It took me a while to start thinking critically about digital humanities in tandem with medieval literature even though I have been doing digital humanities in my study of medieval literature since nearly the beginning. Part of my coming round to digital medieval studies has been asking a lot of scattered questions about what exactly “digital medieval studies” comprises, accomplishes, and means for an undergraduate who wept the first time she saw a medieval manuscript in person.

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What is Digital Humanities?

In a post about introducing digital humanities at the undergraduate level, Adeline Koh remarks, “At its best, the digital humanities is about engaging more critically with the intersections between technology and how we act, think and learn.”

In the same article, she explains that most current undergraduates, like myself, are already digital humanists.  This implies a broad and dynamic definition of digital humanities; it gives us an opportunity to engage in our fields of study in novel ways, and it necessitates interdisciplinary study like never before.  In my consideration of this definition, I have generated two specific questions: How do the goals of medieval study inform and affect the academic use of technology?  What changes do these intersections produce in our preservation, contemplation, translation, transmission, criticism of and interactions with medieval literature, both as artefact and text?  I will use some early modern and modern transmissions of Chaucer’s works to explore these two questions, focusing on my experience in Wellesley College’s Special Collections and my findings online.

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Reading Chaucer in Special Collections

Over two visits to Wellesley College’s Special Collections, I leafed through about a dozen works of Chaucer printed between the mid-15th and 19th centuries and tried to form a research question.  I thought about how readers of Chaucer related to his works and how that affected the transmission of Chaucer’s works throughout the early modern and modern periods.  I wondered why other texts such as those of John Lydgate appeared in books titled “Chaucer’s Works,” and I wanted to know more about the celebrity that appears to have grown around Chaucer after his death.  In brief, the physical books upon which I pondered for several hours at a time led me to ask particular questions in my study of Chaucer’s work.  And these questions were very different from those which developed while I engaged with online Chaucer sources.

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Digital Chaucer

The Harvard Chaucer Page was one of the websites I used for my first post, as it provided me with analogue texts for the Wife of Bath’s Tale and introduced me to the motif of the loathly lady.  Luminarium, my second source for online research on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, supplies links to notes and musings on the Wife and her prologue and tale.  These are two of several sites that are devoted to Chaucer and in varying states of dis/repair.  Many provide bibliographies with dead-end links; some were created for specific courses on Chaucer, and most include the text of the Canterbury Tales in middle English, modern English, and sometimes both.

It is perhaps surprising that it took more time for me to gather online sources for Chaucer than it did to call up books from Special Collections or to pull primary and secondary texts at the library.  In the time it can take me to wade through and digest the sprawling online resources on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, I can easily have spent enough quality time with the likes of Riverside Chaucer and Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales to have developed a reasonably focused research question.

To address my first question (How the goals of medieval study inform and affect the academic use of technology), I tend to follow a pattern of using online resources as a secondary means of gathering information and more importantly as a tool for surveying the field after I have already formulated a question; otherwise I end up staring at my laptop screen, overwhelmed by the vastness of information before me.  Sites like those mentioned above help me broaden my scope of research after I have asked questions and engaged with the text.

Genius.com, a website primarily used for compiling and annotating music lyrics, has the potential to fill my perceived needs in a similar but distinct way.  I discovered it in an article about an Assistant Professor of English at Boston College who used the website in his Chaucer course.  His students annotated lines in The Canterbury Tales, engaging with the text in a collaborative way and allowing the professor to see patterns in their thinking about the text.  The section on the Canterbury Tales allows users to annotate the text directly, adding photos, notes, links, translations, and even videos.

Another unconventional though much less academic digital platform for Chaucer’s tales can be found on The Toast.  I include Mallory Ortberg’s humourous take on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue because it is a reminder that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is not just meant to be studied as an analogue to other texts or as a thread in the textual tradition in which he writes.  The tales are witty and clearly meant to bring pleasure to the reader, and Mallory Ortberg amplifies this aspect of and deeply engages with the text while creating a distinct tale of her own, which is essentially what medieval literature does; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale clearly departs from earlier versions of the loathly lady motif, but the changes he were meant to make better sense to his contemporaries, and that meant transforming the tale to bring sentence and solas to the reader.

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Conclusion

The intersection of digital and medieval studies is clearly expansive and potentially overwhelming.  It demands a new process and a new way of thinking about how we–as academics, as readers, and as the next generations of textual transmitters–relate to our beloved medieval texts.  Historically, academia has more clearly delineated the concepts of the medieval manuscript as an artefact and the medieval manuscript as a text, but the digitization of artefacts for wide scholarly use blurs those lines.  For example, I can find an electronic copy of the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales in the Huntington Digital Library and study it closely for its marginalia and illumination, or I can read the unadorned text provided by Project Gutenberg, which notes variations across manuscripts and moreover provides an easy-to-read compilation of the tales.  Both the artefact and the text are open access, I save a trip to the library, and my backpack is a little lighter for its lack of a copy of Riverside Chaucer.  I am free to organically form ideas and questions about the manuscript or the text, or both.  I can remark upon the variations in the text that are bound to appear from the manuscript to the Gutenberg text, which is based on Keats’ edition of Chaucer (a student’s edition, and one that I also leafed through in Special Collections); I can bounce between websites giving summaries and commentaries on the text (which mimicks the process of annotation and commentary to the extent that the reader has at her fingertips the thoughts and criticisms of other readers).  I can, in sum, interact and engage with medieval texts in myriad ways with the digitization of them.  And with the anticipation of more collaborative platforms like that found in Genius.com’s literature section, I can look forward to contemplating and commenting on medieval texts in more collaborative ways, too.