My writing in other places (or not)

I have some hopes of resuming reasonably regular posting some day soon, but that day is not today, sorry; there are two papers needing rewriting, one requiring no little reading, two reviews to write neither of whose books I’ve yet read, and a multitude of other things almost all of which are late, and although this term’s crop of students is not, proportionally, as disaster-struck as last term’s, their misfortunes are still taking a bit of managing. But, I have been doing the odd little bit of blogging elsewhere, and I also wanted to mention a couple of other things connected with my text appearing on the Internet, since some of you have been kind enough to mention them to me.

My writing where I wanted it

In the first place, over the course of February I have put two posts up on Cliopatria. I’ve been having some misgivings over my place there, as I am an extremely occasional and fairly irrelevant presence by some measures, but it does avail me a place to get political, and thus, if you be interested in that, you can find it in two posts, entitled respectively, “‘They Are Trying To Rob Us of Our Right To Communicate’” (which was not about the SOPA Bill in the USA, though perhaps it should have been, but the motivations behind UK Higher Education policy such as it has been manifest here), and “A historian’s place in (current) politics”, which is more or less as it says. The latter has an egregious malapropism in it that Judith Weingarten quickly spotted, but the site appears to have lost my login details so I can’t currently fix it.¹ Find it while you can!

My writing where I didn’t want it

[Update: the threats and exposure now seem to have paid off and as far as I can see the author mentioned below has taken my stuff down. However, I leave the paragraph here for continuity.]

In less cheerful news, I discovered very rapidly on February 12th that someone had grabbed about thirty posts from this blog and put them up on one of their own, to which I shall not link. I discovered this because they didn’t remove any of my numerous pingbacks to this site, and thus I could find out that they have not used my name, and so as well as stupid things like adverts for my books he has got my musings about being unhappy in church services etc. (or just unhappy) up under no name but `admin’, which is extremely odd to see and makes me quite angry. I am, of course, nothing to do with this site and I gave no permission for anything of the kind. I have been in touch with the author (who wrote to me about one of their other blogs, advertising the one where they’d loaded up my content! Perhaps not the brightest thief in the class, this person) and demanded they take the stuff down, I have been in touch with the abuse address at their web-host, but since none of this has as yet resulted in any action by anyone else, I am now also in touch with the University of Oxford’s lawyers and we’ll see what they advise. But since people had mentioned it to me in private, I wanted to say that I knew, and furthermore, firstly that if you’re linking to anything being run by someone calling themselves Djalma Bright, I’d appreciate it if you unlinked them, and secondly that if you work on Arthuriana your stuff may also have been raided there and you should probably Google some of your work’s key phrases up to make sure. I presume that the idea is that they get some of my search traffic for their own material, but perhaps they haven’t yet started writing any of that…

It’s all complications I don’t want, anyway, but it has made me rethink my copyright policy and decide that while I may guard my text fiercely, I don’t really see any point in not releasing my images, as in, ones I took, into the public domain. Does anyone else have any views on that they’d like to share?

My writing not being where I want it

Lastly, as I return to reading other people’s blogs again periodically, I discover that Blogger has had another reinvention of its spam protection Captcha gear. Either I’m a far worse palæographer than I thought, or just as with the previous version, their OpenID support is crooked again. Either way, if you’re on Blogger and running either of the two latest Captcha set-ups, I can’t comment on your blog except as name/URL and you will understand how just now I am concerned about authentication! So it’s not that I don’t love your various writings, I just can’t say so, and you might want to see if anyone who’s not on Blogger actually can…

---

1. And since the site’s various technical issues (such as the visible spell-check that only shows up in live posts) were another reason why I was considering quitting, it’s quite fitting that, having decided to carry on, I now can’t because of them…

Conferring in Naples, IV and final: clarity, confusion, coffee and photos

The delay in posting is kind of past apology so for once I won’t bother and will just crack on. Despite the sociability of the previous evening, mentioned two posts ago, I was back in the ring on the morning of Saturday 1st October 2011, although it did take me slightly longer to get there because for its final day the Digital Diplomatics 2011 conference was in this unassuming little building…

Castel Nuovo, Naples

And there’ll be more photos of that towards the end of the post, but for now let me just stick with the conference chamber…

Conference chamber in the rooms of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria

… and the view from it…

View from the conference room

… all of which made it quite surprising, in some ways, that any of our attentions were directed inside. This was perhaps especially an issue because we started half an hour late for various reasons and then Dr Renata De Lorenzo spoke for ten unscheduled minutes about the hosting body, sending things still further off schedule, but we rallied. And there were good reasons for doing so; the sessions unrolled as follows, with links to abstracts under the titles as before.

