The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, part two

Firstly, allow me to gloat about three things:

1. I finally finished the dratted chapter. It was supposed to be half a chapter but blew itself out to around 4000 words. I sat down to write 800 or so concluding words last night and ended up writing 2500 words. But I think they’re bloody good words, so that’s happy.

2. I have been relieved of the deadline (which, to be fair, I nominated in the first place) for my Anglo-Saxon essay. Apparently since there’s only me in the class, I can write whatever I want and hand it in whenever I want.

3. The University appear to have put five hundred dollars in my bank account without warning or explanation. This is exciting (pays for flights to the Australian Early Medieval Association conference in October…), but also somewhat disconcerting (what if I wasn’t meant to get five hundred dollars?). I am supposing that it is the same prize I won last year, and that information to that effect will turn up eventually.

And now, on to

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, with apologies to AElfric:

Last week, Stalking Hinguar and his ravening Vikings were on their way to take King Eadmund of East Anglia captive. Scary stuff.

King Eadmund stood in his royal hall, resolute and noble, and completely without backup. Into the hall came Hinguar and his Vikings, and Eadmund raised up his weapons and….

Hurled them. Not at the Vikings; just away. This, AElfric opines, is because he was imitating Christ, who wouldn’t let Peter defend him with weapons, when Christ was under attack. Christ’s example or no, this is not a good way to deal with Vikings.

Hinguar and his Vikings marched straight up to the dais, grabbed King Eadmund and trussed him up like a christmas ham. They poked fun at him and battered him with cudgels, and then stuck him under their arms, dragged him out of the hall, and shackled him to a tree. Then, moderation not being a traditional virtue of pillaging Vikings, they proceeded to whip him with scourges. AElfric tells us that King Eadmund ‘cried out to the Savior Christ’ the whole time. I’m not sure why this is surprising, really. If someone was thrashing me with a scourge, I would certainly be shouting ‘JESUS CHRIST!’, and every other swear word I knew.

Eadmund’s caterwauling eventually pissed off the Vikings. Taking a few steps back, they shot him repeatedly with spears, until he was stuck all over with them, just like hedgehog’s bristles, not unlike St Sebastian.

Hinguar then got really fed up with Eadmund, who was still kicking up a stink and shouting about Jesus. He waved a commanding Viking hand, and someone lopped off Eadmund’s head. Eadmund died crying out to Christ, and we know this because, conveniently, there was a watching Anglo-Saxon nearby, miraculously hidden from the Vikings.

Soon enough, what remains of Eadmund’s people come along, and, shock and alarm, they find the body of King Eadmund, but Hinguar and co have nicked off with the head. (Leave a body with its head, after all, and it’s only a matter of time before you have a zombie on your hands…) The Mysterious Watcher chooses this moment to unveil himself, and to conveniently announce that he saw the Vikings peg the head off into the forest somewhere.

So off they go into the forest, the remnant of the East Angles, poking around in the bushes for a decorpsed head. What will happen next? Tune in next week to find out!

This is what a happy nerd looks like.

Observe the satchel, stuffed full with the fruits of the library. ¹
Observe the scuffed shoes, the baggy t-shirt, the rumpled hair.
Observe hunched-over posture.
Observe the arms, barely managing to clasp three volumes of Anglo-Saxon Law Codes, all neatly wrapped up in Document Delivery paper.

Observe the little old lady congratulating me on finishing my thesis.² If I ever write anything which I can barely get my arms around, I may have to kill someone.

Observe Wulfstan-puppy, his floppy limbs vainly trying to stretch the length of the cover. He shall stand guard over these precious works while I’m out to dinner at Awesome’s place.

~

1. Which nowhere includes AElfric’s life of King Edmund, all copies of ‘Lives of Three English Saints’ being out, Skeats ‘Lives of Saints’ being missing or hidden in the amorphous mass of Early English Text Society publications, and all editions of Mitchell and Robinson in the library being too early to contain it. Anyone know of an online edition? Another of student guide to Anglo-Saxon which may have King Edmund in it?
2. Maquarie Uni earn bonus points for not having lost their copies. *Glares at USyd Law Library* But, on the other hand, they lose points for still having them in pristine condition, barring a few neat pencil notes. Library books should not look like just-bound theses, people! They should be well used and well loved!

