Myths, Magic and Manuscripts

Hello and welcome to this discussion of Myths, Magic and Manuscripts in which three authors tell us more about their new books exploring storytelling in medieval manuscripts. I'm Kathleen Doyle, the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library and I'm delighted to be introducing this event on behalf of the Library. I've also been privileged to have worked with all three of the authors and we just realized that we were there at the same time working in the ancient medieval and early modern section of the British Library. Amy and Mary were interns in the section and Chandri has volunteered in the section for many years. I hope that the great resources of the Library and the wide range of medieval manuscripts has inspired their work, at least in part. I'm particularly interested today to hear more about the background of these new publications. I think that for each of the authors it's her first book and completed and published within a month of each other, two in September and one in October during what must have been a very difficult and challenging time of finishing a book during a pandemic. One of the exciting things about their book is that they all seek to tell stories and to promote and publicize medieval manuscripts for a general audience. However, each author has chosen a slightly different way of achieving this goal. Chandri's book recounts 40 stories illustrated by over 250 color illustrations from British Library books on manuscripts. Amy's tells 30 stories focusing in particular on the mythology of Britain and illustrated by her own artwork of a linocut. And Mary tells stories of individuals, readers, scribes, patrons, and artists in seven chapters through a close reading of individual manuscripts, including some of the most famous in the British Library, such as the Catholic Gospels, the Electoral Psalter, and Henry VIII's personal prayer book. Today each author will give a short introduction to her book and illustrated by some of the illustrations in it, and then we'll have a short panel discussion at the end of the session. Now you can purchase any of the books or all of them during the event by clicking the book tab at the top of your screen, and also at the top of your screen you'll see a link enabling you to give your feedback on this event and to support the work of the British Library. Our first speaker is Chandri Westwell. Her book is entitled Dragons, Heroes, Myths, and Magic The Medieval Art of Storytelling, published by the British Library. The book grows out of Chandri's work with the British Library collection, and in particular her interest in French language and literature. Chandri read Modern Languages at Cape Town University and has postgraduate degrees in linguistics and in Old French and Old English. Please welcome Chandri. Thank you Kathleen, and thank you for inviting me to join this broadcast. It's really great to be here with my former colleagues Amy and Mary, and thank you to everybody who's joined us today. My book Dragons, Heroes, Myths, and Magic is a collection of 40 legends I have chosen from among those copied and illustrated during the great period of illuminated manuscript production in Western Europe between about 11 and 1600. Specialist illuminators worked alongside scribes to produce beautifully decorated copies of popular tales to be enjoyed by those who may or may not have been able to read. Some of the most shimmering and evocative paintings of the Middle Ages have survived among the stories in the parchment pages of medieval manuscripts, and they are reproduced in this book from the British Library collection. My book is divided into seven sections which include heroes and heroines, animal stories, quests, magical events, and so on. For each legend I have summarised the plot and where possible I have explored the origins of the story, how it was adapted, and where possible for medieval audiences and how artists of the time responded to the text. There are legends that are familiar to us today including the Holy Grail and Renard the Fox, while others are less well known, for example Curse Forest and the Seven Sages of Rome. And though literary tastes have changed over the last 800 years or so I dare say, I hope that readers will enjoy rediscovering stories that were once well known. Among the almost forgotten British heroes of the Middle Ages is Guy of Warwick, ancestor of the powerful Earls of Warwick, whose story is as wildly improbable as any modern superheroes. Guy started life in Warwickshire as a humble page who fell in love with his lord's daughter Felice. Determined to win her hand, he became a knight and set off on a series of extravagant adventures around Europe and the East. He defeated literally hundreds of enemies single-handedly and even killed an evil dragon who came upon attacking a lion. The lion became his faithful companion and followed him everywhere. This episode is illustrated across the lower margins of a prayer book in French that was probably made in London in the 14th century for a royal princess. While saying her prayers she may have been reminded of the triumph of good, the lion, over evil, the dragon by the pictures from this well-known story. So to return to Guy, finally after seven years of blazing a triumphant trail and leaving the remains of his enemies scattered in his wake, he returned to England where he immediately had to slay a large brown cow that was terrorizing the people of Warwickshire. Several pubs in the county are now named the Dun Cow after this episode and I believe there's a related drinking song. Guy then claimed his reward, the hand of the beautiful Felice. They were married but after 50 days of wedded bliss, Guy was struck with remorse for his violent past and so he left his new wife and went off again to retrace his steps and atone for his misdeeds, ending his life as a hermit in a cave at a place called Guy's Cliff, which you can still visit today outside Warwick. Annual pageants and jousting competitions are held there in memory of this local hero. So my book brings together a number of topics