This year marks the 10th anniversary of the University of Notre Dame‘s Medieval Institute‘s Medieval Studies Research Blog—a benchmark and milestone—which warrants both celebration and reflection on the evolution of the project, especially certain important actors and pivotal moments that have shaped the academic blog into an accessible resource for so many scholars and medievalist as well as general and public audiences.
The project was conceived by Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, now an Professor Emerita of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the study of Middle English manuscript studies. Kerby-Fulton intuited that an academic blog could become an asset to the medieval institute, and so she brought together a team of graduate students to whom she pitched her academic blog project. Kerby-Fulton, in her wisdom and generosity, leaned on the next generation of scholars to get her project off the ground. Although she was the founder, the project, then called the Chequered Board, has always endeavored to support and lift up students and junior scholars. She envisioned the academic blog as both a forum for public medievalism, a space for academics engaging directly with general readers and a public audience, but also as a serious online, open-access resource for specialists in the field.
Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Emerita Professor of Middle English and Manuscript Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Photo by Matt Cashore (2006).
Many of the earliest blogs in fact, came from assignments in her graduate classes, asking students to reflect and analyze aspects of Middle English manuscripts and their intricacies and peculiarities. Dr. Kerby-Fulton had long recognized certain parallels between modern websites and medieval manuscripts, characteristics that print culture often passed by, including marginalia and visual formatting, as well as their respective function as multimedia objects, especially the interplay between aesthetic (whether illustrations or illuminations) and textual elements in both websites and manuscripts. Just as websites frequently feature a combination of texts, images and paratexts, so too do medieval manuscripts, and this affinity is at the heart of Kerby-Fulton’s vision for the project.
Indeed, my first-ever blog “Bobbing for Answer” discusses the Bob and Wheel in the manuscript containing Gawain and the Green Knight, and builds on Kerby-Fulton’s own work in her foundational text, Opening Up Medieval Manuscripts. My blog explores possible ways in which this poetic feature could offer semantic options and performative opportunities for readers of the poem in its manuscript context. These graduate student blogs, however, were just the beginning of the project.
Images of Arthur, Guinevere, Gawain & the decapitated Green Knight in British Library, Cotton Nero MS a.x f.94v.
Dr. Kerby-Fulton then organized a team of medievalist graduate students to conceive of possible directions and special series, as well as to help her run the blog project (then known as the Chequered Board). From project’s inception, she encouraged students take the reins and shape what would become the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute’s Medieval Studies Research Blog into the active resource that it is today, open to academics of all levels from graduate students to senior scholars.
In order for the project to run efficiently, a blog manager was selected from the team, Dr. Nicole Eddy, who had previously worked for the British Library and had headed up their medieval manuscript blog, so she was familiar with the online genre and brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the project. After her foundational role in establishing the blog and getting the project off the ground, blog management passed to Dr. Andrew Klein who continued the work. Once Dr. Klein left for his current position, the role of blog manager was handed off to Dr. Karrie Fuller. It was around this time that the project shifted from Dr. Kerby-Fulton’s personal research initiative to a project funded and overseen by the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, which came with rebranding and the new name for the project, the Medieval Studies Research Blog, which remains its title today.
Dr. Nicole Eddy (left) and Dr. Andrew Klein (right). Dr. Eddy is currently Managing Editor at Dumbarton Oakes (image from Facebook post) and Klein is currently Associate Professor at St. Thomas University (image from faculty page).
All projects need funding and institutional support to survive, and without the steadfast championing of the Medieval Studies Research Blog by Dr. Kerby-Fulton and both the Medieval Institute Director, Dr. Thomas Burman, and the Associate Director of the Medieval Institute (and fellow contributor), Dr. Megan Hall, our beloved Medieval Studies Research Blog may not have endured. Instead, it thrived and continued evolving into the valuable open access online academic resource it is today.
Dr. Megan Hall (left) and Dr. Thomas Burman, Associate Director and Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Images taken from faculty page.
After a few years of managing the blog, Dr. Fuller passed the role to me, and it was at long last my turn to take the helm of the project Although I had been a contributor and partner throughout the entirety of the project, I have served as blog manager has for the past five years, in which we’ve seen the project continue to expand and transform to meet the diverse and ever-changing needs of the field.