Who needs a system of sigla?

Does anyone actually find alphabetic sigla for manuscripts helpful, in a book? I’ve been sitting here trying to sort out Wormald’s system of sigla (for which the directory, for some reason, is on page 167, rather than sensibly at the beginning or end of the book), and listing manuscripts mentioned in other books which I may also have to add, and it occurs to me that the whole enterprise is more confusing than helpful.

There’s no central directory- so my manuscript, Cotton Nero A.i, is variously ‘G’, ‘I’ and ‘Y’, just in the books I have around me on the floor at the moment. A sensible option might be to refer to everything by it’s Ker catalogue number, but then what do you do with new books, or relevant books not in Anglo-Saxon? Individual sets of siglum, relevant to the topic at hand, are the only really tenable option. For it all to make sense, though, you have to presume that the reader is reading your whole book- and that’s an unrealistically optimistic outlook. Fact is, people pick up books and flick through them looking for the bits they need: unless your work is really relevant to them they’re not going to read the whole thing, and searching around for lists of siglum is a downright nuisance.

Me, even when I am reading a whole book, I get the alphabetical sigla horribly mixed up. Are we talking about MS G part i, or MS GI? Which one was MS O again? Personally, I’d be quite happy if books were routinely identified by a short form of their MS title. It’s hard to get confused about what ‘CCCC 201′ means, and personally I’d find it easier to remember the difference between ‘CCCC 201′ and CCCC 265′ than MS C and D. Perhaps it’s that the longer string of numbers turns on my pattern-retention reflex, which is actually pretty good.¹

Does anyone else feel this way?

Of course, the CCCCs are a fairly simple example. If only we could call them 4C201… My manuscript, BL Cotton Nero A.i(B) is rather more problematic, though. I can’t call it Nero- there’s another legal text, Cotton Nero E.i, which I may have to refer to. I can’t call it Nero A.i, because I have to refer to the first part of the composite, Cotton Nero A.i(A). So that leaves me with Nero A.i(B), which is rather lengthy and perhaps contains too many different types of information to read smoothly (as opposed to the CCCCs, which contain only two pieces of information even though the shorthand is hardly short).

I could call it Nero B, as opposed to Nero A, and specify that any other Nero manuscripts will be reffered to by their full shelf/number/part designations. Or I could use a siglum- in which case, I’d have to use sigla for the whole lot. Or I could teach MS Word to autocomplete Nero A.i(B) and save me the bother of typing it out every time…

What do you think, people?
Which would be the least odious form to read?

~

1. Which is why I never forget a randomly generated pin number. Don’t ask me why I can’t remember my own mobile phone number, though.

Better than a stress ball.

Since everyone liked the idea of drunkenness as a coping method, this week, I shall share with you a stress management tactic I actually practice.

Stuffed Toys. Fabulous things, in their own right. I happen to own a (small) collection named after Patristic theologians, but that’s another story.¹

The newest addition to my collection is a fluffy puppy by the name of Wulfstan. He lacks the fearsome expression you might expect, but is a satisfyingly floppy creature. He can be picked up and shaken in frustration; his limbs can be twisted around and his stomach squeezed, as one would a stress ball; he can be hurled across the room in moments of great distress; he will lie on top of piles of books and guard them devotedly; he will listen intently to the most boring study related monologue; he will maintain his expression of eternal floppy optimism in the fase of all crises; he can be shoved in a handbag and taken on another tedious trip to the library; and in addition to all this, he is fluffy and soothing to stroke.

Best of all, being a stuffed toy, he is unlikely (and really, unable) to object to being the object of re-directed Thesis Angst. This is a saintly quality not possessed by the general public around one.