that are of interest to me and I hope to my readers. As Kathleen has said, my academic studies were in historical linguistics, how languages change, and my particular focus was on Old English and Old French, the languages used alongside each other in England from around the time of the Norman Conquest, the next 300 years or so, with Latin thrown into the mix. I have a question that interests me, is how did the English word toast and the French word tour, meaning early, both derive from the Latin toreo, torere, meaning to scorch? Was it only the English who burnt their cakes? My linguistic research brought me to the British Library and I'm now privileged to work with the extensive collections of medieval manuscripts there, some of them over a thousand years old. Each of these handwritten books is unique and in them I discovered a wealth of medieval chronicles and legends. The linguistic relationships I've talked about are played out in these texts, many of them translated from Latin into French, Middle English, and into other European languages including Italian and German. One example is the legends of toys, which were extremely popular and were translated and adapted many times for medieval audiences across Europe. You're all familiar with the Homeric ethics in Greek, but there were several other versions circulating in the early Middle Ages, including an account by a supposed eyewitness named Darius, which only survives in the Latin translation for late antiquity. The French version of this, Le Romain de Troyes, emerged in around 1150 and Chaucer's 14th century love story Troilus and Criseyde, set in Troy, is from the same source, though via the Italian vocatio. About 50 years later, another English adaptation, Lydgert's Moralizing Troy Book, shown in this slide, was based on a different history of Troy in Latin by the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne. All of these versions contain useful material for linguistic comparison, as well as revealing clues as to the cultural milieu in which they were produced. Aside from language, I'm fascinated by what literature and stories tell us about ourselves. Why do all human societies tell stories? Why do certain themes, like the quest and the wicked stepmother, recur across so many cultures, from Africa to Russia, and how are they adapted in different historical contexts? In the Middle Ages, there was little concept of copyright, so tales from a variety of sources were altered and rewritten, with prequels, sequels, and new characters added almost at will. For example, the tales of King Arthur originated in early accounts of the British warrior king. To these, the court of Camelot, the mysterious Merlin, and the ever popular dragons and giants were added in the French romances of the 12th and 13th centuries. Guinevere and Lancelot and the famous love triangle brought emotional depth to the story, and the knights of the round table needed a quest, so the holy grail and the Christian dimension were incorporated as well. In our modern world, the pace is fast and our attention span is short, so these medieval romances, with their swirling, repetitive episodes, need to be repackaged once again for modern audiences. I am just one of the many people who have tried to do this, and Amy too, in the most imaginative way. One legend that has been adapted and repurposed many times across Europe is the Swan Knight, probably familiar in some way to most of us. Swans have long been associated with royalty and magic, from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, the Finnish Kalevala, to the Russian folk tales that inspired Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The medieval Chanson du Chevalier Ausigne was first told by French troubadours, then later written down and inspired fabulous medieval illuminations. This one is from a book of chivalric tales, copied and illustrated in Rouen in the 15th century by the French princess Margaret of Anjou, future wife of Henry VI of England. Elements of the story will be partly recognisable to us from the fairy tale, The Wild Swans, as retold in the 19th century by Hans Christian Andersen. Seven sons are born to the queen while the king is away, and the jealous mother-in-law has them turned into swans. One, named Elias, manages to escape and rescues his six siblings, returning them to their human forms, all except one who remains a swan. In this medieval tale, Elias, a swan, becomes a knight and sets off on chivalric adventures, dropping off here and there to rescue damsels in distress while being pulled along in a boat by his swan brother, hence he is known as the Swan Knight. At this point enter the real life counts of Wallonia. As with Guy and the earls of Warwick, it was important at the time for powerful families to have legendary characters as ancestors, and this family of crusader knights had themselves written into the swan legend. So after a series of shipwrecks, forsaken identities etc, the tale concludes on a happy note with a marriage alliance between one of the Swan Knight's descendants and an ancestor of the Wallonia dynasty. But it doesn't all end here. In the German adaptation, the Swan Knight is called Lohengrin, becoming of course the and Wagner's extravagant patron Ludwig of Bavaria named his fairy tale Neuschwanstein Castle for the story. More recently, Wikipedia tells me there has been a Jim Henson puppet show and a popular Japanese manga comic version. So the story lives on. Before I conclude this talk, there is one important and this time real life character who I would like to mention. He is Harry Lee Douglas Ward, Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1849 to 1905, before the British Library became a separate institution. His wide knowledge of legends from Icelandic sagas to French romances to ancient Eastern fables was condensed into his three volume catalogue of romances. A monumental work that categorizes, I'm just showing it on the screen now, this is a later reprint, this is a monumental work that categorizes and compares many legends in British Library manuscripts, making them accessible