“Maybe this is something that needs to be done. And you start to ask yourself the question, if not me, then who? And if not now, then when?”
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About this Episode
Recorded October 5, 2020. Produced by Caitlin Postal.
Dr Lucy R. Hinnie discusses her forthcoming digital edition of the Bannatyne Manuscript [Advocates MS. 1.1.6], the largest extant collection of late medieval Scottish verse, with Caitlin Postal. Lucy’s project to digitize the Bannatyne Manuscript, a sixteenth century collection of late medieval Scottish verse, will offer the first working digital edition of this manuscript in its entirety – an excellent resource for those interested in theology, morality, comedy, love, and fables from late medieval Scotland. Follow Lucy on Twitter @yclepit and her work on the Bannatyne MS at bannatyne.org and @BannatyneMS.
Read Dr. Hinnie’s work on Bannatyne’s invocation of Chaucer in “Bannatyne’s Chaucer: A Triptych of Influence” for The Chaucer Review.
Resources and Further Reading
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- National Library of Scotland: Advocates Manuscript 1.1.6
- Images of the Bannatyne MS available in the Universal Viewer
- Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
- Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI)
- Oxygen XML Editor
- Visual Studio Code
- Atom
- Sublime
- Jekyll at GitHub
- Anna Fore Waymack, De raptu meo
- International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
- Early English Books Online (EEBO)
- TEAMS Middle English Texts
- Lindsay Crocket, UI/UX Design
Episode Transcript:
Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Caitlin Postal. Click here to open a .pdf of the episode transcript.
[Music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility,” CC BY 4.0]
Caitlin Postal 0:13
Hi and welcome to Coding Codices! I’m Caitlin Postal from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee. In this episode, I’ll be talking to Dr. Lucy Hinnie. Say hello, Lucy.
Lucy Hinnie 0:24
Hello!
Caitlin Postal 0:26
Lucy is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan. We’re going to be talking today about her project to digitize the Bannatyne Manuscript. Is that right? Bannatyne?
Lucy Hinnie 0:36
Bannatyne.
Caitlin Postal 0:37
Bannatyne. In addition to working on the Bannatyne, Lucy is known for running the #RemoteRetreat on Twitter and is currently preparing her monograph for review. So without further ado, let’s get right into it!
[Music: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” CC0 ]
This is a very basic question because I haven’t read the Bannatyne at all. So Lucy, can you just introduce it for me as well as for any listeners?
Lucy Hinnie 1:06
Of course. The Bannatyne Manuscript is a Scottish manuscript. It was compiled in the 1560s. Most scholarship concedes that this was probably in the period of 1565 to 1568. It is the largest extant miscellany of Scottish literature from this time. There are 407 poems in the main manuscript, and an additional 53 in what is known as the draft manuscript, which some scholarship seems to date as having existed before the main manuscript. So it’s 397 leaves over two volumes. It’s still available to look at in the National Library of Scotland: Advocates Manuscript 1.1.6. It was compiled by George Bannatyne, who was a young man. He was in his early 20s. I believe he was 23 when he finished work on the manuscript, which is galling.
Caitlin Postal 2:02
That’s younger than I am. I don’t like it!
Lucy Hinnie 2:04
I don’t like it either. It makes me feel very inadequate. And he was the son of a Burgess, I believe, in Edinburgh at that time. So he was mingling in a kind of more upper class coteries at this point. And what’s really interesting about the Bannatyne — and what’s become most interesting to me in recent months — is that it is characterized as being a plague manuscript, so it was compiled in time of pest: “When we fra work were compeld to rest.” So it’s one of many plagues that hit Scotland in this kind of late medieval period, where there was a three month enforced seclusion for Bannatyne. We’re not clear on whether that would have happened within the city walls or outwith them, but he certainly takes, takes time out, takes some social isolation to compile this manuscript. So it’s an interesting framing device, and, Bannatyne, he is a very diligent, almost information technologist, as my supervisor David Parkinson refers to it. The manuscript is divided into five sections that are thematic so theology, morality, comedy, love, and fables. And within that, there’s further subdivisions. So it’s a very meticulously ordered manuscript. So that’s kind of the general overview of the Bannatyne. It is not widely known. Partly the reason it has survived and endured where other manuscripts haven’t, is that it was sort of revived by Alan Ramsay and Sir Walter Scott in the 1700s and the 1800s and used as kind of an example of Scotland’s national heritage. It was seen as like this very, and rightly so in many ways, as this very seminal collection of great Scottish literature. And it led to this kind of revival of interest in the material that’s in there. So it gets a big boost in the 18th and 19th centuries. But because it’s so large, I think you’d be hard pressed to meet anyone who has read the whole thing and understands the whole thing and knows everything that’s in there. And I certainly am not that person! I focused on specific parts. So that’s the Bannatyne, this big beast of a manuscript from the 1560s.
