Table Of ContentCollection Development, Cultural Heritage,
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DIGITAL MEDIEVAL
STUDIES
PRACTICE AND PRESERVATION
edited by
Laura K. Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf
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© 2022, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ...............................................................vi
LAURA K. MORREALE and SEAN GILSDORF .........................................
Introduction: The Medievalist, Digital Edition
1
Chapter 1: Beginnings: The Labyrinth
DEBORAH EVERHART and MARTIN IRVINE .......................................
Medieval Studies Website
11
Chapter 2: New Approaches to Old Questions:
JOHN MCEWAN .......................................................................
Digital Technology, Sigillography, and digisig
33
Corpus Synodalium
Chapter 3: : Medieval Canon Law
ROWAN DORIN
in a Digital Age
.................................................................49
J. W. TORGERSON .....................................................................
Chapter 4: Teaching Constantinople as a (Pixelated) Palimpsest
77
LISA FAGIN DAVIS ....................................................................
Chapter 5: Life on—and off—the Continuum
99
..................................................
Appendix: Permanent Links to the
Catalogued Assets of Profiled Projects 112
......................................................................................
Index 113
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1: Image of the floor labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral
(ca. 1215–1221 CE), reworked. .................................... 14
Figure 1.2: Martin Irvine and Deborah Everhart at
Georgetown University withm aant reiamrloyn Liuambyrinth page ............... 19
Figure 3.1a: Search results for the word (marriage),
showing absolute frequenciemsa otvriemr otwnieunmtyfiveyear intervals. ...... 62
Figure 3.1b: Search results for the word (marriage);
clicking any result brings up the full text with
the search term highlighted.m .a..t.ri.m..o.n.i.u.m............................ 62
Figure 3.2: Search results for the word (marriage);
clicking any result brings up the full text with the
search term highlighted ........................................... 64
matrimonium
Figure 3.3: Map showing frequency of references to
(marriage) in diocesan statutes;
clicking any jurisdiction brings up its associated texts
with the search term highlighted. .................................. 66
Figure 4.1: Constantinople as Palimpsest concept, with map
for the topic Monumental Architecture. ............................ 80
Figure 4.2: Constantinople as Palimpsest, ca. 2015............................. 81
Figure 4.3: Clustered cisterns near the Imperial Court.......................... 90
Figure 4.4: Clustered cisterns in the regions of Blachernae and Petra. .......... 90
Figure 4.5: Cistern clusters around the monastery of Constantine Lips.......... 90
Introduction
THE MEDIEVALIST, DIGITAL EDITION
LAURA K. MORREALE and SEAN GILSDORF
a scholar of the medieval world, a morning of research and writing might
if you are
unfold in the following way. After starting up your laptop, you open a document using
Microsoft Word or some other word processor. You scroll through the pages, perhaps
pausing to fix an errant footnote or typo. Once the writing process begins, you might
select a few .pdfs of primary or secondary source readings, open them on your comput-
er’s desktop, then search for a passage or term by using a menu or keystroke command.
If the text is something you decide to quote in your article or chapter, you may be able
to highlight it, press “control-c” (copy), and then press “control-v” (paste) to incorpo-
rate the relevant passages from the source material straight into the document you are
writing, thereby avoiding concerns about introducing spelling or other errors into the
writing process, no matter how obscure or unfamiliar the text. You’ll then note the page
number from the .pdf, enter it into a footnote (the format of which has been checked and
rechecked on the website of the journal or publisher to which the researcher is submit-
ting), and move on with the writing process.
What if a file is missing from your personal laptop or Zotero library, or you’ve mis-
placed the details needed to cite the work or page number? This means a virtual trip to
the library to consult the online catalogue, to dip into computer-based repositories like
Internet Archive or HathiTrust, or even to reference a digitized manuscript so that the
argument is made whole and all sources accounted for. Unfortunately, there also may
be missing pieces that make such a virtual trip to the library impossible: you cannot
remember the author of an article, the editor of a collection, or the shelf mark of the
manuscript that would allow an easy search through the digital archives. No need to
worry; there are field and subjectspecific databases and online bibliographies that col-
lect these references and make them accessible to fellow scholars, all a click or two away.
A quick Google search also may turn up the right information, and if all hope is lost, a
call can be sent out to colleagues via email, Twitter, Facebook, listservs, or other forms
of instant messaging. People (sometimes ones you’ve never even met before) respond
to your pleas, perhaps within minutes, offering up citations, missing page numbers, and
even emailed copies of articles to get you back to the reading, thinking, and writing that
is so fundamental to our field.