to future scholars. This remarkable work was my inspiration and together with the many excellent editions by great literary scholars of the 19th century and beyond made my book possible. I would like to pay tribute to them all here. Thank you. Thank you, Chantry. Our next speaker is Amy Jeffs, who is an art historian and as her book Storyland, A New Mythology of Britain, published by Riverrun, demonstrates she's also a very talented artist, as you can see from the cover and illustrations throughout the book. Amy completed her doctorate at Cambridge in 2019 in art history and she's currently an author and artist working in Somerset. Welcome, Amy. Thank you, Kathleen, for that very kind introduction and it is beyond a joy to be here with Mary and Chantry who I worked with at the British Library and of course with Kathleen who oversaw us all, oversees us all. I'd like to open my talk with a retelling of a myth, I'm just going to do it off the top of my head, that appears in many medieval manuscripts. It's copied and recopied, it's from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which was the definitive story of Britain's history up until sort of the mid-16th century, from about the mid-12th, so really quite an important text actually. And this episode begins on the summit of a hill in Snowdonia, right next to Snowdon, it's called Dinas Emerus, with a king who goes by the name of Vortigern and he's one of these particularly evil British kings, he's held up as a kind of example of how not to do kingship in medieval texts, and he's let the Saxons into the land and he's stolen the throne from the rightful British king Aurelius Ambrosius, and now he's reaping the reward of his sins, he's fled to Wales to the top of this hill and he's building a tower for his own protection. Unfortunately the tower is crumbling to the ground every night after the builders have finished their work and no one knows why, and he asks his soothsayers and they say well in order to stop this curse you need to spill the blood of a boy with no human father, so he sends his scouts out into Wales and then Carmarthen, they hear some children teasing a child and saying you have no human father or what do you know, you can't play ball with us, and so they pick this child up, it turns out to be none other than Merlin, and this is the first time we sort of encounter him in this text, and he's taken to Dinas Emerus to King Vortigern, but Merlin's far more knowing than the soothsayers, he's the child of an incubus, a kind of demon and a nun, and he's got this ability to interpret omens and to see into the future, and he says I know why your tower is crumbling, it's not going to be fixed by spilling my blood, you will find out the reason for this disaster if you dig down under the tower, you will find, and so he says you'll find a pool there, when you find the pool drain it and you'll see, so this is what Vortigern's men do, they find a red and a white dragon fighting underneath the tower, and this is the reason for its collapse, and the king says to Merlin what does this mean, and Merlin says well the white dragon is the Saxons that you've let into this land, and the red dragon represents the British people who are going to be attacked and constantly harried by this new invasive presence, and so to cut a long story short, Vortigern is toppled by the rightful British claimant Aurelius, and Aurelius wants to set up a memorial to a group of British nobles that were massacred under King Vortigern by the Saxons, and this is where the character of Merlin crops up again, he's called upon to find a, to come up with an idea for a monument that will stand forever in commemoration of these nobles, and he says I know of such a place, it's there of such a thing, it is on a mountain in Ireland called Killarouse, we know now Killarouse is a mythic mountain, and he says there's a circle of stones on this mountain called the Giant's Dance, and so Aurelius sends his men to collect the stones but they're unable to lift them, and it's only by Merlin's powers that they are endowed with the strength to carry these stones, and they carry them to the site of the massacre which is Amesbury on the Salisbury Plain, and they re-erect the stone circle, and it becomes Stonehenge. So this is one of the stories that features in my book Storyland, A New Mythology of Britain, which is a retelling of the history of Britain through medieval eyes, running from just before the Great Flood and Noah's Ark, all the way up to the Norman Conquest, and each chapter opens with a retelling of a real medieval legend as fiction, and then that's followed by a commentary setting that myth in context, explaining any political implications it had in the Middle Ages, because many of these myths were called upon to justify real-life wars and real-life political claims, and it's also each chapter is illustrated with a linocut that I produced. And so I suppose it began with the linocuts themselves, they appeared before I'd had the idea for this book, and that was while I was writing up my thesis, I was living in Somerset, and I began producing linocuts at the Black Pig printmaking studio, and for those of you that aren't familiar with the process of linocut, you'd stain a linoblock, you can draw an image onto it and carve away what you want to appear white in the final print, so you carve away your image and then you roll ink onto it, in my case I always use black ink because I really feel like where you have large areas of black it evokes the kind of mystery and mistiness of myth, and then you place paper on top, you run it through a press and a print of that image is transferred onto the paper. And so I started producing illustrations of this mid-12th century history of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and as the series grew so my interest in perhaps retelling these stories for a wider audience grew. And so I'd like to finish this talk with a reading from my book, focusing in on that moment when Merlin enables Aurelius's men to lift the stones from the mythical Mount Kilarus and take them to the Salisbury