Caitlin Postal 4:15
I mean, it sounds really cool. And now I want to read more of it, more than just the handful of poems that you sent my way in advance of this meeting.
Since it is so large, and there’s so much material in it, can you tell me a little bit about how you work with the Bannatyne–
Lucy Hinnie 4:32
Sure.
Caitlin Postal 4:32
— what material is most interesting to you? Why you want to digitize it?
Lucy Hinnie 4:38
Absolutely. So my doctoral thesis, which I completed a couple of years ago, was on basically a feminist reading of the Bannatyne Manuscript’s fourth section and a part of the third section, so primarily the love poems. Also a little bit into the comedy section. So I framed that through the idea the medieval querelle des femmes. So the work of Joan Kelly. So that was my framing. And what I did was I went into the fourth section of the manuscript with the intention of not spending too much time on the established poets and the longer poems that were well known, but rather looking at some of the anonymous verse — verse that had been kind of hidden away for a number of years, poems that weren’t necessarily as well known or well studied. So that was the framing of my, my doctoral research. And from there, two things kind of happened. One is my monograph project, which really takes the thematic interest of my thesis and pushes it to the fore and sort of looks at the sort of reinserting female narratives and narratives about women’s rights and roles into that period of history. But the other thing that became very apparent to me… I started work on my PhD in 2012. In the UK, usually you finish in three to four years, but because I was doing it part time, it was a longer trajectory. And I think for me, I was always astonished that there wasn’t a digital Bannatyne. To me, it just seemed like something that eventually somebody would do, or would exist. Like I wouldn’t have to do, I could just wait and it would turn up. And then a few years into it, having, you know, vast photocopies of older editions of the manuscript, I really started to feel like maybe this isn’t happening. Maybe this is something that needs to be done. And you start to ask yourself the question, if not me, then who? And if not now, then when? So I started to push it forward. And it’s one of those things that looking at these poems in such depth, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had access to an excellent facsimile edition from the 1980s. And a wonderful Scottish Text Society edition from the 1930s and 40s. So I had these dated, but very useful, resources to hand. But the Scottish Text Society, for example, most universities I’ve been at — so Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Saskatchewan — there will be like one hard copy of these texts. But that’s it. You know, if someone else wants it… I remember very vividly in Edinburgh one day, going to get it from Special Collections and it wasn’t there. And I realized, I was like, “I’m going to know the person that has this.” And it turned out a researcher friend of mine from down south was up visiting, and I hadn’t realized. So I sort of jokingly texted, you know, “have you got the Bannatyne today?” And they’re like, “yes.” And I was like, “Oh, cool. I guess I’ll get it tomorrow, then.” So there’s, there was this kind of sense that although it was ubiquitous, and although it was at the heart of so many conversations, access wasn’t easy. And it remains not very easy, particularly for those who don’t necessarily have palaeographic knowledge or aren’t necessarily skilled in the field of how to read this sort of Secretary hand, very cramped, very dense manuscript. It became more pressing for me and it became something that I started to feel quite passionate about. And that’s where the kind of seeds of this project came to light. So at the moment, my two year funding, which is drawing to a conclusion in the next few months, is just to digitize the fourth section, which is about I think it’s 140 poems. It does work out about equally a fifth of the manuscript, maybe slightly more, because there’s some quite long poems in there. So I’m looking at the fourth at the moment, and I’m hoping to be able to do the remaining four sections in the coming decades and get that done as well.
Caitlin Postal 8:35
Yeah, and you had said at the beginning that it’s, what, 500 pages?
Lucy Hinnie 8:41
Yes, it’s 397 folios. It’s 407 poems. Yeah, another 53. So about 460.
Caitlin Postal 8:50
That’s, that’s a sizable amount. So even doing a fourth of that is quite a lot.
Lucy Hinnie 8:54
It really is.