Dr. Karrie Fuller, currently Blog Manager at AptAmigo (image from LinkedIn) and Dr. Richard Fahey, currently Blog Manager at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, in addition to other academic and editorial positions (image from faculty page).
At the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we are blessed to have our regular contributors (currently including Dr. Linnet Mahan, Dr. Nick Kamas, and Dr. Charles Yost, all graduates of the Medieval Institute) in addition to guest and alumni contributors. The work of many junior scholars affiliated with the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame has fostered the growth of our project, which has since received attention from departments of education, scholars, enthusiasts, fellow bloggers and even the occasional author of fiction.
I would like also to cast a spotlight on some of the projects and special series, which in addition to the many excellent blog posts featured on the Medieval Studies Research Blog, have helped shape the project. Some of these projects include: The Medieval Poetry Project and A Scientific Analysis of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript. New projects are rolling out in force this year, such as the Medieval Homily Project and Medieval Fable Project, while older special series, such as Working in the Archives, continue to prove a resource for young scholars in the field. And now, the MSRB now also features transcripts and reflections on its sister-project, the Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast spearheaded by William Beattie and Ben Pykare. Having a somewhat unique perspective—a kind of bird’s eye view—serving in various roles at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, I’ve had the privilege of advancing the project and watching as it has continued to gain traction and momentum in the field, and I am so excited to see where the next ten years take us, and what is in store for the MSRB.
Most of all, on this 10th anniversary of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute want to thank you—our readers—for being so interested and invested in this public medievalism project, and for helping us sustain our viewership. Here’s to another successful year and continued growth and expansion of the Medieval Studies Research Blog.
Stay tuned for a forthcoming Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast interviewing the four blog managers of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, coming this spring!
Richard Fahey, Ph.D. Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame
This tutorial is for those of you who want to learn some basic programming in Python for the digital humanities, but also for those who have never programmed or may become filled with terror at the sight of a single line of code (trust me, I know the feeling!). At the end of this guide, you should know how to perform optical character recognition (OCR) to make a pdf searchable. For this, we are going to use “ocrmypdf”, a Tesseract-based Python package with wonderful capabilities. Everything will be done online from your web browser, so don’t worry, you will not have to install anything on your computer!
I have tried to keep the tutorial very simple and straight to the point, at the cost of occasionally sacrificing some useful and important explanations about the code. For that, I profusely apologize to my colleagues in the department of computer science. Please, do not send the Spanish Inquisition.
The name “Python” is a tribute to Monty Python (please excuse the poor joke).
Why Tesseract and ocrmypdf?
Some of you may be familiar with, or even regular users of the OCR function provided by Adobe Acrobat DC pro. The ctrl+f function is one of the simplest and most efficient tools to support analysis of text and research. Acrobat DC is a powerful and very easy to use software, but this comes at a price. First, Acrobat works only with a handful of common modern languages such as English, French, German or Japanese. Tesseract on the other hand can recognize characters from a broad variety of modern and classical languages, including, but not limited to, Armenian, Classical Arabic, Classical Greek, Syriac, and Old Georgian, to name only a few. Second, Tesseract is a free, and open-source software, presenting a more cost-efficient option compared to other expensive commercial options and I am sure many of you would rather settle for the free but equally powerful alternative.
This is a free Jupyter notebook that will save your data on your personal google drive. Just remember to hit the save button before closing the page.
Open a new notebook and sign up with a Gmail address. You will want to use your @nd.edu address but any personal google account will work too.
As a first step, we need to download ocrmypdf, and all its dependencies. To do so, simply type the following lines. The first will download the python package ocrmypdf, while the other lines will deal with the dependencies. For those of you new to coding, you will learn the first rule of coding: any errors in spelling, indentation and so forth can break your code. Be careful!
When the above lines have been written, run the cell by pressing ctrl+enter or press the button in the upper left corner. The download process should take around a minute. Once the download is complete, you should see a little green tick next to the upper left arrow.
