Something About Oxford

"There's something about this place," said Peter presently, "that alters one's values." ~ Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

The first I knew of Oxford was from Dorothy Sayers' murder mysteries, which I read in my early teens. Gaudy Night is, still, one of what I like to think of as my "cornerstone books"--the books that are so special to me, so fundamental, that I can hardly bear to share them, except on very special occasions. Gaudy Night changed, ever after, the way I think about the life of the mind, romantic relationships, what we owe to our families and what we owe to ourselves, and the impact of studying at the University of Oxford. 

I first came to Oxford as a Visiting Student at Mansfield College, in 2009-2010, and made frequent visits as PhD student and intermittent research trips after I finished my doctorate. And now I get to go back!

"The Bridge of Sighs" by J.Salmoral is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Why am I in Oxford?

In a week, God willing, I will be in Oxford as a Humfrey Wanley Visting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, researching the women who ran the libraries' unofficial early twentieth century research department. It's partly a feminist reclamation project--an attempt to quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate how male scholars' research and publication was made possible by the labor of women. As a fellow historian once said to me, the purpose of history is not to judge but to understand, so my purpose is not to rail against the dead, but rather to reveal the landscape of possibility and limitation navigated by the women who worked in Oxford's libraries. 

As I wrote in my research proposal for the project,

With the appearance of the hashtag ThanksForTyping on Twitter in 2017, the academic community began new conversations about the ways in which women’s contributions to the research and publications of their male family members have gone unacknowledged. Scholarship has so far focused on written work and associated activities such as co-writing, typing, and editing. Yet the unacknowledged contributions of women to the research process has been comparatively neglected. The Bodleian’s own historic archives provide a unique opportunity to fill this gap. Between 1860 and his death in 1906, Bodleian Senior Assistant George Parker ran an unofficial research department, answering questions about manuscripts from scholars around the world. From at least the 1890s, the majority of research queries, especially those about manuscripts, were answered by his daughters Angelina (nicknamed Anna) and Evelyn. My project will examine the correspondence of George, Anna, and Evelyn Parker, held as Library Records A.6.2.b and A.6.2.d, in order to shed light on the contributions of two remarkable female scholars to the study of medieval manuscripts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My Research Questions

In other words, what's unique about my project is that I'm not focusing on great scholars or landmark publications, but on the step before a scholar writes up their findings--the research process itself. The Bodleian offers a unique opportunity to do this kind of work, because it has an archive of letters from a wide range of researchers, asking a group of female library to workers to answer specific questions about items in the library collections. A preliminary reading of the letters in the Bodleian archive suggested that they could be used to answer three interlinked questions:

1. How did the Parker sisters learn the skills necessary to study medieval manuscripts? Manuscript studies are made up a series of technical skills--understanding how the book is put together (codicology), understanding the handwriting (paleography), reading the text (language skills), and situating the book and its contents in its wider context in order make sense of what it tells us (historical analysis). The core question is, what were manuscript studies like in the 1890s and prewar period? How did scholars do their work? Is there anything we can learn from their methods of teaching and learning that can be applied to teaching manuscript skills today?
   
2. What scholarly networks did Angelina and Evelyn (and George) take part in? By tracking who they were writing to, and about what, I intend to map the national and international scholarly networks in which the Parkers and the Bodleian participated. Thanks to the brilliant suggestion of my colleague Simon Corcoran, I will also be answering this question by looking for mentions of the Parkers in the acknowledgments sections of academic books. 
3. Lastly, how was the work of the ladies of Bodleian Research valued by their contemporaries? This builds on the how, who, and what, of my first two research questions by seeing what comes of following the money. My preliminary investigation of Parker correspondence from 1898 and 1903 showed that the scholars who requested the help of the Parker sisters frequently inquire after rates or promise payment for work completed. By exploring the financial side of their work, I will hopefully be able to contextualise it within the wider body of work that has been done on women’s employment in the early twentieth century.

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him—or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.” ~ Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

My research proposal sums it up like this:

My project demonstrates how the archives of major research libraries can reveal unseen scholars and unacknowledged contributions. My work will uncover how informal networks of learning centred on the home and library workplace resulted in the development of professional quality manuscript skills and will influence my development of manuscript studies teaching in the future. The history of the women of the Bodleian libraries research department shows how female scholars made a place for themselves within the rapidly changing fields of nineteenth century historical research and librarianship.

It's a great pleasure and privilege to have the opportunity to explore these questions. I will blog regularly about the progress of my research, so please do follow along!

Outside the Library

 

"The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow." ~ Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

"Oxford University Parks" by npdoty is licensed underCC BY 2.0

Alongside spending as much time as possible in the archives, I am also looking forward to living in Oxford. Among the many things I adore about Gaudy Night is the incredibly beautiful descriptions of Oxford's architecture and landscape (see above); it will be great fun to see these places with my own eyes. I am looking forward to many morning and evening runs through the University Parks, Port Meadows, Christ Church Meadows, and more--I'm planning to balance exploring old favourites with new discoveries and complete at least two Oxford parkruns. This will be my first visit to Oxford as a keen runner, so I'm hoping to visit the Sir Roger Bannister running track.