Accordingly, I recommend everyone invest a stuffed toy or two with the spirit of their academic work.

~

1. Well, a pair. But I’m working on it.

Smugness

Sorry for the posting hiatus, all. An old friend turned up at an ungodly hour on Tuesday morning, and stayed until Wednesday evening. Which was lovely in all respects, and involved a shopping trip resulting in a new umbrella and knee-hi socks with skulls and crossbones on them, but it was not particularly condusive to thesis-related progress. Normal posting will resume on the weekend.

As well as being pleased with my socks, I am pleased with myself for a couple of other things today:

I have half a draft chapter due tomorrow, consisting of one manuscript description. Parts of it are quite definitely not going to happen- the DREADED TABLE mark two, concerning the Latin section of the MS, will not be appearing any time soon, for example. Other parts- such as the manuscript provenance- are proving too interesting for their own good.¹ But nevertheless, a draft of some kind will be done by 6pm tomorrow, if I have any say in the matter.

Smugness the First: meanwhile, my friends in history have just handed in their proposals, with varying degrees of certitude about what it actually is they’re doing. English students are meeting on friday to ‘workshop’ the 250 word thesis statements they handed in last week. And here’s me with my half-chapter.

I can’t decide whether to smugly tell everyone that I’m writing already, or to keep my trap shut now, and four weeks from the deadline wander around waving my complete draft, which would get me lynch mobbed by stressed history students.

Or I could have some modesty and a little perspective, and remember that I have twice as much classwork as said history students, so in second semester when I’m juggling two classes and a thesis, they’ll be locked in the library from dawn to dusk. But that would be the boring option, surely?

Smugness the Secont: someone nominated this post and now I’m on Inside Higher Ed’s Around the Web. Thank you, anonymous nominator!

~

1. Interesting in the OH. MY. GOD. Please-don’t-tell-me-I-have-to-disagree-with-Patrick-Wormald kind of Interesting way.

Sex Libris

Brandon’s discovery of the hottest library smut on the internet reminded me of a suggestion someone made me the other night¹: I ought to see if the BL’s website had a manuscript description for Cotton Nero A.i. Sure enough, they do (a nice neat list of contents), and in the process I have gained a severe case of library envy. Look at those collections!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when I’m transcribing in Fisher Rare Books, I’ll be thinking about the British Library.

~

1. Oooh, look, a dative pronoun!

W.W.W.D?

As I’m sure you’ve heard from Jonathan Jarrett and Brandon, the newest thing in medieval blogging is here: What Would Wulfstan Do?

Which is my question for the day: Would Wulfstan spend the day arsing around with tables? Would Wulfstan spend the afternoon commenting upon Sir Gawain? Would Wulfstan spend the day translating sermons? Would Wulfstan get dressed and go and examine Cotton Nero A.i?

(Answers: no- lived in a fortunate age before MS word; no- lived in a fortunate age before courtly poncing around; yes- quite often; yes- presumably, it being his MS and all. But WHY, oh why, would he be examining it? If I knew that, I’d have a whole chapter written already.)

Would Wulfstan have breakfast and a cup of tea first? Yes, yes he would.

I’m a real nerd now!

I just submitted my very first Inter-Library Loan Request. This arcane power is not available to general undergraduates, but is granted to Honours students (possibly because it is like crack to a true library nerd, and will lure us on to postgraduate study through the promise of ever more obscure journal articles). I’m sure Awesome breathed a sigh of relief when I enrolled in fourth year, after having spend third year requesting obscure articles for me. (Why do we stock the Franciscan Quarterly, but not the American Benedictine Review? Why do we have a Canadian Literature collection but not stock English Studies in Canada? I ask you!)

Soon, soon, Wilcox’s ‘The St Brice’s Day Massacre and Archbishop Wulfstan’ will be in my hot little hands.

Useful things I have discovered on the road to productivity:

* That setting up in a library or other studious location will perforce jolt the brain into some semblance of studiousness, even in the face of fourth-year-itis. It remains to be seen what happens when the library fills up at the end of semester and my search-and-destroy typing methods drive everyone batty.