Digital tools and approaches inform our pedagogy as well. Twentyfive years ago,
you might have hired an information technology (IT) professional to build and manage a
website for you, if you felt you needed one at all. Now, many of us maintain a web pres-
Laura K. Morreale
Sean Gilsdorf
, Global Medieval Studies Program, Georgetown University;
, Committee on Medieval Studies, Harvard University.
2
Laura K. MorreaLe and sean giLsdorf
ence via course pages on our school’s content management platforms. We upload mate-
rials, provide links, add new pages, and subscribe users to the curated web-spaces that
nearly everyone who teaches is required to have. We must become savvy consumers of
web-based knowledge, content, and tools in order to populate our course pages, add
chat rooms, incorporate YouTube videos, or integrate tools, exhibits, or workspaces for
1
our students. This is what being a scholar and teacher looks like today: online, instantly
and unceasingly accessible, and in constant contact with colleagues and repositories
2
of knowledge. Yet despite our field’s deep immersion in online modes of researching,
writing, and teaching, many medievalists still feel uncomfortable calling themselves dig-
ital scholars, and thus are quick to dismiss groundbreaking digitallyinflected medieval
think 3
scholarship as outside their purview and not relevant to the way they work. Whatever
actually
the reasons, there is a gap between what we we are doing as medievalists and
what we are doing as we consult manuscripts, collate texts, compile subject
specific bibliographies, teach and mentor students, stay uptodate with the latest work
4
in our subfield, and create new scholarship in a computerbased knowledge economy.
This collection of invited essays features authors whose computer-based schol-
arship is oriented towards fundamental goals of medieval humanities research: they
identify and make available fieldspecific resources, locate and organize sources from
the medieval past, contextualize, analyze, and compare medieval materials, and present
what they have learned from these efforts to students in the classroom and colleagues in
public venues. Because digital humanities scholarship is governed by the same values,
practices, and goals of humanistic inquiry more broadly, its products also are recogniz-
able to all medievalists, and there are many journals and essay collections that map out
how individual digital projects extend the scholarly activities first practiced in the ana-
logue world. Our goal in this volume, however, is to ensure both that this scholarship is
taken seriously as an identifiable and articulated process, and just as importantly that
it can exist as a durable intellectual product. The chapters that follow thus are neither
5
project reports nor standins for the digital efforts of their authors. Rather, they are
critical reflections on what those authors have learned in the process of engaging in
computer-based research and teaching, and demonstrations of how such work can be
recorded, disseminated, and preserved in a form commensurate with more traditional
forms of Medieval Studies scholarship. In this introduction, we outline the journey many
medievalists make when setting out to work in the digital space, some common chal-
lenges they face, and new ways that they can make their work not only more compre-
hensible to peers now but also available to scholars in the future.
1
2
Davis, Gold, and Harris, “Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.”
3
This point is made effectively in Birnbaum, Bonde, and Kestemont, “The Digital Middle Ages,” S3.
There are still few clearcut examples of the efficacy of digital methodologies; this is addressed
4
directly in Hiltmann et al., “Digital Methods in Practice.”
For a reflection on how digital methodologies rely upon core aspects of traditional humanities
5 Meeting the Medieval in
work, see Moravec, “Digital Historical Practices.”
a Digital World Digital Medievalist
For examples of project reports, see Davis, MahoneySteel, and Turnator,
, or the many projectbased articles featured in the journal .
3
The MedievaLisT, digiTaL ediTion
Familiarity and Novelty
We might describe the current situation, with so many medievalists fully immersed in
online knowledge exchange yet still hesitant to engage with born-digital research in
their field, as a case of growing pains. This process of transformation, affecting not only
the tools we use to carry out our research but also the very process of that research, can
sometimes feel rapid and disorienting—due at least in part to the perception of digi-
tal scholarship as a province of the hard sciences, where innovation is the watchword.
While much of the rhetoric surrounding born-digital work emphasizes what is new and
pathbreaking, therefore, many of us accept change in fits and starts, with an accompany-
ing sense of discomfort, and we rely heavily upon previous practices before engaging
in, or even accepting, new modes of working and learning. This is because, as with any
technology, new digital platforms, methods, and approaches always must be rooted in
and integrated with older, more familiar and comfortable ways of learning and knowing
in order to be comprehensible, much less successful.