Plain. Still Merlin sat down on a mossy knoll, breathing in the scent of time and asked to see their technique. We shall see which is better, brute strength or artistry and skill. They demonstrated how they rocked onto their haunches, embraced the rocks or wound their hands around ropes and taking deep breaths exerted their efforts on lifting the stones into the air. They demonstrated by trying once again with all of their strength, determined not to be outdone by a child. Everywhere Merlin looked, nearby and receding into the mist bands, he could see men purple in their face, their veins bulging, their calluses bursting against the rock, their feet pushing into the When it was clear that nothing they would do could shift the stones, the men walked panting over to the child. Now it was his turn to laugh. The boy's bony arms poked from his tunic and he seemed too weak to lift anything heavier than a bird's egg. But he stood up and placed his hands over his face. Those nearest him heard him muttering words under his breath. Some wondered if The small child stood motionless on that mountain, but a change was palpable in the air. It was as if the weight of each stone were tiptoeing out of its crystalline core onto the droplets of the ubiquitous vapour. It was as if the strength of the rock were passing from those droplets into the bodies of the men. Fingertips twitched, muscles rippled, jaws clenched, pupils dilated. And suddenly, as one, each man turned towards the stone with which he had previously contended and placed his arms about it. So this book was really born of academic research into manuscripts and a sort of excitement at the marvellous stories they contain and their artworks. And, you know, none of this would be possible if it weren't for the amazing work of institutions like the British Library, digitising their collections and putting them online. And we're at a point now in history where we can engage with this source material in ever more imaginative ways. And I think especially for students, this is such a great opportunity to respond creatively to historical sources and to just revel in the plethora of stories that are available to us now, from the deep past especially, and rethink them in ways that reflect our modern preoccupations and challenges. So, as I said, I'm so grateful to have been invited here today and I'm so excited about my colleagues' new books and I would urge you to get all three and really delve into the magic, the myths and the manuscripts. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you, Amy. Our final speaker is Mary Wellesley, introducing her book, Hidden Hands, The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers, also published by Riverrun, featuring on its cover an image from a British Library manuscript of Christian de Pizan and the act of writing. Like Chauncey, Mary's background is in literature, obtaining her doctorate in Middle English Literature from the University College London in 2017. Following her internship, she worked on the Library's Discovery and Literature website and is still involved in teaching in the Library's adult education programme. Welcome, Mary. Thank you so much, Kathleen. It's so nice to be here with former colleagues and friends, a real feast of myths and magic and manuscripts today. So, my talk is really, I hope there's still enough magic to go around because my talk is about really the magic of manuscripts themselves, my feeling of the magic that I get from manuscripts. I suppose I wanted to try and distill why it is that I have this slightly odd obsession with manuscripts and I wrote a doctoral thesis about them and then a book and I think I can, I think I can distill it down into this single idea, which is that a manuscript is an encounter. When I'm sitting in the silence of a special collections reading room and turning the pages of a medieval manuscript or indeed sitting at home looking at a digital surrogate online, what I'm having is an encounter with the past, but more important than that, I'm having an encounter with the people that made the object in front of me because a manuscript is not just a text, it's a collection of human stories. So many people have been involved in the creation of manuscripts, the end-to-end process is one that involves so many figures, from the people who made, who made and processed the parchment or the paper on which it's written, to the scribes, perhaps junior scribes in a scriptorium or a workshop who assisted the main scribe, to the artists and it more of a remove the patrons and the authors and then latterly once the manuscript was finished, readers and owners and each of these figures have a role in shaping the manuscript in ways both small and large and many of them left their traces in the pages and that's what's really special to me, especially because although many manuscripts do give us a window into the lives of famous figures, so Kathleen mentioned that one of the sections of my book talks about the prayer book of Henry VIII, his personal prayer book which was made in about 1540 by Jean Mallat who was a famous illustrator and scribe and it's an amazing manuscript which has these wonderful images of Henry within it. Although some manuscripts do give us this window into the lives of these famous figures, very often they give us this wonderful connection to these people whose stories we otherwise wouldn't know anything about, anonymous artisans, anonymous scribes and what's important about this is that these are very often the kinds of people who we don't really valorise in our traditional histories of the Middle Ages, you know these are people of a lower social status, women and that's why manuscripts are so special to me because they're often one of the only ways we can access these lives now long receded and often not celebrated. So before we begin, I want to just look at this lovely page from a British Library manuscript. This is a manuscript made in Spain at the end of the 11th century, possibly the beginning of the 12th and it has this wonderful little note at the end of it which I think encapsulates