Once the package and its dependencies have been downloaded, we will need to import “ocrmypdf” so that we can put it to work. Add a line of code to your colab sheet by clicking on + Code and write the following code:
Next, add a copy of your scanned pdf to the “files/content” folder on the left side of your screen (or any other folder of your choice, you will just have to note its path somewhere). In our case, we are going to work with the first page of an article on the Mevlevi Sufi order published by the Byzantinist Speros Vryonis Junior.
In a new cell, enter the following lines of code (beware, the underscores are double underscores!).
Here, the name on the left should be that of the file you want to ocr (or its path if put in another folder), the one on the right should be that of the new, postprocessed file. The code uses the exact name of the file, ‘Vryonis_Article.pdf’. You can keep the exact same name if you want the new file to overwrite the original one. In my case, my code is directing ocrmypdf to create a new file: ‘Vryonis_Article_OCR.pdf’. Once generated, the post-processed article should appear in the same folder.
If you ever get an error, simply restart the runtime before running the cell again.
Et voila! You can now search your pdf with ctrl+F or copy and paste any sentence you want.
But this is not the most exciting part of this tutorial, and we may want to spice things up a little bit. Tesseract is very good at OCRing (yes, this is a verb, at least according to the WordSense dictionary) non-Latin scripts, but the process is a bit more involved. As an example, let’s take a page from the Masālik al-abṣārfīmamālik al-amṣār written in the 14th century by the Syrian polymath al-ʿUmarī.
And here we are. Those who can read Arabic will notice that the result is extremely impressive. This, however, is a rather neat scan and Arabic is often difficult to properly OCR because of the cursive nature of the script. If the quality of your scan is poor, you may also be able to clean it with Python beforehand for a better result. I may develop this point further in another post.
Beyond Arabic, Tesseract works very well with other non-cursive Semitic scripts, and you may get excellent results with Hebrew for example. Here is a last example from a Syriac Bible.
If you have any questions or comments about this guide, feel free to contact me.
As a specialist in the study of women’s education and literacy in England in the Middle Ages, I’m asked this question a lot. I’ll cut to the chase: YES.
How do we know this?
Medieval England (on which I’ll focus this blog) was a multilingual nation.1 English had been its primary vernacular from the time of the Anglo-Saxons (about 450) until the Norman Conquest of 1066, when French became the language of the nobility, government, and diplomacy.2 By the mid-fifteenth century, though, English had reasserted dominance as the primary vernacular language, while the Church, clerics, and higher education continued to use Latin.3 Because medieval English people would have heard and used all three languages in daily life, children were taught to read and speak all of them.4 Whether children’s reading knowledge became advanced depended on the importance of reading in their lives and what socioeconomic station they attained. In fact, most of the evidence for literacy survives from the upper classes; uncovering the history of less privileged groups remains difficult.
In infantia
Medieval scholars commonly thought of childhood in three divisions: infantia (birth to about 7 years), pueritia (about 7 to 14 years), and adolescentia (about 14 to 21 years).5 The teaching of reading began in infantia with parents and nurses, if the family could afford such help.
Girls and boys began by learning the letters of the Latin alphabet and the sounds they made. In this way they acquired the basic skills of early reading, called contemporaneously sillibicare (sounding out syllables) and legere (sounding out words), even if they didn’t understand what those sounds or words meant.6 Singing might have been used as well to teach pronunciation, as sung Latin was used in church services. Because reading was important to promote spiritual instruction, and had indeed been cited at least as far back as Jerome in the fourth century as a reason girls should be taught to read, some of the earliest texts learned were the Pater Noster, the Ave, and the Creed. Alphabets and these simple prayers could be written out on a variety of surfaces: boards, painted walls, wooden trays covered in ash or sand, ceramic or metal vessels, or hand-held tablets made of materials such as slate, horn, or board covered in parchment (more on this below).
Beginning around 1300 in England, medieval parents had a model of teaching in St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. Depictions of her teaching Mary to read appeared in stained-glass windows, manuscript illuminations, wall paintings, and other artistic representations.7 One such survives today in the Church of St. Nicholas in Stanford-on-Avon, Northamptonshire, England.
“Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to Read,” about 1330–50, the Church of St. Nicholas, Stanford-on-Avon, Northamptonshire, England; south aisle, east window, farthest left panel. Image from Painton Cowen’s The Online Stained Glass Photographic Archive.
In this window, Mary is shown sitting in Anne’s lap and holding a bound book with letters written on its pages. She holds the book open so the text is visible to the reader. Her mother Anne points upward, in a gesture both teacherly and pointing heavenward, perhaps emphasizing the importance of reading for spiritual development.8
This beautifully-painted miniature from a Book of Hours shows Anne and a young Mary holding a book together. With her right hand, Anne isolates text for Mary to examine.
Saint Anne Teaching the Virgin to Read, a miniature painted by Master of Sir John Fastolf (French, active before about 1420–about 1450), in a Book of Hours created in France or England about 1430–1440. Tempera colors and gold ink on parchment. Los Angeles, Getty Museum, MS 5 (84.ML.732), fol. 45v.
Other surviving representations show Anne using a hornbook (mentioned above) to teach Mary to read. This illustration comes from a Book of Hours that originated in England around 1325–1300.
Though the hornbook was at least a medieval invention (discussed recently by Erik Kwakkel and Trinity College, Cambridge, librarians), it survives only from early modern centuries, as in this example, created in London around 1625. The text is printed on sheepskin parchment and fixed to an oak paddle with a brass frame and iron nails; the handle is used for holding the hornbook. The parchment is laminated over with a processed animal horn (hence the name) to protect the text.
A text from the 1230s, written by a layman, Walter of Bibbesworth, also reveals much about how boys and girls learned, especially languages, in a gentry household. Bibbesworth was a wealthy English landowner and a knight who wrote this book for his neighbor and fellow member of the gentry, Dionisie de Munchensi. Dionisie had three young children to educate, and as part of the expectations of their class, they would have needed to learn a French more advanced than what they would have picked up through everyday living. The image below shows the opening leaf of Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz.
Walter addresses Dionisie in column 1, lines 10-20, identifying the purpose of his text: “Chere soer, pur ceo ke vous me / pryastes ke jeo meyse en ecsryst [sic] / pur vos enfaunz acune apryse / de fraunceys en breve paroles” (Dear sister, because you have asked that I put in writing something for your children to learn French in brief phrases). What follows is a narrative poem, beginning in column 1, line 21, that describes childhood, starting with birth and ending in young adulthood with a large household feast. In each scene, Walter presents French vocabulary for Dionisie’s children to learn.
Many clues in the text demonstrate that the physical book was shown to children so they could learn the reading of words on a page, not just the sounds of them. Walter gives many homophones, for example, that would only make sense in writing, rather than in pronunciation. Some of the vocabulary also has English translations written in between the lines of the main text. You can see this in the image above in the poem, which starts at column 1, line 21, and goes into column two. All the smaller words written between the lines give the English translation of the main text, which is written in French.
In pueritia and adolescentia
Once they moved into pueritia (about 7-14 years of age), girls of the upper classes would often transition into the care of a mistress (called at that time magistra, magistrix, or maitresse). The mistress provided education in such things as deportment, embroidery, dancing, music, and reading.9 For any skills the mistress did not herself have, she could bring in other household members, such as the minstrel for musical training, the chaplain for more advanced reading and spiritual instruction, and the huntsman for hunting. Specialized academic tutors could teach girls more advanced academic subjects. Sometimes these well-to-do girls were sent to other households to be fostered, serving as ladies-in-waiting to upper-class women. Girls, especially those of the upper classes, could be sent to nunneries as well (sometimes beginning in infantia) for education. Not all girls sent to nunneries were meant for the vocation of nun.10
As their reading abilities progressed, girls and boys moved on to reading comprehension (intelligere) and began to read more sophisticated spiritual texts, such as prayer-books, books of hours, psalters, antiphonals, and saints’ lives. They also would continue on, as personal libraries grew in the thirteenth century, in reading romances, histories, poetry, classical authors, theology, philosophy, and more. It is most likely, given that women were not admitted to the university (unlike boys, who could progress from this stage to Latin grammar school and then on at a university level to the study of business, liberal arts, medicine, canon or civil law, or theology), that the reading of these last few would have been limited to girls whose families could afford private tutors.