Digital Research

• Michael Hänchen, “Die Erschließung, Formalisierung und Auswertungsmöglichkeit digitaler Urkundencorpora mittels einer Datenbank”, was a start-to-finish summary in masterly order of a digitisation project using the documents of two particular monasteries, Aldersbach and Fürstenzell. What I liked about this was the clearly-theorised approach: somehow in twenty minutes Herr Hänchen managed to explain exactly why they’d built things the way they had, and you could easily use his slides as a how-to for your own monastic archive. What I was less keen on was the expression of trends from a relatively tiny sample, percentages from 38 and 22 documents, and although some of the things he was finding were interesting, with that kind of sample it’s very hard to say if the peaks and troughs of the evidence’s distribution actually show anything.
• Martin Roland, “Illuminierte Urkunden im digitalen Zeitalter – Mapregeln und Chancen”, was unusual in this company in being an art-historical paper about the relatively few but spectacular illuminated charters from Central Europe, comparisons between which have now become usefully possible because of digitization, but only just, because these are so diverse and so widely-spread that their mark-up varies considerably, meaning that the digitization has in some cases hidden like from like. This demands, felt Dr Roland, a classification endeavour to bring things more properly together. I want to note that he was the only presenter who used a handout as well as slides, which says something either for the digitalization of the conference or else for his determination to stick with traditional methods alongside new ones. His slides, however, were absolutely the best of the conference, so do have a look.
• Anaïs Wion, “Éditer vs. analyser? L’exemple du projet Ethiopian Manuscript Archives”, took us much further afield than most of other other papers; she has been working with, or sometimes apparently at odds with, the Ethiopian government to digitise the numerous community archives that exist in the country. Much of this material is medieval, running from fourth to twelfth centuries, and the bulk of that is royal, but it has not been studied because those times and cultures are very far away from any modern Ethiopian political consciousness, but some of it is more modern and even some of the historical stuff exists only in oral form, as traditions supposedly handed down, which takes some fitting into a diplomatic schema! Digitization seems the obvious answer because the corpus is very dispersed, but Dr Wion raised the question of whether, once it was all transcribed, marked up and otherwise filed and sorted, it actually still needs editing? There is a question there. I would expect, in a parallel situation, that a big fat book of the country’s heritage would be a nice thing to have achieved, but whether it would be any more use than the database Dr Wion has already achieved might indeed be questioned…

There was then coffee, which by now will not surprise you, but this time the south vs. north thing described before hit really hard; the coffee was all gone before some of us had even left the conference room, and the only good thing about that at all was that it was easier to get people back in there, as long as they weren’t queueing for the single bathroom behind a staffed counter that was all that was available. I’m sure that the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria is a noble institution, and there is no doubt that their premises are medievalist heaven, but I cannot entirely recommend them as a place to hold a conference. Anyway, we continued…

• Serena Falleta, “Dalla carta al bit. L’edizione digitale del cartulario di Santa Maria Nova di Monreale”, was one of those papers that I think had misjudged its audience, being considerably more basic in what I could pull out of the Italian than this audience really needed, which is a pity because I have been otherwise led to believe that the Monreale documentation is crazy interesting and I would have happily tried to understand more about what was in it and less about why encoding charters isn’t as simple as we might think, which let’s face it, we knew.
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Poor Tools to Think With: the human space in digital diplomatics”, was of course probably no better, you’d be asking the wrong guy to tell you really, but what it was supposed to do was stress that sometimes, you don’t want the computer to make the decisions or find the links, because they can only be decided subjectively, and the correct division between computerised interpretation and human interpretation is precisely on that line of what is certain and what is unprovable. This is especially true in the area of trying to find certain persons in a database, for example; when you have fifteen occurrences of people called Miró with no surname in any given sample (I exaggerate, but not by as much as I might be) it’s hard to be sure how many of them are the same guy, so what you want is for the database always to tell you those fifteen are there, and do whatever you may think valid about identifying them elsewhere; the data should not be made to tell you more than it did initially. Of course, a data schema shouldn’t allow that kind of thing anyway, but anyone who’s digitised a large corpus of information from non-digital sources will tell you that you make split-second decisions about what something is every other minute; really, we need to keep those outside so that they can if necessary be revised if we’re making databases that will ever need to be revisited, by ourselves or by others.

