A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Project Information

CLASP

Grant agreement ID: 695262

DOI

10.3030/695262

Project closed

EC signature date 3 June 2016

Start date 1 September 2016

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 443 640,00

EU contribution

€ 2 443 640,00

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CLASP (A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry)

Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

CLASP (‘A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ ) comprises a fully-searchable multimedia library of poetry from pre-Conquest England, both in Old English and Anglo-Latin, alongside a curated selection of Classical, Late, and Christian-Latin poetry known to Anglo-Saxon authors. The addition in particular of what has been widely considered as constituting the broad corpus of school-texts known to have been studied, memorised, and reused by Anglo-Saxon poets writing in both Latin and the vernacular, not only offers a range of tools and data-sets, but also provides significant opportunities for further research. A bespoke word-search tool that operates both across and between languages and allows comparison at a number of different levels, as well as from various particular perspectives: the value of this resource lies in its implicit flexibility, potentially to cover other languages and scripts.
One can navigate easily from the main site (clasp.ell.ox.ac.uk) with its own banner-headings and links to “Poems;” “Words;” “Handlists;” “Pattern Search;” “Concordances;” “Transcriptions;” and “Abbreviations.” For any given poem, whether in Old English or Latin, there are live links for each form to the so-called “Word Explorer,” connecting to the same form elsewhere in the corpus, and not simply enabling for the first time but actively encouraging readers to skip between texts, and make comparisons for a wide range of specific features. When a text is displayed, in the bottom right corner one will find check-boxes (where available) for “Show translation;” “Show errors and emendations;” “Show line structure;” “Show normalized version;” “Show syntax;” “Show scansions.” As you scroll down from the beginning of each poem, there are panels to the right with links to “Metadata;” “Tools;” “Repeated scansions;” and “Formulas.” As for CLASP-related publications, a first volume, containing twelve substantive papers focusing on Old English verse, edited by Rachel Burns and Rafael Pascual (Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre), and published with Open Access by Arc Humanities Press, appeared in 2022; a companion volume, focusing on Anglo-Latin poetry, edited by Rachel Burns, will also shortly be published with Open Access by Arc Humanities Press.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In terms of outputs alongside the database itself, a significant gain for the project was permission to incorporate in new digital form (and, thanks to CLASP, with new search-capabilities, for example, by date and provenance) one of the most iconic reference works for the period, namely the Gneuss–Lapidge Handbook of all the manuscripts written or known in England up to 1100; it is notable that, as a result of the project, a considerable amount of ancillary material has been added to the original material by Colleen Curran), including downloadable pdfs with live links to relevant online manuscript facsimiles, where available. In addition, there are links to three volumes (designated ‘CLASP Ancillary Publications’ [CAP]) available as pdfs for download from the CLASP website itself, as follows:
CAP 1: A second edition of Word-hord: a Lexicon of Old English Verse with a Particular Focus on the Distribution of Nominal and Adjectival Compounds, produced and edited by the PI with the assistance of four part-time researchers. The colour-coded Word-hord for Old English poetry allows for the first time (when used alongside the word-search tool) the comprehensive and systematic assessment of potential influence between texts, and hence a sense of the comparative chronology of the mostly anonymous and largely undated Old English corpus.
CAP 2: Metricalities: Studies in Old English Verse, by Eric Stanley, edited by the PI, and with prefatory remarks by Rafael Pascual, comprises the posthumous collection of unpublished works relating to Old English metre by a former Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford;
CAP 3: The Craft and Cunning of Anglo-Saxon Verse comprises five original essays by the PI relating to verse in both Anglo-Latin and Old English, a categorization of five types of parallels, and a collection of several hundreds of parallels divided into two groups, relating respectively to internal parallels in the four signed poems of Cynewulf, and parallels between Beowulf and eleven other Old English narrative poems.
The intention of both CAP 1 3, and indeed the PI’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture for 2019 (‘Alcuin and Cynewulf: the Art and Craft of Anglo-Saxon Verse’, Journal of the British Academy 8 [2020], 295–399; links to both the recording and the written paper are available via the CLASP-website]) is to highlight the extraordinary potential for future research that CLASP offers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

While a machine-readable library of Old English verse has been available in different forms for many years, it is based on the standard edited text, and so reflects a wide variation in spellings, while also eliding and obscuring scribal and editorial emendations; the normalized version that appears in CLASP alongside the edited version (and the ability to toggle between the two), represents a significant advance. Likewise, while there are scattered machine-readable versions of those texts that have relatively recently been identified as school-text authors available in the public domain, the identification of Anglo-Latin verse is a field still relatively under-developed, and electronic texts have been hard to come by: CLASP’s consolidation of these three hitherto quite separate corpora (Old English, Anglo-Latin, and school-text authors in Classical, Late, and Christian-Latin verse) is in itself both innovative and significant, and is intended to challenge the prevailingly monoglot and synchronic attitudes towards Old English in general, and Old English poetry in particular.
Other innovative features include a normalized corpus for Old English, so flattening the spelling-variants of individual manuscripts and scribes, and therefore enabling and encouraging comparisons and contrasts across the corpus in ways impossible previously; a parsing tool for Latin, to assist in the identification of sense and grammatical structure; and bespoke markup of caesuras, alliteration, and line-patterning in both languages. There is also a limited Audio-Visual archive, showcasing poems in both literary languages, as well as new translations and transcriptions of some of the longer Old English and Anglo-Latin poems.
The combined corpus can be interrogated in both normalized and manuscript spellings, and are further analysed through a number of different lenses, so offering a multi-layered tool for mapping the transition from script to print in ways previously unimaginable. The comprehensive multilingual and multifaceted perspectives provided by CLASP are unparalleled for the poetry of any period of English literature, and offer innovative opportunities for teaching and research, encouraging new editions, translations, readings, interpretations, and audiences. The other outcomes all contribute to the success of a significant and paradigm-shifting project. CLASP is not intended to be the end of anything, but rather the beginning of everything else.

Rafa Metre training workshop Oct 2019

Post Doc presenting

Post Doc R Burns presenting

PI presents at the Conference in Oct 2019

Post doc R Pascual