a database within the mapping program itself:

Still, there are some kinks to work out before I move forward. Consider, for example, what happens when I try to map regions like Wessex and Mercia:

It's not a pretty sight! Nevertheless, I've gotten great help from the UNC librarians and fellow SHARPists. More on both very, very soon.

Til then, 

Map on!

So you want to be a medievalist...

...that's awesome! Congrats, and welcome. 

I'm about to take exams, and I'd like to share with you some resources that I knew nothing about until I found out I'd be tested on them. In a perfect world I'd have time to explain them all to you. For now, here's a rough sketch of what they do. And please forgive the strange formatting errors. I've spent far too much time trying to html my way out of them already.

Until soon, stay savvy, friends!

Primary Sources: What do you want to find?*

                                   Old English                                                        Middle English

                                          |                                                                             |

Prose                Poetry               MS            Drama                            Verse             Prose                 ?

|                           |                          |                      |                                   |             |                           /

                                                             Record of Early English                                  Manual of Writing

|                           |                          |                   Drama                            /             |      in Middle Eng.           

             Online Corpus of Old                                            (Digital) Index of                      

             English Poetry;                                                      Middle English Verse                                                             

             Anglo-Saxon Poetic                                                                                           

|            Records                             |                                                                        |

English                                      Catalogue of MSs                                      Index of Printed

Historical                                   Containing Anglo-Saxon;                          Middle Eng Prose;

Documents;                               Early English MSs in                                 Index of Middle

Die Gesetze der                         Facsimile                                                    English Prose

Angelsachsen;

Rolls Series;

PASE database

              

            Patrologia Latina

            /

*Latin? --Repertorium Biblium Medii Aevi

            \

                  Acta Sanctorum

Secondary Sources: What kind of question do you have?*      

                        About sources                                                About influence or interpretation

                                |                                                                                       |

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici;                                                                                Anglo-Saxon England; Year's Work in English

Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture;                                                Studies; Studies in the Age of Chaucer; Variorum

Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales                         Edition (Chaucer); Arthurian Lit in the Middle Ages

*Old English Newsletter Online and Digital Medievalist are also great sources for sources

Tertiary Sources, etc.: For the very specific, or very general search

Bibliographies: 

International Medieval Bibliography; Bibliography of Publications on Old English through 1972; Bulletin Bibliografique (Societe Internationale Arthurienne)

Indices (indexes?), Surveys, Concordances, etc:

Motif Index of English Metrical Romances; Survey of English Place-Names; Index of Arthurian Names in Middle English; Biographical Register of University of Oxford to AD 1500; Medieval Libraries of Great Britain; Monumenta Germaniae Historica; Dictionary of National Biography; Dictionary of the Middle Ages

Linguistic Aides:
Cambridge History of the English Language, Grammar of Old English (Hogg), Handbook of Middle English Grammar;  A Middle English Syntax; Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, Microfiche Concordance to Old English, Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections; Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; Dictionary of Old English (Toronto)

A manifesto

I've recently contributed to HASTAC'S Future of Higher Education Forum, "inspired by a recent workshop called Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education, which was organized by the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)" (hastac.org).

We were asked, 

"If you could change one component about your own academic program, what would it be, and why?"  

You can bet your next holiday Starbucks drink that I was (and have been for some time) quite ready to answer. 

via Debra Rae Cohen

Here's a brief run-down of my experiences, disappointments, and minor miracles over the past few years. At the end you'll find my mini-manifesto on graduate education. 

What do you think? What would you change? I open these questions to those within and outside of academia because I think it's an important question to raise about one's professional development track, no matter what the profession is. 

Answer: coursework/exams

I  had a great two years in my master's program, but found my PhD program difficult from the very start. I've spent the past two and a half years taking courses of no interest to me or relation to what I'd like to study. Perhaps I should have spent that time trying to publish something that didn't matter to my future work, but frankly I was so disheartened that I spent most of my energy just convincing myself to stay in the program. With little faculty support and a massive, hard-to-navigate administration (who three years later still has my last name wrong), I passed these years in social and academic isolation. 