Contemporary Diplomatics

• Luciana Duranti, “The Return of Diplomatics as a Forensic Discipline”, was a paper I was looking forward to because Professor Duranti was one of the few people here whose work I had already met; she has had interesting things to say about what counts as an original that I recommend to you.¹ Here she was transporting some of these concepts into the digital realm, arguing most notably for a separation between the concepts of reliability, accuracy and authenticity. The latter is especially problematic in a digital sphere where all the information of a digitally-presented document may be being pulled dynamically from a database, in which there is no document per se, just a set of encoded fields which are reassembled on the fly every time a record is invoked. All of this was coming from a very different context, work in digital forensics intended to establish legal authenticity criteria for things like e-mails, database contents, etc., where it becomes vital to know if what it now says was what it said at the relevant time; perhaps not unsurprisingly, it turns out that diplomatic concepts actually make quite good tools for structuring such an enquiry…
• Antonella Ambrosio & Maura Striano, “Insegnare la diplomatica con le nuove technologie. Uno del percorsi possibili”, I’m afraid, fell on an unreceptive audience where your blogger was concerned. This was partly shortage of caffeine, I think, and partly shortage of food, but also it was that teaching diplomatic is something that seems basically pretty unlikely from a UK perspective, and that my Italian wasn’t good enough to get what might have been relevant to my experience out of the presentation. So I’m afraid my notes for this one only say, “(Comic Sans!)”, which is not the kind of review I ought to be giving people and I apologise.

Lunch was a more equable occasion than the coffee break had been, a buffet served in the very anteroom where the coffee had been extinguished, and all extremely nice, so we settled down for the final strait more cheerfully, even though it was entitled…

Theory

• Gunter Vasold, “Work in Progress: Editionen als multidimensionale Wissensräume”, was looking at what it means for scholarship and the way we access it that a digital project may never in fact be complete, or that it may be available before that point and then sometimes updated after it. This makes for very complex information flows (as his slides make clearer), especially if different parts of the project pull on shared information that one of them updates without reference to others. In questions I urged that it be kept in mind that old versions would need to be openly archived, or else information from such a project could never safely be cited; we already face this problem with the world-wide web but making it a feature of scholarly editions is going a bit too far in my opinion. Happily this was also the speaker’s opinion so there’s an extra technical complication to consider…
• Manfred Thaller, “What is an Environment for Charters?”, addressed some of the higher-level questions of the process of digitisation and mark-up, related to how one gets the data out to users in such a way that they can do what they want with it rather than what one had in mind without prejudicing the accuracy and completeness of the results they get. One either reports work of this complexity in bald outline like that or basically transcribes, and I can only now do the former, but the slides and abstract may help you if you want to look into these questions further.
• Georg Vogeler, “Conclusion”, tried to pull out the themes of the conference, not a small task given the range of papers, but he identified four headings, one of which had three subheadings: that one was the digital preservation of European charter history, within which we had discussed the choice of what to digitise and for what purpose; the respective roles of hand and machine, intuitive versus automatic processing of information; the issues about how far we should smooth data to allow similarity to be evident; and how to store our data in a lasting fashion, which as Georg said, we had not really discussed but is a real issue that deserved mention. The other headings were: sharing of data, the obvious point of all this and yet done by very few people comparatively speaking;² the different problems of source-rich and source-poor areas, the latter breeding analytical sloppiness because unverifiable but the former inhibiting complexity because of sheer bulk of data to process; and lastly, given the new possibilities and techniques at issue here, are we really still doing diplomatic and how can we teach people the same old stuff? So the closing note was something quite like What Would Bresslau Do, and that is actually very rarely a bad question to ask in medieval studies.³ I will leave it with you.

This still left a little time to look around the castle, however, before it was necessary to head back out into the wider world, and there were a few things worth seeing therein, which I will just briefly display some of…

Once again I absolutely wasn’t taking illicit photos in a museum, naturally. I mean, someone would surely have stopped me. Besides, some views you can’t copyright.

I don't care about perspective, ships should not look bigger than buildings or obscure dormant volcanoes

It turns out that we were only in the lower castle, even once as high on it as we could easily get.

View from the Castel Nuovo to the Castel Vecchio

And finally, once fortified with gelato, back to the hotel, and then away the next morning. I think this may be the only photo I’ve ever taken from an aeroplane window that’s been any use at all so I cannot help but share it with you as a parting shot. Next post but one it’s back to London and Oxford reports at last!