After eighteen months of working from home, it's going to be a big change to be around people again! Socially, I want to make the most of opportunities to meet new people and renew acquaintances. I aim to listen generously and make other people laugh. I also want to attend as many classical music concerts as I possibly can--one of my fondest memories of my time as a visiting student was playing violin and viola in as many Oxford orchestras and chamber music ensembles as I could fit into a week--it's a terrific place to be a music-lover, and live music is one of the things I have missed most in the pandemic.

I'm enormously grateful for this opportunity and I hope you will enjoy reading about it as much as I will enjoy writing about it.

A Poem for "Freedom Day"

"Grumpy old man" by Spamily is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The United Kingdom has lived under a significant level of restrictions for much of the pandemic and most of these are being lifted on Monday, 19 July, dubbed 'Freedom Day' by the press. With the number of Covid cases on the rise, there are mixed feelings about this. Public opinion about the easing of restrictions is divided, and many clinically vulnerable people are preparing to restrict their movements and interactions in order to keep themselves safe.

 

For myself, I plan to continue living as quietly and cautiously as I can; here is a poem that helps me see the humour in this. I hope it makes you smile too.

Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!  

~ Walter Alexander Raleigh, reprinted in the Zoo of the New, ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (London, 2017), p. 425.

Learning from the Best: Reflections on IMC 2021

This past week was the second virtual International Medieval Congress--one of the world's largest gatherings of scholars and students of the Middle Ages. For many medievalists, it's known simply after its location, Leeds (as in 'are you giving a paper at Leeds this year?')

An accurate reflection of my conference experience

Although I've attended and presented annually since 2013, for the past few years I have only attended part of the conference, rather than the full five days. I learned early on that less could be more: rather than attending the full five days, I actually got more value for my money if I left blank spaces in my schedule for browsing the book fair, refueling with coffee, or seeking a quiet place to reflect and recharge. One of the advantages of an online conference is that taking breaks can be much easier; but I still haven't gotten used to the disorientation of cutting off a shared experience at the click of a little red button.

Among the many highlights of the online conference (not least among them the famed conference dance, surprisingly successful in a virtual format), was conversations with other early career scholars. This was the first year I have volunteered as a mentee for the Medieval Academy of America's Graduate Student Committee mentoring scheme, which pairs doctoral students and more established researchers for a conversation about careers. Having benefited from mentoring through the program in the past, this year I felt established enough in my own career and goals to try to give back as a mentor, and had lovely conversations with two PhD students.

My conversations made me think about the importance of examples in learning how to do something well, and it just so happened that Session 2026, Monastic Education and Formation in the Early Middle Ages, II: New Approaches and Case Studies picked up on that theme. In a paper on the early medieval saint Radegund (c. 520- 587) as an example for others, Dr Maria Munkholt Christensen introduced the importance of learning from exemplary figures in monastic education by referencing one of the letters of the early Christian thinker Jerome (c. 342/7-420). 

I hadn't read the passage before, so after the paper I went and looked it up:

Every mode of life has its own exponents. For instance, let Roman generals imitate men like Camillus, Fabricius, Regulus, and Scipio. Let philosophers take for models Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Let poets strive to rival Homer, Virgil, Menander, and Terence. Let writers of history follow Thucydides, Sallust, Herodotus and Livy. Let orators find masters in Lysias, the Gracchi, Demosthenes, and Tully. And, to come to our own case, let bishops and presbyters take for their examples the apostles or their companions; and as they hold the rank which these once held, let them endeavour to exhibit the same excellence. And last of all let us monks take as the patterns which we are to follow the lives of Paul, of Antony, of Julian, of Hilarion, of the Macarii. And to go back to the authority of scripture, we have our masters in Elijah and Elisha, and our leaders in the sons of the prophets; who lived in fields and solitary places and made themselves tents by the waters of Jordan.  ~ Epistle 58.5, to Paulinus, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6,  ed. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburgh, 1996), online at tertullian.org

This in turn called to mind my earliest memory of writing advice that really resonated with me. In eighth grade English class, I read the novel version of Flowers for Algernon; what I remember most is not the story (though that has stayed with me) but the essay at the end of our Providence Public School District supplied copies, in which Daniel Keyes reflected on the process of learning to be a writer (I remember this as a freestanding essay, but in trying to locate it again, it seems may have been an excerpt from Keyes' book Algernon, Charlie, and I). As I remember it, he wrote that he learned to write science fiction by reading widely, reflecting on what he thought was good, and then trying, as precisely as he could, to imitate it.

Lately, learning by example has fallen out of pedagogical fashion--and for some good reasons. Teachers can alienate and frustrate their students by insisting on rigid imitation of a particular example; prescribed definitions of what counts as excellent can enforce sexist, classist, homophobic, or racist norms. But learning by imitation, when it is directed by the students themselves--when their task is to figure out what they think is good, why it works for them, and how to reproduce it in their own work--it can be an incredibly powerful tool for becoming an effective speaker and writer. Each year, the IMC provides me with the opportunity to work through these ideas for myself--to reflect on what challenged or inspired me, why it did so, and how I might take up those ideas or methods in my own writing. 

The opportunity to learn from the best--it's the best. Thanks everyone. Till next year!