If the emotional toll that this system has on us is extraordinary, the anxiety is made even more accute by the exam process.

I don't mind that PhD exams exist, of course. But I do mind that I'm responsible for the equivalent of 2 years of coursework in material that I've had to read on my own, outside of my classes. If courses don't matter to my exams,  I shouldn't have had to take them-- or not four semesters' worth, anyway. And now that I'm interested in pursuing digital humanities, I feel that I've run out of time to commit to classes on programming or other interdiciplinary integrations to my field.

The members of my exam committee have been extraordinarilly understanding about my situation, and I'm quite grateful for their support. Still, in a conversation about funding by, support in, and general funcitonality of higher education, my case illustrates the too-frequently ignored example of an outdated system that costs the university money and the students time-- time that is especially precious to those who want to have families, and whose biological clock seems occasionally at odds with our professional plans.

I am not as productive (and by that I mean as published) as those who had the luxury of faculty support during their coursework years. Indeed, of the three medievalists in my cohort, I'm the only one who made it through to the exam stage. And now that I'm here, and now that I have a bit of support, I wonder if it will all be worth it in the end, given what so many people in the third year of their PhDs have already accomplished.

This is not a situation unique to my program or even my school. There needs to be a re-evaluation of what's expected from PhDs and a re-assesment of how programs can position us to be successful-- within and outside of our programs.

I call for a radical streamlining that promotes faculty-student interaction and mentorship, interdisciplinary graduate courses, and a plan of study tailored to students' scholarly interests and professional goals. Such a system would be inherently and necessarily transparent; it would reduce administrative red tape and demystify the process of applying for fellowships or assistantships. This new system would require and reward mentorship by making it easier for students to participate in professors' research or teaching. By inspiring and fostering collaboration, this system would make candidates and professors more productive and more valuable. 

Most importantly, a new system would help students spend less but better time in their programs. 

Until next time, stay radical, readers.

On our choices

Mother Sawyer and her devil/dog. 

Reading Arthur F Kinney's introduction to sixteenth-century The Witch of Edmonton I came across the following line:
"There was inherent in communities like Edmonton a necessity for witches."
A necessity for witches.

Whoa.

But why did communities need witches, and why did the witches comply?

Evidently, in the early sixteenth century about 80% of England's population was rural. The manorial system was breaking down, so poverty increased, leading to more desperate times and of course, more desperate measures. When cattle died or crops failed, there needed to be a scapegoat. And what better scapegoat than one who doesn't fit in-- what Kinney calls "unassimilable women"?

This reminded me instantly of the symposium I recently attended at Duke: "Thinking through Death: Corpses and Mortality Strategies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe" [check my twitterfeed for Oct 19]. At the symposium, Diana Presciuti gave a presentation on fifteenth-century Italian paintings of a saint who reassembled and revived a victim of maternal infanticide. Each image illustrated that patriarchal anxieties about infanticide and cannibalism were at once "utterly alien but uncomfortably close to home" for men who feared even the most domestic women. To men frightened by women within the home, women living without the patriarchal buttressing of the "standard" domestic setting must have seemed even more horrifying.

But what about these women? Are they only the victims of social construction? Not in their literary forms, I don't think. What makes early modern drama so awesomely exciting is the tension between victimization and choice. What complicates this further are the uncomfortable overlaps between necessity and evil, justification and sin, predestination and despair.

Particularly, it's the very idea of justification-- and the horror of its potential realities-- that so motivates The Witch of Edmonton.

And guess what?
The witch of Edmonton was real.

Murder pamphlets were popular for generations. This is a late 17th-century example.

