Crafting knowledge in the early medieval West: Glosses, learning and culture, circa 800-1050

Glosses, that is marginal and interlinear notes ubiquitous in Latin manuscripts of the early medieval West, were once side-lined as a technical sideshow to mainstream intellectual history. Traditionally, scholarship on glosses focused on the exposition of words in the vernacular. My project contrasts with the essentially linguistic focus of nineteenth-century research in this area. As the first wide-ranging study of glosses, it seeks to investigate annotations on key texts and authors in order to view glosses in the conceptual framework of what knowledge is and how it is made in the early Middle Ages. One of the aims of the proposed project is to examine how glosses helped shape the inheritance of classical and Judaeo-Christian learning during a period crucial for the cultural history of the Middle Ages. Understanding glosses thus allows us to appreciate our intellectual heritage.

Another aim is to investigate glosses for insight into the crafting of knowledge in early medieval book culture. In the modern world we put high value on knowledge quickly and easily acquired, but this study will present a quite different ideal: of knowledge that is painstakingly compiled, constructed through effort and even, at times, attained through the unravelling of that which has been rendered obscure, encoded with exegetical difficulty or clothed in references to authoritative sources. This research is thus not only intellectually but also educationally important. It shows that medieval glosses pose a problem for the modern understanding of interpretative practices. It argues that by studying them we can begin to comprehend what value they held for early medieval scholarly communities.

Above all, this project will investigate the significance of glosses for mainstream intellectual history. For example, it studies how glosses help resolve the question of why classical pagan works were read by medieval Christian scholars and looks at what glosses reveal about early medieval reading practices. Moreover, a central concern of this project is to rethink the function of early medieval glosses. On the basis of extensive manuscript research, the project seeks to argue that clarification in the modern sense was not the sole and sometimes not at all the intention of early medieval glossators. Glossators also added layers of signification, introduced complexity, and offered multiple interpretations of a word or words. As such, they introduced both polysemy of meaning and underscored potential ambiguity in the text. Glossators even created a sense of mystery. We can of course only infer their intentions, but glossators did in fact encrypt and conceal information, engage in word play and create puzzles, as well as make what was likely difficult easier to understand - hence they often communicated the complexity and obscurity of knowledge - that is, the need for active decoding before it may be understood. This research will argue from close readings of glossed manuscripts that encoding knowledge was a process, a crucial epistemological dynamic rather than a particular kind of knowledge. It was at the core of medieval hermeneutics and in line with well-established interpretative, exegetical and cognitive practices aimed at the unravelling of meaning, and at sustained and slow intellectual engagement. The research has the potential to reach out to a wider audience interested in medieval intellectual history and the history of ideas and will appeal to those interested in obscurantism and cryptanalysis in both its medieval and modern contexts.

A variety of people outside the academic research community would potentially benefit from my research: librarians, students and the wider public. The following activities and outputs are specifically designed to engage with such users:

(i) Public exhibition and online version, provisionally entitled "Ciphers, Codes and Notes: Crafting Knowledge in
the Medieval and Modern Worlds," Special Collections and Archives, The McClay Library, Queen's University,
Belfast
(ii) Public lectures to accompany the exhibition, including one from a colleague working on cryptography at the
Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology, Queen's University, Belfast, and one from
a leading UK public intellectual on codebreaking
(iii) Public lectures in Belfast, Dublin, London and Munich
(iv) Skills development opportunity for a postgraduate student

While the most immediate relevance of my research is within the academy, it has the potential to reach out to publics beyond academia. The exhibition (with free entry) and online version seek to appeal to the wider public in Northern Ireland and beyond. By juxtaposing medieval and modern examples of crafting knowledge, harnessing popular interest in codebreaking, and drawing on the local collections of The McClay library and placing them alongside materials from other libraries across the UK and Continent, the exhibition aims to foreground the value of humanities research, the relevance of public institutions like libraries and museums for the preservation of the material heritage of the past and the crucial role of historians in enhancing public enthusiasm for and understanding of the importance of local, national and international heritage resources.

The public exhibition would be accompanied by a skills development opportunity organised by the library staff at Special Collections and Archives, Queen's University, Belfast. The public lectures, exhibition and colloquium would benefit our MA and doctoral students, who would be invited to these events. We normally have circa eight students on the pre-modern strand of the History MA (this year we have ten and I am currently the convenor of the strand). Doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows at Queen's and from elsewhere will also participate in the colloquium.

Secondary school students from Northern Ireland would be invited to the public exhibition and lectures. This would afford an opportunity to engage the interest of students and teachers in ideas about education and learning throughout the ages. Above all the proposed project would highlight the relevance of thinking historically, underscoring differences as well as parallels between medieval and modern understanding of how knowledge is transmitted.

The wider public may find value in reflecting on the medieval and modern fascination with encoding and decoding information. The evident enthusiasm for making things difficult as illustrated by the creation of puzzles, secret script and anagrammatic writing in medieval books has its modern counterparts and finds a reflex in modern popular culture from TV shows like "Countdown" to films such as "Da Vinci Code" and "The Imitation Game". To harness the potential of this public interest, I plan to organise two public lectures at Queen's (one by Professor Hodges on the Enigma Machine; the other by a colleague at the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology on cryptography) and to deliver public lectures in Belfast, Dublin, London, and Munich.