Miscellany of religious, medical, and secular verse and prose in French, Latin and English. Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Digby 86, fol. 68r. Produced in Worcestershire, England, c.1271–83, this “common-place book” contains French, Latin and eighteen English texts of various genres including fabliau, romances, devotional and didactic texts, prognostications, charms and prayers, among others written between 1271 and 1283. The manuscript was written by its owner and has amateurish scribal drawings and decoration. This image shows three sections of French text: the end of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (Come, Creator Spirit) (top 11 lines); a list of the unlucky days in the year (middle section of the text); and at the bottom a list of Arabic numerals 1 through 46. Three shields decorate the bottom.
In adulthood
By the time they reached adulthood, women who were privileged enough to have obtained a sophisticated education and their own libraries could be avid readers.
Gospel lectionary written in Latin, made in England c.1025–50, later owned by St. Margaret of Scotland. Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Lat. liturg. f. 5, fols. 21v–22r. This opening shows St. Luke with the start of his gospel reading. The Bodleian Libraries digital Treasures exhibition notes: “A compact selection of passages from the Gospels, this finely illustrated book was Margaret’s favourite, and one she read and studied closely, even when she travelled. A poem added at the front describes how this very book was dropped into a river but remained almost unharmed: this miracle contributed to her growing reputation for holiness.”
The historical and literary records provide examples of such sophisticated learning, primarily among the nobility. For example, the Norman monk and chronicler Robert of Torigni (c.1110–1186), praised the education of St. Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093) and her daughter Matilda (1080–1118), wife of Henry I, writing, “Quantae autem sanctitatis et scientiae tam saecularis quam spiritualis utraque regina, Margareta scilicet et Mathildis, fuerint” (Of how great holiness and learning, as well secular as spiritual, were these two queens, Margaret and Matilda).11
In a different Latin life, commissioned by Matilda about her mother Margaret, the biographer describes how Margaret from her childhood would “in Divinarum lectionum studio sese occupare, et in his animum delectabiliter exercere” (occupy herself with the study of the Holy Scriptures, and delightfully exercise her mind) and notes that her husband, King Malcom III, cherished the “libros, in quibus ipsa vel orare consueverat, vel legere” (books, which she herself used either for prayer or reading), even though Malcom himself could not read Latin.12
This image above shows the unidentified female patron of this Book of Hours kneeling on a prie-dieu, her prayer book open to the text “Maria mater gratiae” (Mary, mother of grace). This open book with its discernable text has several functions: it leads the reader into the prayer; it demonstrates the piety of the patron, kneeling in prayer before both her spiritual book and the Blessed Virgin and Christ (illustrated on the facing leaf); and it shows one of the primary purposes of teaching children to read: being able to use spiritual texts in personal devotion.
Even women who were not noble and who were not able to read much Latin possessed and used books such as the one pictured above. In the mid-fifteenth century Englishwoman Margery Kempe wrote through her scribe of a memorable time in her church of St. Margaret in King’s Lynn when a chunk of masonry fell from the ceiling down onto her as she was praying with her prayer book in hand.
The image below comes from her Book of Margery Kempe as preserved in London, British Library, Additional MS 61823. Lines 24-28 narrate, “Sche knelyd upon hir / kneys heldyng down hir hed. and hir boke in hir hand. / prayng owyr lord crist ihesu for grace and for mercy. Sodeynly fel / down fro þe heyest party of þe cherche vowte fro undyr / þe fote of þe sparre on hir hed and on hir bakke a ston / whech weyd .iii. pownd” (She knelt on her knees, bowing down her head and holding her book in her hand, praying to our Lord Christ Jesus for grace and mercy. Suddenly fell down from the highest party of the church out from under the foot of the rafter onto her head and her book a stone which weighed three pounds). She survived, for which she credited the mercy of Christ.