a lot of what I really adore about manuscripts and it's this little note written by the scribe. The scribe says, A man who knows not how to write may think this no mean feat, but only try to do it yourself and you will learn how arduous is the writer's task. It dims your eyes, makes your back ache and knits your chest and belly together. It is a terrible ordeal for the whole body. So, gentle reader, turn these pages carefully and keep your finger far from the text, for just as hail plays havoc with the fruits of spring, so a careless reader is a bane to books and writing. And I love that because it just reminds us of the people involved in the production of manuscripts and also reminds us of the preciousness of them and that for me is much of their magic. So I just want to focus in on some a few key figures. There are lots of people in my book but these are just a few of them to try to give you a sense of what the book's about but also what it is that I love about these figures. So here you can now see this image from the famous Lindisfarne Gospels, this incomparable 8th century manuscript made in Northumbria, really most famous for its extraordinary artwork. Here, word becomes artwork, letters become visual masterpieces, created most likely by Bishop Eardfrith, possibly on a kind of Lenten retreat and it's an absolute masterpiece. But what I really love about it is, as you can see here in these little tiny details in between the lines, these tiny annotations that were added in about 970 by an annotator called Aldred and he added these translations of the scriptural text which is in Latin, he added the translations in English, in Old English, and they're just so beautiful in themselves. But also what's really important about Aldred is that he's the one that names Bishop Eardfrith, who we think was the artist, and names the anchorite Bilfrith who made the cover of the manuscript which is now lost. So if it wasn't for Aldred who wrote this little note at the end of the manuscript, we wouldn't know anything about the people who made this manuscript. So he's an important witness to the story of the manuscript and he's also lovely because there are moments in the text where he writes these notes which really you might almost miss. There's one folio where he's written a note and it's almost hidden in the page gutter, you might miss it if you were turning the manuscript pages quickly, and there he begs the reader to remember him and the other people involved in the manuscript's production. And we hear him, centuries hence, from that little groove at the bottom of the page gutter. Aldred is an annotator and annotators are some of my favourite figures in manuscript study. And I now want to look at another one who has this wonderful name, the Tremulous Hand. We don't know anything about the Tremulous Hand. Unlike Aldred who actually gave us his name, the Tremulous Hand is an anonymous figure. He was a monk in Worcester, Priory, who annotated a large number of manuscripts in Old English. And in the 12th century when he was writing these annotations, English was starting to evolve and it was starting to become unintelligible. And so he wrote these little translations of the Old English words either in Latin or in Middle English, the language into which Old English had evolved or was beginning to evolve. And he was gathering words, possibly to make kind of a glossary. And he's called the Tremulous Hand because he has this very distinctive handwriting. It's shaky, it's left leaning. We think he had a condition called essential tremor, which affects about 4% of adults. And here I've just taken an example. And you can see in the close up, I've pulled up this word, lareo, which is an Old English word meaning doctor or teacher. And there you can see he's above the word doctor. And it's a wonderful shaky little hand. And he's just this lovely figure. And I find it very hard not to feel a certain kinship with him because he just, you know, he loved the material remains of the past and was intent on ferreting around in manuscripts, trying to learn something of the history of his own language. And I feel a real connection to him, even though I know nothing about him really, other than that his hand shook and roughly when he lived and where. Sometimes, however, manuscripts do give us these names and these fleeting glimpses of figures who we otherwise might not know anything about. This is a manuscript that I came across while I was doing my doctoral thesis. It's a manuscript of a poem by John Lydgate, who is a 15th century poet. And here on this manuscript page we have at the bottom this wonderful note. And it says, this is Elizabeth Dane's book. He that stealeth it shall be hanged by a hook. And I love this note. And when you look closely at it, to a palaeographer, you can see that it's a bit of an amateurish hand, which might suggest that this was written by somebody who was not very used to writing, possibly a child. And I find this quite moving because Elizabeth Danes is a young woman, possibly a girl, and she clearly loves her book. She loves the story it contains and she wants to protect it. So she writes this little threat into its pages. But also, you know, she was a young woman in probably the 16th century living in a patriarchal world and threatening potential book thieves might have been one of her very few ways to assert herself. And I was very kind of moved by this note and I remember reading it and just feeling this sense of the centuries dissolving and feeling this kind of kinship with this fellow lover of books from centuries ago. And so then I wanted to look into Elizabeth Danes and so I went looking for traces of her and I could find various other Elizabeth Danes but I just couldn't be sure which one had potentially written this note or indeed if any of the ones that I found was the author of this note. And so I suddenly realised, you know, this note might be the only surviving trace or record we have of this woman about whom we know very little but otherwise all of her life would be lost to her but for this little note. Such is the magic of