Mapping Medieval Chester

I’ve just spent a couple of days in the British Library, making some final checks between my edition of the Henry Bradshaw Life of St Werburge and the British Library’s copy of the 1521 Richard Pynson publication (shelfmark C.21.c.40). If you have access to Early English Books Online you can view the digital facsimile of the British Library copy there – though inevitably the images don’t show all the detail, especially not all the marginal annotations. In fact, it’s those marginal notes I’ve been thinking about, as I’ve made my final pass through the Pynson text. One of the privileges of working with an early book is that feeling of following in the footsteps of earlier generations of readers (though please be reassured that I didn’t add my own set of marginal doodles). And as my research paper for this project is on the memory of the Anglo-Saxon past in late-medieval and early modern Chester, I’m particularly interested in what these annotations and comments can tell us about the way Pynson’s text was read by an early modern (late sixteenth-century) audience. (more…)

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading two new books which are directly relevant to our project research: Jane Laughton’s Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester, 1275-1520 and Robert Barrett’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656. I’m planning to share my thoughts on each of them here on the project blog. Today, I’m going to discuss my responses to Rob Barrett’s excellent book.

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Well, I’ve just sent off 1200 lines of the Bradshaw text, edited and XML encoded, to the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. I think I’m ordering take-away tonight.

This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.

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