Caitlin Postal 9:02
As you’ve been working on the fourth section of the Bannatyne, how, how are you preparing the digital work with your non digital approach?
Lucy Hinnie 9:11
For me, it’s about the broader idea of cultural heritage. It doesn’t exist solely in a vacuum. So we can’t just have the primary sources. And we can’t just have the theoretical understandings of it, they kind of have to meet in the middle. I’ve been quite careful to not let my monograph studies influence too much what’s happening in the fourth section, because I do want this to be quite a universal tool for people. So I’m keen not to go in and do like, I don’t know, a very gendered, very feminist reading of the fourth section, because I would like it to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible. So that has been, that has been quite difficult. A lot of what I did in my doctoral research was looking for what wasn’t there or what had been overlooked, and the process of digitization going through and encoding the text has led me to see things that I didn’t see before. See patterns that didn’t necessarily stand out to me when I was reading the poems not in chronological order and not literally line by line so that I could put in my little <l> brackets to indicate the fact that it was a line. So there have been some things that have come up, and I’ve just kicked myself and thought, I wish I’d noticed that, and then there are other things where I’m like, oh, it turned out that wasn’t as important as I thought it was. So I’ve had this weird opportunity to go back and really do probably the most in depth close reading of my life through doing it for a completely different purpose. Like I’m counting lines, I’m figuring out how to markup, you know, this one superscript TC, like, how am I going to do that? What’s going to happen here? But I’m also getting a chance to delve back into the poems that I’d given a, you know, a close reading in a theoretical way. So it’s interesting. I’m trying to keep, like, the passion I have for the digitizing and the passion I have for my monograph project, weirdly I’m trying to keep them quite compartmentalized from one another. But I do hope that I will be able to do at least a couple of almost, like, richer editions of certain poems where I can really go to town with the markup in terms of the theoretical things I’ve been looking at. Whereas the full standalone fourth edition may be more in keeping with a TEAMS edition or something like that, where the footnotes carry information but aren’t necessarily hugely politically motivated in that sense.
Caitlin Postal 11:30
Yeah, I mean, I always like to say that encoding a text is closer than close reading because you’re attending not just to the text as a piece of literature, but really, on its own linguistic and structural terms, in addition to the sort of content based literary approach.
Lucy Hinnie 11:50
Absolutely. And let the record show that it was Caitlin herself, who helped me understand TEI by explaining it to me on a whiteboard in a dorm room in Victoria last summer. So the project owes you great debt, because that was really useful. I still have the picture on my phone when I get confused.
Caitlin Postal 12:13
We’ve talked a little bit about digitizing it and about encoding it, but we haven’t really described the back end tools and resources that you’re using for this digitization process. So I know already (because we were at the same DHSI course) that you’re using TEI to do some XML markup for it. Will you share a little bit about how you’ve approached the technical side?
Lucy Hinnie 12:35
Of course, it was so interesting thinking about this question, because the biggest lesson I’ve learned through DH is to keep track of what you do and the decisions you make. Because you will start to doubt yourself and ask yourself, why did I decide to do this? Convince yourself that you’re quite stupid, and then go back and be like, “Oh, no, that reasoning tracks. Yep, that was so logic. That’s why I’m doing it. That’s cool.” So it’s been a real whirlwind in the last few years. To put it in context, I was not at all a digital humanist before my postdoc. I became interested in it in the final two years, thanks to the wonderful Dr. Anouk Lang, Edinburgh, who’s working on that amazing Data Sitters Club project that’s coming out at the moment. So that really helped turn my attention to, so a lot of this is self taught. And a lot of it is very rudimentary. My aims with the project were to keep it simple, to keep it open, and to keep it affordable wherever possible. Those three things don’t always go hand in hand, I have discovered. So it’s always, I always think of it as like weights and balances. So for example, a decision I came to this year, which I’ll talk a little bit about in a moment, was whether or not to invest in some web design. And thankfully, because the pandemic cancelled every single thing that my budget could have been used for, paying for web design suddenly became not an issue at all. Whereas if this had been a normal year, that would have been a real consideration. So the things that I began working with were, in the 1960s, the Oxford Text Archive began to digitize text in a really, really rudimentary form. And it turns out — this is one of the my favorite things that I’ve discovered throughout this whole project — was that the Bannatyne was actually one of the first texts to be digitized in this way by the Oxford Text Archive. So it was done in a very rudimentary style of markup called COCOA, which I’ve met a few people who know how to wrangle. My first impression of COCOA was it’s like someone yelling at you, because it’s all in capitals. So it’s a very, very stressful text edit file to work with — is COCOA — because your manuscript is effectively yelling at you. So these files were made for the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, which is an excellent online resource that has catalogued many manuscripts for examples of how words and verb forms were used. So these files existed. I was led to believe that COCOA was a dead art and there was nothing that could be done with it. And these files in themselves were quite useless because they were just