Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic continues to be very proud of its association with the Sutton Trust, a philanthropic organisation which seeks to promote social mobility through education. Each year we host a Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC for a small group of talented young people, from non-privileged backgrounds, who are about to begin their final year of school. The purpose of the Summer School is to allow them to experience university life, attending a range of lectures, seminars and classes on all aspects of the ASNC undergraduate course: from Anglo-Saxon history to Old Norse literature, from palaeography to medieval Welsh law. This year we welcomed eleven teenagers from a wide geographical area, including students from Wales, Yorkshire and London, all of whom were bright, enthusiastic and willing to sacrifice a week of their summer holiday in order to learn about all things medieval.

The Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC, 2012

One of the highlights of the Summer School, as ever, was the afternoon spent in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. The Parker sub-librarian, Dr Suzanne Paul, introduced the students to the Parker collection, and then the students spent an hour preparing presentations on manuscripts including the Parker Chronicle and the Old English Bede. After giving their presentations, the students had the opportunity to study the manuscripts in detail, as well as looking at other important items from the collection.

Admiring medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library

In Old Court, Corpus Christi College

 

Participants also had the opportunity to experience a supervision, the small-group teaching which is characteristic of Oxford and Cambridge. Each of them had chosen the topic in which they were most interested, and were supervised individually or in pairs by doctoral students and early career researchers in the ASNC department.

 

Finding Anglo-Saxon things to stand in front of ...

 

During the Summer School the students stayed at St John's College, and were able to indulge in typical Cambridge activities, such as punting on the river and attending a 'formal hall' dinner. We hope very much that this week will inspire them to apply to elite universities, such as Cambridge, for their undergraduate studies.

The grown-ups (allegedly): Ollie (residential supervisor), Becky (CAMbassador and ASNC graduate), and Lizzie (academic co-ordinator of the Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC)

And, despite the fact that most of the students had never studied a word of Latin before they arrived on the course, the expert teaching of Dr Rosalind Love ensured that, by the time of the disco on the last night of the Summer School, they were all able to get into trouble for swearing profusely in Insular Latin. No matter what the participants go on to do in life, that is one invaluable skill which will always stay with them.

Obituaries

Ray Page: obituaries published in the Daily Telegraph (22nd March) and The Times (23rd March) have celebrated the career of Prof. Ray Page. The link to the Telegraph obituary is here; the Times obituary can only be accessed by subscribers.

Ursula Donke: sadly, another eminent Cambridge-based medievalist has passed away in recent weeks, namely Ursula Dronke, the distinguished scholar of Old Norse literature. An obituary, published in the Guardian, can be found here.

Seachtain na Gaeilge, Cambridge, 5 - 17 March 2012

Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson announces a series of public events, exhibitions and lectures, celebrating Irish in Cambridge:

5 MARCH (Monday, 5pm):  Irish Poetry Reading, Biddy Jenkinson

Seachtain na Gaeilge will open with a reading by the Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson, who has been praised by Professor Ciaran Carson (Queen’s College, Belfast) as ‘one of [Ireland’s] greatest writers in any language’. Ms Jenkinson will introduce the background and content of each poem in English.  The poems will be read in Irish.  The Poetry Reading will take place in the English Faculty (9 West Road) in Room G-R05.  A wine reception will follow in the ASNC Common Room.  The reading is free of charge and open to students, staff and the general public.

Biddy Jenkinson brings a distinctive style and purpose to her writing, and her highly regarded collections of verse include Baisteadh Gintlí (1987), Uiscí Beatha (1988), Dán na hUidhre (1991), An Grá Riabhach (1999), Mis (2001), Rogha Dánta (2000) and Oíche Bhealtaine (2005).  She is also the author of prose works, including An tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín—Bleachtaire (2008).  

8 MARCH (Thursday, 5.30pm):  Dánta agus Ceol ‘Poems and Music’ / Irish films

Modern Irish language students will present Irish poems and traditional Irish songs in the ASNC Common Room (2nd floor, English Faculty, West Road). 

The performance will be followed by a showing of the short Irish film Lipservice and the RTE documentary Oileán Eile ‘Another Island’ (1985), which presents the literary and cultural legacy of the Great Blasket Islands through archive footage of daily life, an examination of the island autobiographies (Tomás Ó Criomhthainn’s An tOileánach and The Autobiography of Peig Sayers) and accounts by well-known scholars who visited the island, including Robin Flower, Carl Marstrander, Kenneth Jackson and George Thompson.

 The Blasket Islands

13 MARCH (Tuesday, 1-3pm):  Exhibition of Irish and Irish related manuscripts, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College (*Registration required)

More than thirty items of Irish interest from the Parker Library’s world renowned collection will be on display. Students, staff and members of the public are invited to register for a guided viewing of these exquisite examples of Irish insular art, decorated initials, glossaries, saints’ lives, prophesies, chronicles and charters dating from the 8th to the 16th century.  Highlights of the exhibit include the Hymn on St. Patrick attributed to Saint Secundias (Seachnall) or Saint Colmán Elo, the only extant copy of the canons of the ‘First Synod of Patrick’, the first European description of a giraffe (written by an Irish monk!), one of the earliest maps of Ireland, and the first printed piece of Irish anywhere in the world: the bardic poem Tuar feirge foighide Dé, composed by Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn in 1571. Two tours (1-2pm and 2-3pm) will be conducted on 13 March.  To register please contact Dr Denis Casey: dc399@cam.ac.uk. 