Millennia ago, one of the most momentous transformations in learning technol-
ogy—the shift from scrolls to codices as the dominant format for longer-form written
communication and textual preservation—epitomized this integration of the familiar
and unfamiliar, adapting longstanding scribal habits and practices within a new system
of informational storage and presentation first embraced (like all technological inno-
vations) by a cadre of early adopters before gaining wider acceptance in the following
6
centuries. One can see a similar process at work in the creation of glossed Bibles in
the twelfth century ce, as a centuries-old textual form (the Biblical codex) was updated
and transformed with what were then high-tech innovations, such as apparatus keyed
to main text via complex sigla (the distant ancestors, in a sense, of our modern hyper-
links). Perhaps most famously, the shift in Europe from manuscript to print, despite its
frequent characterization as revolutionary, was one in which older forms and formats
7 had
played a critical role. In addition to the ongoing role of manuscripts themselves as
sources, models, and adjuncts to printed volumes, for many years printed books to
operate according to manuscript visual and operative logic in order to be accepted and
understood, an impulse still seen today in the e-reader, whose creators and program-
mers quickly realized that users still wanted to be able to turn the page, if only in a
simulacral form.
Much more recently, the introduction of computers and computing into the scholarly
research process has followed a similar path, one in which digital elements have been
mixed in or appended onto predominantly analogue materials and outputs. In many
instances, scholars have applied computer-based tools such as algorithms, visualization
software, or data mining to wellestablished questions or topics. This approach was one
taken by a number of medieval social historians, including David Herlihy and Christiane
6 The Birth of the Codex
The classic account remains Roberts and Skeat, , from 1983; cf. the
7
perceptive comments of McCormick, “The Birth of the Codex and the Apostolic Life-Style.”
For a recent and valuable overview of this issue in its English context, see Boffey, “From Man-
uscript to Print.”
4
Laura K. MorreaLe and sean giLsdorf
catasto
laudatio parentum
KlapischZuber in their 1978 study of the Florentine of 1427, or Stephen White
a decade later in his analysis of kin approval ( ) in eleventh-century
8
French donation charters. In both cases, computers were used to carry out work that
previous generations of scholars either had done painstakingly by hand, or had avoided
doing due to the time and effort it required. In turn, medievalists increasingly turned to
Online Catasto
digital technology in order to expand or enhance works of traditional (i.e., print-based)
scholarship. Good examples of this are the project at Brown University,
produced by Robert Burr Litchfield and Anthony Moelho to present in generally acces-
sible and searchable form the data derived from Herlihy and KlapischZuber’s earlier
9
research, or the cdroM disks containing maps, images, and sound files that became
common appendices to print textbooks in the early 2000s, and that since have been sup-
planted by analogous publisher-produced websites.
Even as digital scholarship matures, however, and the research that we do becomes
increasingly born-digital, it remains the case that all such work still must build and rely
upon earlier technologies and epistemic structures, and be legible in terms of previous
scholarly practices and modes. To be sure, every medievalist today is a digital scholar
in important ways. Just as significantly, however, even the most techsavvy among us
continues to be part of a scholarly enterprise with deep and enduring analogue roots.
We as a field have come to our current state of digital integration slowly, adopting and
rejecting certain technologies along the way insofar as they do or do not meet our
10
research needs. Many of us have witnessed this change without taking much notice of
it; at times we consciously changed our ways of working, while at other times we did so
unthinkingly, but always in step with developing norms, in concert with colleagues who
themselves were learning to work in the digital medium and with reference to the work-
ing models of the past.
Thinking Digitally, Documenting Narratively
In light of all this, it should come as no surprise that digital argumentation in Medieval
Studies still relies upon only a limited number of methodologies, even as computer-
based tools are constantly evolving. Among these are the ability to aggregate, analyze,
and filter large amounts of data; to access, disseminate, and publish materials broadly;
to support simultaneity and user-driven interaction; to link materials across the digi-
tal landscape; to collocate words and images within a corpus; and to represent space,
11
whether real or imagined, visually. Most computer-based scholarship calls upon one
or a combination of these affordances, so that the outcomes are readily recognizable
8 Les Toscans et leurs familles Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to
Saints
Herlihy and KlapischZuber, ; White,
9 The Online Catasto Project
.
10
Moelho and Litchfield, .
The continued hesitancy about accepting digital modes of scholarship has been under discussion
for quite some time. See, for example, Lässig, “Digital History. Challenges and Opportunities for the
11 TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities)
Profession,” and Edmond, “Collaboration and Infrastructure.”
, downloadable at http://