effectively showing markup. However, as I started to learn more about it — and attending DHSI was a huge part of that — and I managed to find ways to make these COCOA files work as a basis for a more in depth transcription. So I decided at that point, I was going to go with TEI, I was going to use the COCOA files as a basis, cross-referenced with a printed edition of the text. I was lucky that I got to work with an honors student here at U of S, who did a module on advanced manuscript studies for their final honors year and Tiana Kirstein, who graduated, was an absolutely fantastic degree and won a prize, in fact, just this last convocation. She came on board and diligently went through the transcription on behalf of the project and made sure that it was all correct. And all in keeping with one another, there were no errors there. The transcription was there to do this, obviously, Oxygen — this is the one tool that I’ve yet to find a free workaround for, if you’re working with TEI — is the inevitable place at which you end up and it’s, it’s very good at what it does. So I’m trying not to begrudge it that much. Yeah.
Caitlin Postal 16:27
So I actually have some recommendations for non Oxygen —
Lucy Hinnie 16:31
amazing
Caitlin Postal 16:32
— tools. There are other free plain text editors, like Visual Studio Code, which is put out by Microsoft. Like Atom and Sublime, that are available. There are XML plugins that will run some validation. Sometimes they’re buggy and have errors that might not necessarily happen in Oxygen. But it sort of depends on what you need the tool for. So if you’re doing just straight XML with TEI, you can use a plain text editor generally without an issue, especially if they have an XML plugin. But if you’re doing some more heavy lifting, so if you’re writing like XSLT, or using some of the other X languages, then you would want something more powerful like Oxygen.
Lucy Hinnie 17:17
Yes, for me, so I love Atom. I’m glad you mentioned Atom. I think that was a DHSI tip from someone in the Digital Editions class mentioned as well. It’s so beautiful, I love using it. For me, the problem was validation. When I put the fourth section together as one big lump, we’re looking at like 50… I just thought “I can’t, I can’t, Oh, goodness, me, I can’t do this.” So Atom has been super, super helpful for doing smaller bits and pieces. And I really want to get plugins working to the point where I could do the whole thing in Atom because honestly — anyone listening who’s not using it, listen to Caitlin — Atom is amazing. And it’s what I actually recommended Tiana use for her transcription because it was free. And I didn’t want to ask a student to have to pay money for a piece of software that I’d like to think they would go on to use. But realistically, they might not. So Atom was a real, a real gift there. The other kind of under the hood things were: I was very lucky in that, literally the month I moved here, I got an email from the National Library of Scotland, who have been very supportive of this project, to see that the Bannatyne had actually been digitized in IIIF for Project Europeana, which is a funnily enough a European project with a name like that. So those images were now available, which was just so serendipitous in timing because there had been digitizations prior, but they were quite laggy. They were maybe about a decade old. So I’ve had those to work with, obviously free, been using them through Universal Viewer online, which has just been working perfectly in terms of hosting. This was a really interesting thing that I came across early on, which was the question of intellectual property, institutional property, and precarity. One project that I took a lot of inspiration from actually was Anna Fore Waymack’s work on De Raptu Meo, which is about Cecily Chaumpaigne and Chaucer. And it’s a very simple website, but a very beautiful website. And Anna, as far as I know, shoulders the burden of that website herself. There was funding from an institution, but it is independent, it doesn’t rely on an institution for hosting. It just exists there as this kind of beautiful object that deals with a really important part of that whole narrative. So that was in my head as I came to realize, my time here was always going to be limited and to tie my project into an institutional hosting, an institutional server could present problems further down the line. So in my head, I wanted, like, a digital briefcase. I could put my project and close the locks and take it with me. So, to that end, I used some of my research funding to secure a domain name. I will be using it to secure a little bit of server space once the file is actually up and running. And along with that, just made sure that, while U of S and my funder have been very, very supportive and very, very wonderful to work with, and will obviously be acknowledged, this will be a Lucy Hinnie project that will come with me to wherever I go next. And that was important in a lot of the decisions I made, I didn’t want to be reliant upon things. It does mean I’ve made work a little harder for myself. At the moment, the project is hosted on a simple Jekyll, GitHub website. Very, very basic. But I’m working with a web designer at the moment who is starting to put proofs together of what the website is going to look like, and how we’re going to get that up and running, which I’m very, very excited about because it never felt it would actually get to that point. And I think I reached a point where I thought, I’m gonna have to teach myself to become a web designer. And I just, it did not occur to me for a second that I could actually outsource this and ask for help. I was, like, imagining my, like, Geocities page from 1999, thinking “it’s gonna look like this, it’s gonna look like that everyone’s gonna laugh at me, I’m probably gonna have like Comic Sans glittery rating, and like a unicorn or something on it”. So I had a bit of a panic, then remembered that my very lovely stepsister is actually a very accomplished web designer. So we’ve been working together, and it’s been really, really good. So she’s looking at the XSLT and the stylesheet side of things for me, which is a fun collaboration.
