Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ECHOE (An Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English)
Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-02-28
Anonymous Old English preaching texts, written and copied between the ninth and late twelfth centuries, survive in ca. 350 versions in ca. 60 manuscripts. They represent the most comprehensive vernacular preaching corpus of medieval Europe before 1200 AD and depend almost entirely on a wide variety of Latin sources from all over the continent. This project will revolutionise scholarly work on Old English anonymous homilies by tracing, visualising, and studying their highly complex material and textual transmission in full. It will recover, unite, and systematise all surviving Old English anonymous homilies (ca. 680,000 words) in an online and interactive digital corpus that brings to the fore the individual manuscript version and all its revisional layers from before 1200. The project counters traditional editorial models of collation by exposing substantial textual difference and by analysing compositional and variational procedures. This will enable users for the first time to comprehensively study Old English anonymous homilies as living texts through the centuries. ECHOE will a) introduce a new taxonomy for the homiletic corpus, b) identify the closest Latin and Old English sources, c) identify the compositional structure of mobile textual units between related versions of the corpus, d) mark up decisive palaeographical features, idiosyncratic diction, formulas, themes, and genres, and e) assess the historical, social, and theological dimension of revisions and the roles of individual revisers. The digital corpus will reveal for the first time the complex network of interrelated versions and allow for a swift comparison of parallels and their sources. It will further allow modern audiences to explore the chronological as well as geographical relations between Old English homilies and their European sources, and will open up new perspectives on the identity of authors, revisers, users, and audiences.
This project is important for modern society, because it opens up new ways of understanding peripheral, non-élite education in Europe and gauges the impact of religious doctrine on European society, and England in particular. The results will not only reveal how preachers composed their speeches and which fictional and rhetorical elements and cultural memes they employed for elocutionary purposes, it will also trace the actual performances of these texts, by highlighting, quantifying and studying the rhetorical manuscript mark up. The project thus provides unique data on the construction of doctrinal discourse and traces phenomena such as source authority, (self-)censorship as well as the legal and political tailoring of texts into changing historical contexts. The project is further important because it provides novel forms of big data analysis, such as in the area of profiling individual handwriting of Old English prose. In doing so it is exposing the beauty of palaeographical idiosyncrasy, trying to balance it with modern forms of the technologizing of the word in editing, well aware of the risks that digital communication holds for the survival and knowledge of various types of handwriting. The project also raises awareness for languages that show orthographic inconsistency, exposing the creative potential involved in this phenomenon, but also providing solutions to tackle this issue with the help of respective search engines. For the field of Old English, the origin of the modern world language of English, ECHOE is not only carrying out ground-breaking research, it is also setting standards for the transcription of Old English prose and its mark up and aims at facilitating the analysis of orthographically inconsistent corpora.
This project is important for modern society, because it opens up new ways of understanding peripheral, non-élite education in Europe and gauges the impact of religious doctrine on European society, and England in particular. The results will not only reveal how preachers composed their speeches and which fictional and rhetorical elements and cultural memes they employed for elocutionary purposes, it will also trace the actual performances of these texts, by highlighting, quantifying and studying the rhetorical manuscript mark up. The project thus provides unique data on the construction of doctrinal discourse and traces phenomena such as source authority, (self-)censorship as well as the legal and political tailoring of texts into changing historical contexts. The project is further important because it provides novel forms of big data analysis, such as in the area of profiling individual handwriting of Old English prose. In doing so it is exposing the beauty of palaeographical idiosyncrasy, trying to balance it with modern forms of the technologizing of the word in editing, well aware of the risks that digital communication holds for the survival and knowledge of various types of handwriting. The project also raises awareness for languages that show orthographic inconsistency, exposing the creative potential involved in this phenomenon, but also providing solutions to tackle this issue with the help of respective search engines. For the field of Old English, the origin of the modern world language of English, ECHOE is not only carrying out ground-breaking research, it is also setting standards for the transcription of Old English prose and its mark up and aims at facilitating the analysis of orthographically inconsistent corpora.
By the end of the covered period (i.e. up to Feb 2021) the project team has:
• Formally transcribed and marked up ca. 97% of the entire corpus (338 of 348 versions = ca. 555,000 words);
• Sourced ca. 20% of all homilies, sentence by sentence, including the deep source horizon of antecedents
• Implemented ca. 35% of the planned mark up
• Has proof-read ca. 97% of the corpus in a first run-through, integrated first revisions for ca. 69% of the corpus, and completed second revision for ca. 42%.
• Developed an alpha website of the project that offers access to 22 versions, enables version and sentence comparison and visualizes version overlap
• Developed a new version of the edition software, including a reactive JavaScript client in Vue.js and a server component in Java.
• Developed analytics tools to quantify palaeographical features
• Developed first stages of search functionality for the ECHOE corpus through an orthographically tolerant search engine
• Established a workflow for sentence mark up of the corpus which takes the source identification into account
• Obtained the images and rights of publication for c. 95% of the manuscript sources
Project Presentation and Public Impact
• December 2018: the PI introduced the project and presented the latest results on the continental provenance of the Vercelli Book and its homilies in London.
• January 2019: The IT Researcher Grant Simpson presented at the MLA conference in Chicago
• March 2019: the PI and project team conducted a workshop week on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts through the Vercelli School of Medieval European Palaeography at Vercelli (Italy) in March/April 2019. The workshop week included a public reading event, which took place on 4 April.
