On Thursday 14th November, the Oxford Medieval Society was delighted to welcome Prof Daniel Wakelin and Dr Stewart Brookes to discuss their work as part of an event on 'New Perspectives in Palaeography.' Between them, Stewart and Dan cover over half-a-millennium of script, as Stewart specialises in the vernacular minuscule of later Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and Dan works on books and literature from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. They introduced us to two very different (but arguably mutually-dependent) ways of engaging with manuscript sources, so the event certainly broadened the perspectives of members of the Oxford Medieval Society.
Dan started the evening by introducing us to the background of palaeographical study. This is a field that has sometimes been presented as a Darwinian evolution, with script just doing its thing, changing from one form to another over time... But as Dan pointed out, does this model forget to leave room for human agency? Dan pointed out that script is a cultural phenomenon, and handwriting is a day-to-day cultural act performed by people - so we need to think of them too. We can look for little details in manuscripts that hint at the experience of writing them, such as scribal mistakes. Dan illustrated this by showing us a variety of scribal hands from his own research on various Gothic scripts, with examples in which scribes had made tiny little errors in the shaping of letters. Either the scribe, or someone else, had gone back to make corrections. These little details remind us that manuscripts don't just happen, but were made by people working with complex expectations of how script should appear on the page. Dan called this the craft of scribes - an idea that could translate to many areas of manuscript research, and gave our audience food for thought.
Stewart also focused on the significance of the little details that appear in manuscripts, explaining how digital approaches can aid research in script analysis. Stewart is currently working on the DigiPal project, a free online tool that will allow users to compare the letter-forms of vernacular Anglo-Saxon scripts using database technology. He explained that we often think of script in macro terms: the units of the manuscript, one (or more) scribe, the overall style... But what about the micro-scale, where individual letter-forms might tell us about the influences of the scribe, in their moments of creativity or little accidents they might make (like Dan's accident-prone Gothic scribes)? DigiPal will offer a way of looking at lots of different letter-forms without flicking through manuscripts - instead, letters can be searched for and compared on-screen. The resource offers a great opportunity for the student members of the Society to engage with detailed analysis of script in their future research - we hope M.St and D.Phil students will find it helpful.
Questions, chaired by the Oxford Medieval Society's President Laura Varnam, suggested that Oxford palaeographers are keen to get involved in the type of detailed analysis both Dan and Stewart suggested. In particular, the group wondered whether the technology used by DigiPal will be applied to other fields. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and particularly to Stewart and Dan for providing such interesting introductions to their work!