the manuscript. So the stories of women is something I'm incredibly interested in and I wrote about women in every chapter of the book and because I wanted to make clear that women were involved in the production of manuscripts at every level as scribes, as artists, as patrons, as authors, you know, and also as readers and annotators. And this is a very very early example of a manuscript, this is called the Book of Nunnerminster, and it's in these tiny little details in this manuscript it suggests that it may have been written by a female scribe, possibly for a woman. It's a prayer book, probably made in Mercia, and some of the Latin words have feminine grammatical endings suggesting that it was for female use. And it also has, right at the end of it, a little note describing some land owned by Queen Aelswith who was Alfred the Great's wife. And so there has been a suggestion that this book possibly belonged to her and that she then gave it to Nunnerminster which she founded. And this is just a lovely example of how manuscripts really have to be examined with kind of forensic care and it's these small details, you know, a few slightly different words in a Latin word ending or a tiny note at the end that just are these hints and clues to a lost history. But they're also little clues to remind us that the past is often richer and more diverse than we give it credit for. We have this kind of misconception that all manuscripts were made by monks and it's just not true. Many manuscripts were made by secular figures but also women were involved in the production of manuscripts and this manuscript is a fantastic example. So another great example of a female producer, this is the book of Marjorie Kempf. I talk about this manuscript in the opening chapter of the book which is about discoveries because the story of this manuscript's discovery is a really fantastic one. In 1934 a group of people called the Butler Bowden family were playing ping pong in their house in Derbyshire and one of them trod on a ping pong ball and they went to a cupboard to go and look for new balls and out of the cupboard came this what was described as an undisciplined pile of book clutter and Colonel Butler Bowden said that he was going to put the whole lot on the bonfire because it was so annoying and he couldn't find ping pong balls. But mercifully someone suggested that perhaps they should have a look at the books and they should try and see if there was anything interesting in them and indeed sometime later one of the books which had a mouse-eaten cover was identified as the lost book of Marjorie Kempf. The book of Marjorie Kempf is the first piece of autobiographical writing in English. It was authored by a woman named Marjorie Kempf who came from Bishop's Lynn in Norfolk in the 15th century. She held various jobs, she was a horse mill operator and a brewer, she was the mother of 14 children and what I always say about Kempf, what's really extraordinary about it is in a way its ordinariness because Marjorie Kempf was from this kind of prosperous urban mercantile family, today what we might call perhaps a kind of middle class and it's so rarely those kinds of voices that come down to us from the middle ages. It's more often the voices of a kind of regal or ecclesiastical elite that survive from the period and that's because people who were not part of those elite classes were more likely to be illiterate and Kempf is no different in this. Kempf was herself illiterate. She could probably just about read but she certainly couldn't write and so she had to dictate her text to an amanuensis which is a that's a word which means a scribe who heard her words and wrote them down for her. In fact she made four different attempts to do this with three different amanuensis which I find very moving. It shows her kind of dogged determination to get her story heard and I just think if we think about this moment in 1934 with these ping-pong players it really under underlines the preciousness of the manuscript itself because had it not been for that fateful ping-pong game we wouldn't have had this extraordinary text, such an open, unvarnished, honest account of an ordinary woman's experiences in 15th century England. So thinking about that theme of the voices of ordinary people this is just a a penultimate example. This is a letter written by a man called Richard Call to his beloved Marjorie Parston. It's part of an amazing cache of letters that the British Library holds called the Parston letters which were letters exchanged between several generations of one family and the story of Richard Call and Marjorie Parston is one of kind of ill-fated lovers. Richard Call was a servant who worked for the Parston family and he fell in love with his mistress's daughter and she indeed fell in love with him and they had a secret marriage but because he was of a lower social status to her, her mother really took against the union and had the pair separated and this letter is this amazing, very moving document in which he begins it, you know, mistress my own dear lady wife and he says it's the hardest thing he's ever had to write and he also writes, you know, I pray you burn this letter. He's so afraid that the letter will be seen by her family and so we just have this sense that, you know, by some amazing miracle this letter has survived and it's this extraordinary expression of love. Their story is a sad one because they did indeed marry but they were ostracised by Marjorie's family and she died about 10 years after they got married, possibly in childbirth, we don't know, although Richard Call as a trustee servant was welcomed back into the family and into their employ but Marjorie, the daughter of the house, was never allowed back and Marjorie's mother Margaret wrote this horrible letter describing her and she says we have lost in her nothing but a brethel and that's a middle English word which is related to the modern English brothel and it just means a worthless person in her estimation so we have lost in her nothing but a worthless person and she never spoke to her daughter ever again. So