• March 2019: Team members attended the DHd Conference in Frankfurt am Main
• March/April 2019: the PI and Senior researcher Thomas Hall carried out manuscript research on Latin homiliaries in Basle, St Gall, Vercelli, and Milan, identifying new sources to the OE corpus
• April 2019: a Twitter account for the project was created
• May 2019: the PI and the Senior Researcher have presented results of the project at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI (U.S.A.) in two sessions
• June 2019: The PI introduced 30 postdocs of Göttingen University to the ECHOE project and the ERC application process
• August 2019: the PI and IT Researcher presented the project at the meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Albuquerque, NM (U.S.A.)
• September 2019: Team Member Julia Josfeld and IT Researcher Grant Simpson presented Project Text Model at TEI conference in Graz (Austria)
• In November 2019 the PI introduced the project to “The Guild”, a consortium of Deans of Faculties of Philosophy from European universities and to the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Sebastian Wood (25 November) at meetings in Göttingen.
• December 2019: a Memorandum of Understanding was ratified between Göttingen and the University of Toronto.
• July 2020: Team member Paul Langeslag reported on perspectives of lemmatizing the ECHOE at the virtual International Medieval Congress (Leeds, UK).
• September: Team member Thomas N. Hall presented source discoveries at a workshop in Udine (Italy)
• December 2020: a collection of essays on Old English homilies and their sources has been published with BRILL publishers, co-edited by the PI.
• Formally transcribed and marked up ca. 97% of the entire corpus (338 of 348 versions = ca. 555,000 words);
• Sourced ca. 20% of all homilies, sentence by sentence, including the deep source horizon of antecedents
• Implemented ca. 35% of the planned mark up
• Has proof-read ca. 97% of the corpus in a first run-through, integrated first revisions for ca. 69% of the corpus, and completed second revision for ca. 42%.
• Developed an alpha website of the project that offers access to 22 versions, enables version and sentence comparison and visualizes version overlap
• Developed a new version of the edition software, including a reactive JavaScript client in Vue.js and a server component in Java.
• Developed analytics tools to quantify palaeographical features
• Developed first stages of search functionality for the ECHOE corpus through an orthographically tolerant search engine
• Established a workflow for sentence mark up of the corpus which takes the source identification into account
• Obtained the images and rights of publication for c. 95% of the manuscript sources
Project Presentation and Public Impact
• December 2018: the PI introduced the project and presented the latest results on the continental provenance of the Vercelli Book and its homilies in London.
• January 2019: The IT Researcher Grant Simpson presented at the MLA conference in Chicago
• March 2019: the PI and project team conducted a workshop week on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts through the Vercelli School of Medieval European Palaeography at Vercelli (Italy) in March/April 2019. The workshop week included a public reading event, which took place on 4 April.
• March 2019: Team members attended the DHd Conference in Frankfurt am Main
• March/April 2019: the PI and Senior researcher Thomas Hall carried out manuscript research on Latin homiliaries in Basle, St Gall, Vercelli, and Milan, identifying new sources to the OE corpus
• April 2019: a Twitter account for the project was created
• May 2019: the PI and the Senior Researcher have presented results of the project at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI (U.S.A.) in two sessions
• June 2019: The PI introduced 30 postdocs of Göttingen University to the ECHOE project and the ERC application process
• August 2019: the PI and IT Researcher presented the project at the meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Albuquerque, NM (U.S.A.)
• September 2019: Team Member Julia Josfeld and IT Researcher Grant Simpson presented Project Text Model at TEI conference in Graz (Austria)
• In November 2019 the PI introduced the project to “The Guild”, a consortium of Deans of Faculties of Philosophy from European universities and to the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Sebastian Wood (25 November) at meetings in Göttingen.
• December 2019: a Memorandum of Understanding was ratified between Göttingen and the University of Toronto.
• July 2020: Team member Paul Langeslag reported on perspectives of lemmatizing the ECHOE at the virtual International Medieval Congress (Leeds, UK).
• September: Team member Thomas N. Hall presented source discoveries at a workshop in Udine (Italy)
• December 2020: a collection of essays on Old English homilies and their sources has been published with BRILL publishers, co-edited by the PI.
Progress beyond the state of the art:
• Identified new texts and autographs
• First complete edition and full textual representation alongside Latin sources, as far as they can be identified
• New sources have been identified
• Hitherto unrecorded variants and revisions have been charted and communicated to the Dictionary of Old English
• New tools have been developed that enable unprecedented tracing of textual parallels, hitherto unknown
• Full handlist of versions and manuscripts in progress
Expected results:
See summary of aims above. The project has seen some impediments due to Covid-19 during the past 12 months of the reporting period, but – prolongation granted – expects to complete all steps lined out.
• Identified new texts and autographs
• First complete edition and full textual representation alongside Latin sources, as far as they can be identified
• New sources have been identified
• Hitherto unrecorded variants and revisions have been charted and communicated to the Dictionary of Old English
• New tools have been developed that enable unprecedented tracing of textual parallels, hitherto unknown
• Full handlist of versions and manuscripts in progress
Expected results:
See summary of aims above. The project has seen some impediments due to Covid-19 during the past 12 months of the reporting period, but – prolongation granted – expects to complete all steps lined out.