View of the Italian coast from the air

---

1. For a start, have a look at her “Reliability and Authenticity: the concepts and their implications” in Archivaria Vol. 39 (Ottawa 1995), pp. 5-9, online at http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12063/13035, last modified 15th August 2005 as of 20th August 2008. Now, it might somewhat cruelly be said that here she was doing no more than update and publicise concepts first broached by Pierre Chaplais in, among other places, his “The Origin and Authenticity of the Royal Anglo-Saxon Diploma” in Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 3 (London 1965), pp. 48-61, repr. in Felicity Ranger (ed.), Prisca Munimenta: studies in archival and administrative history presented to Dr. A. E. J. Hollaender (London 1973), pp. 28-42, but the thing is, nobody else seems to know that exists and I don’t believe Professor Duranti did either, and so what this basically means is she’s as sharp as Pierre Chaplais was, which is not a small thing to say.

2. Here of course I am among the guilty: sharing my actual data would be of little use to people given how irregularly it is stored, but the format might be some use and might, in some other discipline, be publishable in itself. I want to hold onto it, however, precisely in case it becomes so…

3. For those who might not know, this is a reference to Harry Bresslau, medievalist and editor of the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, who as well as editing many many things for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and indeed writing its first history also wrote, slowly, an eventually three-volume work with a very complicated publication history, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien, 3 vols (Leipzig 1905-1931 and Berlin 1960; 4th edn, Berlin 1968-1969) that has become the standard textbook on diplomatic for a great many German-reading medievalists and is one of those things you go to and find out that the author already had your idea a century ago and spent three lines on it in the middle of something else he thought was more interesting….

Bearing the sins of Michel Zimmermann

Cover of Michel Zimmermann's Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècle)

That title sounds more negative than I really want. You will have observed by now that I have what might best be called a complex relationship with the work of Professor Michel Zimmermann, which I have described here as “three-quarters brilliance”.¹ As I continue on through the book, however, more and more secure that he does not have the answer to the question I’m trying to solve, I am becoming more perplexed by the sins of omission than the sins of commission that it could be seen to commit. This is, after all, a 1219-page book in two volumes; it’s slightly surprising to find that he’s omitted anything at all. But we have seen, for example, that there are only three dealing with women, and now I find something else discussed very briefly that I was really hoping for more on, which is one particular form of curse that I occasionally see in the Catalan documents which cries out for study. So I thought I’d ask you guys about it!

You may be wondering what I’m doing with documents with curses in in the first place, since sometimes those can be quite, well, quite literally occult, but honestly it’s above-board: almost all medieval charters end with what’s technically called a sanctio, a clause that sets out what will happen to those who interfere with the transaction declared in the charter.² Sometimes this is purely a financial penalty, albeit sometimes a completely unrealistic one, but more often (especially as charters that are preserved frequently concern grants to churches) there is a spiritual sanction. Now Zimmermann enthusiastically dedicates seventy-five pages of Écrire et lire to this (so, only say, twenty-five times the amount of space he gives to half of the population), and rather than being impressionistic and just giving examples of the sort of things one can find in the material, which is how he frequently proceeds in the book, leaving one wishing he’d also done the numbers, here he was actually working from a quantitative sample. I am in no position to criticise someone for only using information technology in one part of their thesis of course, but it certainly adds something to this section: we can here say with some certainty what curses are used when, where, how much and how for long.³

Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Wifredo I 8, low-quality but larger image linked through

So, OK, here’s the one I mean, and you may be able to see the text on the larger version linked underneath that image, starting line 22 just after the paragraph break:

Peccatis nostris anime illius sit obligatum que pro hac re cupimus esse purgatum

Or, translated:

Let his soul be burdened with our sins, of which we hope to be purged through this matter.⁴

This is unusually elaborate, actually: it would be more usual to find it just as “peccatis nostris animae illius sit obligatum”, and there are other things about this charter that make it unusual.⁵ Firstly, as said when I first got this image, it bears the autograph signature of Abbess Emma! (Bang in the middle, first line of signatures, split by the discolouration.) But that’s not actually odd, it can be seen elsewhere.⁶ More unusual is the fact that the scribe, Athanagild of the chapter of Vic, finished the document off with a line of characters that look like Dingbats, at least partly Greek as far as I can see not wholly and thus a bit hard to work out! Athanagild’s occasional flourishes are well-documented here, and who knows what he was up to on this occasion, but I’ve included the full version because it makes it a bit clearer what the supposed mechanism is here.⁷ The idea of a donation to the Church, and this is mainly what Zimmermann’s eighty pages are about here, is that, as one of the common introductions to these documents has it, “we have heard the preaching of the Holy Fathers that alms may free the soul from death”. That is, giving to the poor (or to the Church, who will then minister to the poor, albeit perhaps only the poor in spirit) potentially gets you out of going to Hell. That is, the donation will hopefully purge your soul of sin.⁸ In that case it makes a certain amount of common sense that someone who messes with that joyful process should wind up with the penalty of which the donor had hoped to be free. And so we get a few documents, more than Zimmermann notices but still not many, that add that hope into the curse like this.