Caitlin Postal 21:33
Yeah, I mean… I think that so often with digital additions, we have this great idea about what we’re going to be doing to the text, how we’re going to prepare the text. And then we don’t quite think about what we’re going to do for the final render and visualization. And a lot of projects will stall out at that stage. Part of the beauty of DH is that we can collaborate and we can reach across perceived disciplinary boundaries to work with people who have the technical expertise in programming, in web development and design. We as humanists can learn that if we’d like to, but we don’t necessarily have to. And I think that’s one of the real joys about digital projects, just me personally.
[Music: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” CC0 ]
Thinking about what we’re going to say is going to be a very beautiful website, what’s going to make it compelling for potential users? What are some of the things that you hope to offer in the digital platform so that users can really experience the Bannatyne or interact with it in ways that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to interact with the print edition or the manuscript itself?
Lucy Hinnie 22:44
Such a good question… I really wanted to have simultaneous scrolling IIIF and transcription, and be able to switch between the two. But I think, while that is possible, the manifest for the IIIF would need to be split up, and it would be a different kind of website building. And I just think it would maybe detract from what the real point of what I want to do is, which is give a simple but useful attractive user experience. I want to give people something where they can easily find what they’re looking for, whether it is by author, whether it’s someone saying “I really want to find out how many poems by William Dunbar are in this section, and I want to be able to download a PDF of them.” That’s the kind of functionality I would like to give. For me, the key audience for this is really students. It’s people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to these additions. I think researchers will find utility with it. But my key demographic is to have students who are now, you know, working remotely as we all are. Like I’m teaching a medieval women seminar this semester, and it’s completely changed how I look at reading lists. You know, I’m looking for what can I find online that is going to be convenient for the students. So I want the Bannatyne to fit into that framework. But at the same time, I want it to be robust, I want it to be a kind of simple that leads for it to be enduring. And I want it to be easily searchable, because I want people to ultimately be able to find what they’re looking for. Whether that’s going through the manuscript from A to B, whether it’s going by theme, or whether it’s going by author. That’s where I feel like the power of TEI is going to come into this here is being able to tag that and help the user navigate this kind of vast swathes of text in that way. Yeah, I’m a sucker for a good looking website. I really do think it makes a difference. Like it feels shallow to say but, constantly if I’m looking for something online and there are like four options for how to do the same thing, I will pick the attractive one. Color me shallow, like, I want it to be something that’s pleasant to use not aggravating.
Caitlin Postal 24:50
I agree that if the user interface is clunky or overloaded or visually displeasing, then you’re not going to get return users. People aren’t going to say, “Oh, this is a valuable tool that I want, that I want to use and that I want other people to use as well.” So spending some time on the visualization and on the final website for a digital project is so important.
Lucy Hinnie 25:16
I really think so. I mean, the last thing you want is to create another EEBO. I mean, EEBO, I think is better now. But back in the day, it was the one where like, you’re like, “well, I guess you’re gonna have to look for that on EEBO” and like, a silence descends across the room. And everyone’s like, oh… Sorry, EEBO, if you’re listening.