a final example because I just wanted to really underline this point about how precious manuscripts are themselves. This is the opening page of Beowulf, the great masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon literature, this extraordinary epic poem and you'll see it looks a bit funny, it's got these weird edges to it and that's because on the 23rd October 1731 the manuscript was being stored in a rather ominously named place called Ashburnham House and Ashburnham House, a fire began on the floor below the library of Ashburnham House at around two o'clock in the morning and a desperate salvage operation began during which time the librarians had to forcibly break open the locked bookcases and begin to throw manuscripts out the window and several whole presses, i.e. bookshelves, were destroyed and in several the fire travelled up the backs of the bookcases and singed the edges of the folios and Beowulf is one of those examples which is why it's got that very ragged edge that you can see there and it's a story of an incredible near miss because at that point in 1731 there was no other copy of the poem, there was no transcription, there was no edition and so had that fire travelled any further we would have lost this great gem of old English literature. So that is the end of my talk, I hope I've given you some sense of why I love manuscripts so much and the magic I find in them. Thank you so much. Thank you Mary and can I at this point thank all of our three speakers for fascinating and I have to say really quite inspiring storytelling about medieval manuscripts. I hope all of you enjoyed it as much as I did. Now we have a little bit of time to ask the speakers some questions and I'd like to start with the topic of selection and choice because obviously there's a lot of decisions to be made when you're writing a book. Maybe could I start with you Chantry and ask a little bit about how did you pick the 40 and were there any, I know you grouped it by themes, did that help in the selection process or were you focused on the languages? What sort of things did you think about? Well I actually had I think it was 46 stories and I had to cut some in the end because my book was becoming rather too thick and heavy for anybody to manage, certainly not to read in bed. So actually what I started from was the illuminations, the images because my book is very much about the images and what they tell us about the stories and I had to leave out some of the most well-known legends like Beowulf that Mary mentioned because there weren't any medieval images associated with that story and so many of the stories that I chose were because they were really lovely images that I wanted to include but then for some of them there were so many beautiful illustrations across the British Library manuscripts that I had to, it was so hard, I had to sit there and decide which ones weren't going to make the final cut and that was probably one of the hardest things that I had to do but really it was the images that dictated for me and it was very easy really from there on. Thank you. Amy I'm fascinated by, I think you really bring a unique perspective. I can't really think of any other examples of somebody who has the art historical knowledge but illustrates her own book. I mean you must be doing something quite extraordinary here but it occurred to me that you, did it give you a perspective on medieval artists and I'm thinking here that you had to choose the element of the story that you were going to illustrate and did that give you some insight into how medieval artists might have made a similar choice? Absolutely yes, I mean at the same time as illustrating and producing the illustrations not yet knowing they were going to illustrate a book, I was working on my thesis which focused on a history of the kings of Britain, the origin myth of Britain in French by Wasse, heavily illustrated. It's a manuscript in the British Library, Edgerton MS3028 and I showed pictures of it in my talk and that poem is very heavily abridged in that particular manuscript and I realised in the process of producing my own illustrations of this same story that you need action to illustrate and that large parts of the unabridged Hormones of Brut, Wasse, the origin myth of Britain are dialogue or sort of rhetorical elaboration and that leaves you with nothing to illustrate and Edgerton MS3028 has an illustration on every single recto of every double page spread and so it was absolutely necessary to abridge the poem if they were going to stick with that intense programme of illustration. So it taught me about, it helped with kind of understanding this manuscript, it taught me about book production, it gave me an insight into this workshop where they might have been kind of abridging a text on the hoof in order to have this lavishly illustrated, dynamically illustrated book. Fascinating. Now Mary I'm going to ask you the dreaded favourite question which I always hate but in your selection, and you mentioned you picked several highlights, do you have a favourite? Well I think it probably would have to be Marjorie Kemp. She's just such a kind of larger than life figure and the story of the manuscript's discovery is just so kind of ridiculous and wonderful but I also, because it was one of the earlier chapters that I wrote and indeed is the first chapter that appears in the book, it was quite a kind of inspiration for me because I was thinking a lot about women's stories and women's contribution to manuscript production and it kind of to some degree informed the way that I approached the research for the rest of the book and I really tried to find female producers at every level and that was really kind of wonderful for me in a way and because I, you know, I didn't really know very much about the stories of female scribes and what evidence we had for them but the more I looked the more I found all of this fantastic stuff and I actually came to kind of regret the fact that in my doctoral thesis I'd kind of by default always used a kind of male pronoun of a scribe and actually a lot of the time, you