And what does Michel Zimmermann have to tell me about this? Well, basically just that it happens and is a bit odd. He notices that it seems to die off around about 1030, and wonders if this might be because of increasing pressure from the papal reform effort, keen on reinforcing the separation of clerical and lay power.⁹ And indeed that is exactly why this is so interesting, and why I wish he had more to say about it. This is, I think, completely unjustifiable in church terms: this is not just priestly power, this is binding and loosing, the power entrusted to St Peter. The average layman, or even the often-but-not-always-clerical scribes who write these documents, is simply not allowed to deposit a load of sin on someone else! Only God can say for sure who is a sinner and who isn’t. This is an extreme example of a wider phenomenon, admittedly, as many of these documents and lots elsewhere too prescribe excommunication for breaching the charter’s terms, which strictly speaking is something only a bishop can impose. Zimmermann goes into that in some detail, and concludes that the thought of the documents, as it were, is that God will impose this at the Final Judgement, not that it is intended to apply in the world right at the moment of infringement. I find this convincing in itself, although it has to get over the fact that as excommunication becomes less permanent and more worked-out in theological terms the documents start allowing one to repent and be relieved of it, which means it can’t be at the Final Judgement after which, as one document points out, God will forget about the sinners. I think that’s OK, and since that starts about 1030 it may even correlate with whatever pressure is driving out these particular curses, but I’m still left with an impression that it’s the document itself that is the agency here, representing the Word of God ahead of time. It is, as often observed, no coincidence that these texts are often called scripturae. So, I don’t know the canon law of excommunication very well, still less anything that might cover this: am I right in thinking that this is, quod vulgo dicitur, “well weird”? Have you ever seen anything like it elsewhere? How is it justified? What do you make of it? Michel Zimmermann and I are stumped…

Also, what the heck was Athanagild aiming for here?

---

1. M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols.

2. A quick stab at Regesta Imperii’s OPAC suggests that you’re not going to find anything very much in English about these that isn’t extremely specific to an area, though on those lines Jeffrey Bowman’s “Do Neo-Romans Curse? Law, land, and ritual in the Midi (900-1100)” in Viator Vol. 28 (Berkeley 1997), pp. 1-32, repr. in his Shifting Landmarks: property, proof, and dispute in Catalonia around the year 1000 (Ithaca: 2004), pp. 56-80, is very clear and interesting. For some guidance in a language where they care about such things, try Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke & Benoît -Michel Tock, La diplomatique médiévale, L’atelier du médiéviste 2, 3rd edn. (Turnhout 2006), pp. 82-83.

3. Zimmermann, Érire et lire, I, pp. 348-423, esp. pp. 365-380 and 410-422.

5. Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Wifredo I 8, ed. Federico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 10 with facsimile lám. 4, also printed in Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 37, cit. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, I p. 409 without reference beyond the date. Check out that jussive subjunctive! (You know who you are.) Also, I should like to note the irony here. Zimmermann quotes the document without reference, as said, but with a year; I knew I’d seen it somewhere so searched my notes files for the word ‘purged’, found the document fairly easily, and yes, it turns out that because it’s the one Emma signs, not only do I already know it quite well but in fact I had a facsimile of it pinned to the board in my office the whole time I was trying to work out which one it was. “It’s behind you…”

5. Others doing this for example Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 164, 179, 496, 563, 827 & 1327, and certainly more even in that edition that I just didn’t note.

6. In a charter printed and pictured in Nathaniel L. Taylor, “An Early Catalonian Charter in the Houghton Library from the Joan Gili Collection of Medieval Catalonian Mansucripts” in Harvard Library Bulletin New Series Vol. 7 (Cambridge MA 1997), pp. 37-44.

7. Athanagild’s other appearances are, sticking with Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, for convenience though all are printed in earlier editions too (of which Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX-X), ed. R. Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), catches most and has many facsimiles), nos 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 27, 35, 38, 48, 101, 283 & 285. I have my doubts about those last two, so much later than the others, expressed here.

8. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire I, pp. 348-361.

9. Ibid., I, pp. 378-380.