[Music: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” CC0 ]
One of the preconceptions I always had was, well, if it’s digital, then it’s timeless and… oh, no digital stuff, in some ways, ages, way more poorly than books. Because you go into a website, and even the visual cue of a font, or a particular website layout, immediately you’re like, “Nope, that’s like from 2005. Nope, that’s, that’s really old.” And it’s, it’s quite funny to me trying to keep abreast of like, what, what will be simple, but also a bit timeless? You know, I think TEAMS kind of nailed it with their editions, because they are just essentially a printed book on screen. You can, you can print nice copies of it. It’s just simple text. Simple footnoting. I’m sure there’s a lot of complicated stuff going on under the hood. But yeah, there’s, there’s something to be said for that. Because it is, it does have kind of longevity that’s lacking from some of the more bells and whistles things that have come over the years.
Caitlin Postal 26:29
I love the METS Online TEAMS editions, but I never read them online. I always have to save it as a PDF. I think it’s an incredible resource. But again, we’re thinking about the functionality of a print edition versus a digital edition, and they can do different things. As much as I love METS Online, you’re right that they are sort of “we’re going to put our print edition online and have some additional digital functionality,” but it’s still currently still very much mirroring the print editions.
[Music: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” CC0 ]
Before we close for today, I’d like to ask if you would share your favorite thing about the Bannatyne or maybe if there’s a particular poem or part of the text that gets you energized that we could then point listeners to.
Lucy Hinnie 27:20
Alexander Scott is a poet who turns up a lot in the Bannatyne and he’s not a poet that I have studied in and of himself in much detail. I’ve tended to look at his poems, like, in relation to other poems rather than doing a Scott study, per se. So getting into the, the encoding and looking at the IIIF in much more detail, two things really struck me. One is that I think I’m now able to tell when Bannatyne is getting tired, because you can see his handwriting start to go and then starting the next page, it’s very neat. And I’m like now clearly George went to bed and had to sleep and came back and was neat the next day. I was doing this at the heart of lockdown, so I think I was really overly empathizing with him at this point, I’m like. And the other thing was just this tiny little footnote to a poem called “to love and love it is in pain.” So to an unrequited love is, is very painful. And it’s by Scott and someone — I don’t know if it’s Bannatyne or if Scott, this is like verbatim from Scott — but the sign off is something like “quad Scott, when his wife had left him” which I didn’t realize so personally. It’s like written this heartbreak poem about how stupid he was to fall in love. And Bannatyne, a part of me wonders about attains just being a little bit meaningless, like his wife left him, or if this was a Scott thing to like, frame his narrative voice. But it really really tickled me when it came to that point. Generally though, what excites me about the Bannatyne is the depth and breadth of content there. And in terms of the fourth section, what I hope people will have access to through this edition is the discourse about women, these different points that are put forward of like, “women are terrible because of these reasons. And women are wonderful because of these reasons.” The way in which work on things like courtly love in the pastourelle, critics like Carissa Harris are doing amazing work on renegotiating the terms of these and looking at how these problematic paradigms play out time and time again. So I think the things that interests me most, excited me most about the Bannatyne, are bringing out these new primary sources for people to look at and to understand through these new frameworks of feminist criticism. In terms of poems, I would promote the edition itself to see what people enjoy. It should be live by the end of January. But the ones that I sent to you Caitlin, I think are probably some of my favorites. “The garmond of gud ladeis.”
Caitlin Postal 29:47
I loved it. I loved it so much.
Lucy Hinnie 29:50
It’s such a good one, isn’t it? It’s very simple, but it’s Robert Henryson at his kind of didactic school teacher best. Along with Dunbar’s “Golden Targe” and “sen that I am presoneir” which are very courtly in their imagery, and very indicative of Scotland at that time, but the anonymous and understudied versus also brilliant. You just don’t have access to it yet until this edition comes out so–
Caitlin Postal 30:12
But soon, soon we will.
Lucy Hinnie 30:14
Soon you will.
[Music: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” CC0 ]
Caitlin Postal 30:17
Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee, and thank you Lucy for joining us to talk about your work with a Bannatyne manuscript. You can find Lucy at @yclepit on Twitter, and follow her work with the Bannatyne at bannatyne.org or on Twitter @BannatyneMS. Catch up on Coding Codices on our website or get in touch at dmpostgrads@gmail.com
[Music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility,” CC BY 4.0]
Credits
Music:
- Theme music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
- Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” (CC0).
Graphics:
- Featured image: Bannatyne manuscript, f. 83r, ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.