Yep. The play was inspired by the real trial and real execution of real woman. The details of these events were published by HER CHAPLAIN-- a man in the habit of publishing and profiting from the confessions of the condemned under the auspices of "exempla." This guy makes Chaucer's Pardoner look like Santa Claus. 

Here's a snippet from Sawyer's "real" interrogation:

Question (paraphrased): "What did you and the devil talk about when he appeared to you? What did he ask of you, and you of him?"

Answer (paraphrased): "He asked how I was, and what he should do for me, and demanded that I give him my soul and body or he would shred me to pieces."

In what kind of state must someone be in to utter these words?  How is she understanding her own complicity in her witchiness? Does she think she had a choice?

Most importantly, does she know, or can she sense, that her role as a witch was one that the community required of her? If so, is her demonic demise a device of her her own wicked will, or of inevitable fate?

From here, I'll briefly summarize one of the play's plots (there are two-- the second concerns a pregnant woman, a secret shotgun wedding, her husband's bigamy and eventual murder of the second wife, and the involvement of a lecherous noble named Arthur) and compare it to Dr Faustus. You'll have to read to the end to get to the non-academic part :)

"Mother Sawyer" has been stealing firewood from her neighbor, who hits her for the theft. We quickly learn that the whole village thinks she's a witch. Inevitably, she stops fighting it and embraces the label. Ironically, she learns how to be a witch by what she hears from the rumors.

The stick-stealing-turned-neighbor-beating is the last straw for her; she  curses her neighbor and declares that she wants revenge. And as soon as this declaration is made, Dog appears (as a dog in name and form, though he is admittedly a devil).
You see, in the early modern theology explored here and by Marlowe in Dr Faustus, a demon appears any time someone disavows God. Indeed, Dog's first words are, "Ho! Have I found thee cursing? Now thou art mine own" (II.i, 120).
Compare that to the similar explanation Mephistopheles gives to Faustus:

For when we hear one rack the name of God,

Abjure the Scriptures and his Savior Christ, 

We fly in hope to get his glorious soul,

Nor will we come unless he use such means

Whereby he is in danger to be damned.   

            (I.iii, 48-52)

In both plays, then, the devil comes when he's called.

In Marlowe's play, there are some pretty intense suggestions that Faustus is already damned. If he isn't one of God's elect, there's nothing he can do about it-- his is a hopeless case.

But the tensions of "God's elect" and "reprobate" are not as pronounced in The Witch. 

The playwrights show her  to be an impoverished victim of her cruel community more than a power-hungry academic driven by boredom and hubris (Faustus). And in a play that opens with a pregnant woman threatening the good name and fortune of two men (the second plot), we know that ladies have more than marginal or superficial roles. 

There are whole scenes dedicated to onlookers and rumor-mongers-- to those looking upon, judging, and condemning the "unassimilable woman." In this sense, The Witch is nearly opposite Faustus. Sawyer is condemned outside her home by her neighbors who point and jeer. Conversely, Faustus calls the devil into his study, to the ignorance of most of his friends. Hers is a public offense; his a tellingly private and personal transgression.  

Still, Sawyer's character is no mere scapegoat. Like Faustus, she knowingly makes a contract with a devil in her own blood. And as my students have pointed out, a blood oath usually betokens something bad. Surely she knows that she's involved in an evil act. In the play, the first thing she asks of her demon familiar is that he kill her neighbor. He can't (or won't), but we now know that she has violent intentions. 

NB: If you're about to sign in pen and the second party suggests you sign with blood instead,  RED FLAG.

Sawyer is arrested, tried, and hanged. Her last words are those of regret; she sees that she has not been in power at all: "There is no damned conjuror like the Devil" (V. iii, 51). 

This seems like an admission of guilt. But could it be an indication of her victimhood, too?

If the real Edmonton needed witches, does Sawyer's conversion suggest that she was more "assimilable" than we thought?

I invite you to reflect on this post about communities, choices, and the legacies of both. 

So close to an election, our choices make all the difference. 

Don't they?