* That you really do use your left hand more when typing. Whaddya know?

*That making plans and having short-term goals is really, really important, in the absence of frequent undergraduate assessments.

* That nine months is NOT a long time in which to write a thesis.

*That I am going to DIE in the month of June.

* That the Bocera thinks I should apply for PHDs to start next year, and then defer if I REALLY think I’m burnt out, but “no one does anything in the first year of a PHD anyway”.

*That said Bocera is going on holiday commencing two weeks before my thesis is due, and coming back just on the due date. Current plan is, this will force me to have the thing finished early. Suspected outcome is, Awesome takes over final editing and/or crisis control.

Thinkin’ about the Thesis: What do YOU want in a manuscript description?

As I was ranting in my LJ last night about the nightmare of creating a table format Manuscript Description, Brandon started me thinking about the possibility of broader problems with the manuscript-describing conventions in Anglo-Saxon studies.

I’ve found three main problems with the descriptions of my manuscript (London, B.L., Cotton Nero A.i- part B):

* Firstly, none of the comprehensive descriptions (Wormald’s Making of English Law, Ker’s Catalogue, Loyn’s facsimile introduction) are written at the level I want them. You more or less have to know what’s in the manuscript before you can understand the descriptions. Loyn’s introduction, being the most comprehensive, has been the most useful to me, but even he assumes the reader knows what he’s talking about. In the early stages of research (not having much idea of Anglo-Saxon legal history or of manuscript studies), what I really wanted was a description which told me in a few sentences for each entry what sort of text it was (law, homily, Institutes of Polity, other tract), whether or not it was by Wulfstan, and what general topics it dealt with. I can find all these things out, that’s what God invented research for, but it struck me as odd that none of the descriptions provided that.

* Secondly, all the descriptions are presented as lists, meaning that you can only really use them by reading through in the order in which the texts appear in the MS. What I wanted, when I was first starting my enquiries, was the ability to scan quickly through and isolate all the homilies, or all the laws, or all the chapters of the Institutes.

* Thirdly, except for Wormald’s table in The Making of English Law (p. 200-201), they don’t note quire divisions within the list. If you’re sitting there with Wormald’s book, or his article Archbishop Wulfstan and the Holiness of Society, and trying to figure out which texts were in the MS at which point in its life, this is most frustrating. Wormald’s table was obviously designed for this purpose, breaking the MS into five sections, but the list of contents is in such a shorthand form that again, unless you knew the works of Wulfstan well, you’d find yourself unable to isolate any themes or patterns to the groupings of texts.

Accordingly, I’m making myself a table which will do all of these things at once. If Micrsoft Word doesn’t drive me insane in the process, I will end up with a lovely guide which should be of great use throughout the rest of the year.
Brandon suggested to me, in response to the Livejournal rant about the difficulties of making tables, that I’m not the only one frustrated by Ker and co, and that although invaluable, his methods may be getting a little out of date. Brandon has heard word of a paper given somewhere by Elaine Treharne talking about the need for a new approach to manuscript descriptions, so I guess I’m not the only one frustrated.

Which brings me to the Questions of the Day:

For the Anglo-Saxonists:
* What, if any, do you think are the weaknesses of Ker’s Catalogue?
* Which scholar do you feel presents the most easy-to-read manuscript description format?
* Can anyone give me references to (recent-ish) articles or books in which the principles of manuscript description are discussed? Has there been “scholarly debate”, as they say, about the need to update our approach?

For all and sundry:
* What do you want in a manuscript description? What makes a description easy to use? What sort of features do you look for first? What features do you want to group together or to compare? (Do you want to be able to quickly scan the the orthography section and locate common features of all the scribes? Is it important to be able to quickly compare notes concerning the wear & tear on different sections? Which of these would be MOST important to your work?)
* If you prepare descriptions for your own reference, what sort of format do you use?