know, it could have been written by a male scribe but I didn't really have any way of conclusively saying that a scribe was male or female except if they, you know, they give their name at the end of a text which they sometimes do in which case you can be more clear but, you know, Kemp was kind of, you know, to some degree a sort of bit of a springboard that forced me to go and look for more women's stories and then I came across a whole load of stuff that I didn't, you know, I hadn't encountered before. I think we, because I, you know, I did a literature PhD and I think we tend to sort of study literature in quite kind of nationally bound ways and I sort of mainly focused on English material and I then, in the course of the book, was starting to read about medieval Welsh poetry. I don't have Welsh but I read all of the stuff in translation and I came across this fantastic Welsh poet, Chwaebel Mechain, who wrote this incredible poetry. She wrote about religious themes and all sorts of things that you kind of might conventionally expect of a 15th century poet but she also wrote about scatological themes, about domestic violence, about sexuality. I mean, she wrote a poem about her own body, let's say, that is, I mean, just incredibly graphic and so unexpected for a medieval British female poet and I was just delighted to come across it and it was a, you know, it was a kind of bit of a wake-up call for me and it has really informed the next project that I'm doing. Well, I was just going to say it sounds like you've got next, a lot of material for the next step. Talking about process, maybe I could ask a final question of all three of you, the same question and just pitch in, which is, I am interested in how you managed to do this during the pandemic. It must have been so hard and I know a couple of you are new mothers as well. How did you do it and perhaps what did you find the most surprising about that process when you were, I assume, writing at home and didn't have access to your primary source material? Well, I think my experience was quite a positive one. I'd been writing blog posts on these subjects for the British Library and I'd been talking for years about maybe putting them in together into a book but, you know, family commitments and all sorts of things meant that I never got around to it and then suddenly lockdown came along. I couldn't come into the British Library and work with the manuscripts. I already had sort of started on the idea and I just shut myself in a little room at the top of the house and I had the time of my life writing this book and I found that there was, you know, luckily all the British Library manuscripts are available, as has been mentioned, you know, on digitised manuscripts and you can find most of the images there and, you know, fortunately so many of the institutions opened up their periodicals and other information to people during lockdown so, for me, it was just a great opportunity. What about you, Amy? What was your experience like in Somerset? I'd done a lot of the research in this manuscript, well, yeah, sort of manuscript, but unwittingly through my thesis and I think that, you know, while it was obviously a very upsetting time, there was a sort of, I realised that I am much more of a loner than I'd been before and that actually this time to write and reflect and was really essential and there were these windows when things opened up and you could travel and in those windows I darted out to visit the sites that I talk about. I went to Scotland and saw Mary, that was very exciting, and visited some glens on my own and I went to the Norfolk Broads and into Wales and those precious, like, darting out like a moray eel from lockdown. I think that made those moments of freedom even more kind of delicious and exciting and you felt like you used to make the most of every second that you were out because you knew that, you know, there was inevitably going to be another retreat. So, yeah, it taught me a lot and about myself and, yeah, it was how it made freedom feel. Mary, you've already mentioned some surprises that you came across during your research. Is there anything that stood out from the process of trying to finish this with everything going on? Well, I mean, just to chime with what Chantry was saying, you know, this really, finishing this book in a pandemic without access to the libraries would have been completely impossible if the manuscripts weren't digitised and I wrote a lot about, I mean, the book is mainly British Library manuscripts and they are almost all of them digitised. So, yeah, it would have been impossible without that. Were there surprises? There were many surprises. You know, finishing a book is hard. Finishing a book in a pandemic is very hard. Finishing a book when you're pregnant in a pandemic. I think my partner bore the brunt of it. Let's put it like that. Wow. Well, Amy. May I just, I just want to also want to shout out to the daughter of the studio director. She's 13 and she, because I couldn't use the studio because of pregnancy insolvency and also lockdown, she editioned, it was her first assay job, she editioned the prints, the illustrations for the book so that I would have stuff available when the book came out. Wow. And so, you know, I was so grateful to her and it was a pretty cool assay job for a 13-year-old, I think. Her dad taught her to edition prints. That's Chris Pegg at the Black Pig Printmaking Studio teaching her all of the craft. And so that was a satisfying outcome. Well, I'm so impressed by all of your work. I mean, really well done. So exciting and so exciting to have this, this concentration of focus on this material, which can be sometimes dismissed as boring. And I think each of you have described in slightly different ways why that's the opposite of the situation. So it only remains for me to thank you very much for your time and your insight. To thank all of the audience for attending this event and to remind you that an easy way to fulfill all of your Christmas needs is to go up to that book button at the top of the screen. Thanks very much.