The Parker Library exhibit has been organized by Dr Denis Casey, Teaching Associate in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and Postdoctoral Fellow of the Society for Renaissance Studies, and Dr Christopher de Hamel, Donnelly Fellow Librarian at the ParkerLibrary

The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

picture courtesy of the Parker librarians

15 MARCH (Thursday, 5pm):  Public Lecture: 'H.M. Chadwick: A Centennial Commemoration'

Professor Michael Lapidge, Fellow of Clare College, will deliver the 23rd Annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture in the Riley Auditorium, Gillespie Building (off Memorial Court), Clare College, Queen's Road, Cambridge.  The lecture will be followed by a reception in Clare College at 6pm.

Parker Library blog and CCASNC

Two notices which may be of interest:

First, the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now has a blog, which you can find here.

Second, the 2011 Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, which is organised by postgraduate students in the Department of ASNC, will be held on 26th February. This year's theme is 'Colliding Worlds', and the Colloquium will feature two keynote lectures: Prof Malcolm Godden, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, who will be speaking on 'Old English Orosius and its sources' and Dr. Paul Russell, Reader in Celtic, University of Cambridge, who will be speaking on 'Revisiting the "Welsh Dictator" of the Old English Orosius'. The full programme, along with details of how to register, can be found here.

Modern Glosses

Dr Denis Casey writes:

In recent years the internet has become an indispensable tool for medieval scholars, with websites such as the Early Irish Glossaries Database, Parker Library on the Web and the Celtic Digital Initiative providing access to texts and images to users around the world. Websites, like any other medium, have both their advantages and limitations but an interesting, most likely unplanned, though certainly useful side effect has been produced by archive.org. That website, as its URL suggests, is a vast archive of useful material not always readily available in every library. The beauty of this service is that some of the actual digitized volumes themselves were formerly owned by well-known scholars and their annotations offer interesting insights into the texts and their interpretations of the texts, just like any medieval gloss or commentary.

To take an interesting example, consider the case of the Ancient Laws of Ireland series. That six-volume edition and translation of the corpus of medieval Irish law was based on the earlier work of the mid-nineteenth-century scholars Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, but not completed until 1901. It was widely castigated for errors in transcription and translation (not necessarily the fault of O’Curry and O’Donovan); to prove the point, Eóin Mac Néill, the great Scholar-Revolutionary, published a translation of two of its texts in 1923, shortly after emerging from jail and taking up the post of Minister for Education in the new Irish Free State, during the civil war. A later scholar and former Free State ambassador to Weimar Germany, D. A. Binchy (who incidentally left fascinating pen-portraits of Hitler, von Bruning and others in the pages of Studies), spent much of his career editing and translating various legal texts and finally produced a six-volume diplomatic transcript of the known legal manuscripts: Corpus Iuris Hibernici (1978). Nonetheless, many of the texts have neither been reedited nor retranslated since the publication of the Ancient Laws series. Luckily, at least some volumes from Binchy’s library found its way into the collection of Stephen B. Roman, who subsequently bequeathed them to J. M. Kelly Library, St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Among these are at least three volumes of Binchy’s annotated copies of the Ancient Laws, which are now available on archive.org. Anyone who has dealt with the complexities of (and frustrations attendant upon) working with medieval Irish legal texts will appreciate the help of one of the most notable scholars of medieval Ireland. Here are the links to volume 1, volume 3 and volume 4.

Parker Library on the Web

ELB writes:

From 2005-9, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was involved in a project (in collaboration with Stanford University) to digitise their superb collection of medieval manuscripts. The resulting online resource is the 'Parker Library on the Web' site. More than five hundred manuscripts were digitised, ranging from the 'Augustine Gospels' (a sixth-century, Italian Gospel-book, thought to have been brought to England by Augustine of Canterbury), to letters and documents concerning the sixteenth-century Reformation archbishop, Matthew Parker, who bequeathed the collection to Corpus, and after whom the Parker Library is named. A number of members of the ASNC Department, past and present, were involved in this project, particularly Dr Rebecca Rushforth, Dr Denis Casey, and myself, who were employed as Research Associates on the project, and who were particularly involved in the production of the site's metadata, such as the extensive bibliographies of scholarship which were compiled for each manuscript. For us, the project represented an unrivalled opportunity to have firsthand access to the manuscripts, as well as the chance to immerse ourselves in the copious modern scholarship which has been produced on various aspects of provenance, script, contents and decoration of each of the manuscripts.

This was an expensive and ambitious project, and one which is ongoing, in the sense that bibliography, and new information about the manuscripts, will be added to the site as it arises. The cost of maintaining the site is such that most of the site is only available to institutions that subscribe to it. However, the basic manuscript images are available to everyone, and it is hoped that the site will attract interested members of the public, as well as scholars. For those interested in ASNC-related topics, the Parker Library on the Web site offers a multitude of treasures, from the A-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in MS 173) to the Historia Brittonum (in MS 139), from the poetry of John Scotus Eriugena (in MS 223) to the homilies of Wulfstan (in MSS 190, 201, 419, and others). It is to be hoped that this will prove to be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.