Finally, a note on those of the working classes. I have not discussed them in detail as it is unfortunately difficult, in fact nearly impossible, to say much about the reading skills of those who left few or no records behind: the great majority of women (and men) of the medieval population were laborers who left little trace in the written record. Yet as we see from the image here below, even for working women, especially in the last few centuries of the Middle Ages, possession and use of books was within the norm, provided those books could be afforded.
My focus here has been tightly on the teaching of reading to medieval English girls. Girls and boys alike were taught to read, and began their reading education in the same ways. Boys alone could attend the medieval university and reach the highest (and best educated) ranks of clerics, but if girls had access to the right resources, they too could be highly educated. The evidence demonstrates that the teaching of reading was not linked specifically to gender; rather, it was a function of both socioeconomic station and the usefulness of such skills for one’s life.
If you’re interested in this topic, I cover the subject in much greater detail, with many other examples and suggested readings, in my article, “Women’s Education and Literacy in England, 1066–1540,” in the “Medieval and Early Modern Education” special issue of History of Education Quarterly, and the accompanying HEQ&A podcast.
Megan J. Hall, Ph.D. University of Notre Dame
Twitter @meganjhallphd
[1] On languages in medieval England, see Amanda Hopkins, Judith Anne Jefferson, and Ad Putter, Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066–1520): Sources and Analysis (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012).
[2] W. M. Ormrod, “The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 78, no. 3 (July 2003), 750–87, at 755; and William Rothwell, “Language and Government in Medieval England,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 93, no. 3 (1983), 258–70.
[3] David Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 57.
[4] On the complexities of a trilingual England, with a number of helpful citations therein for further reading, see Christopher Cannon, “Vernacular Latin,” Speculum 90, no. 3 (July 2015), 641–53.
[5] A variety of frameworks were imposed upon the ages of humankind, though these major divisions for the stages of childhood were fairly commonly accepted. For a discussion, see Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: the Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066-1530 (London: Methuen, 1984), 5–7; and Daniel T. Kline, “Female Childhoods,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–20, at 13.
[6] Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “‘Invisible Archives?’ Later Medieval French in England,” Speculum 90, no. 3 (July 2015), 653–73. For more on levels of reading Latin, see Bell, What Nuns Read, 59–60; and Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Literacy of the Laity,” in Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts, 1976 (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 275–97, at 275.
[7] On the cult of St. Anne and the teaching of reading, see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 244–45; and Clanchy, “Did Mothers Teach their Children to Read?,” in Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400: Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser, ed. Conrad Leyser and Lesley Smith (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 129–53. For further examples and a detailed analysis of the Education of the Virgin motif, see Wendy Scase, “St. Anne and the Education of the Virgin,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford, UK: Paul Watkins, 1993), 81–98.
[8] For a discussion of this window, see Orme, Medieval Children,244–45.
[9] Boys (especially royal princes) typically followed the same path of moving from the nursery into the care of an educator-caretaker: pedagogus (a term used into the eleventh century) or magister or me[i]stre (terms in use from the twelfth century forward) (Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, 19).
[10] Excellent reading on the education of girls in nunneries is found in Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1922); Alexandra Barratt, “Small Latin? The Post-Conquest Learning of English Religious Women,” in Anglo-Latin and Its Heritage, Essays in Honour of A. G. Rigg on His 64th Birthday, ed. Siân Echard and Gernot R. Wieland (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 51–65; and J. G. Clark, “Monastic Education in Late Medieval England,” in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson; Proceedings of the 1999 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins, 2002), 25–40; and Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School: A Study of Women’s Education Through Twelve Centuries (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1929).
[11] Robert of Torigni [Robertus de Monte], Historia nortmannorum liber octavus de Henrico I rege anglorum et duce northmannorum, ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina 149 (Paris, 1853), col. 886; translated in “History of King Henry the First, by Robert de Monte,” ed. Joseph Stevenson, The Church Historians of England vol. 2, part 1 (London, 1858), 10.
[12] Transcribed in Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, ed. J. Hodgson Hinde, vol. 1 (London, 1868), at 238, 241, from the version preserved in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius D iii, fols. 179v–186r (late twelfth century).
