Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CLASP (A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry)
Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31
CLASP (‘A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.