Heraldry as code

London, British Library MS Harley 3479 (the Harley Froissart), fol. 83v, detail. Image: British Library.

This miniature from the Harley Froissart, a sumptious manuscript made c 1470-1472 in Bruges, shows European forces attacking a walled town in North Africa: la forte ville dauffrique en barbarie, says the rubricated caption, ‘the strong town of Affricque in Barbary’. Among the many items of interest in this image are the flags carried by the attackers, camped out around the town. The artist has taken care to depict the arms of various European leaders on these flags: easily recognisable, for example, are the royal arms of France, azure, three fleur-de-lys or, on the third square flag from the left. Although this project deals mostly with medieval textual codes – what we usually think of as ‘writing’ – medieval Europe also had another highly developed non-linguistic semiotic code, that of heraldry, which often intersected with the world of books.

Information retrieval strategies

London, British Library MS Royal 13.E.vi, fol. 1v. Image: British Library.

The image here is a table of signa, indexing symbols invented by Ralph of Diceto in the 1100s for his historical works, the Abbreviationes chronicorum and Imagines historiarum. They enable the reader to search for points in the text that deal with various topics or historical persons, such as kings of England and dukes of Normandy (a crown next to a sword), or conflicts within the royal family (two hands pulling a crown in different directions).

Information retrieval is one of the major industries of our digital world. It is both an academic field of study and a set of technologies and techniques. We often think of it, therefore, as something that we do with machines, or that machines do for us. If I want to find, say, a definition of ‘information retrieval’, I type the term into everyone’s favourite search engine and discover that the first hit is (no surprise) a Wikipedia article, followed by a couple of online textbooks and a link to an academic journal devoted to the subject. Here’s how one of the textbooks (Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze 2008) defines information retrieval:

    Information retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers).

three main strategies for finding a particular item of textual information

I like the repetition of ‘usually’ in that definition because it reminds us that although we usually think of information retrieval as a computing activity, searching for stuff on Google is only one form – and generally not the most effective – of information retrieval.

How did information retrieval work in the Middle Ages? We can posit three main strategies for finding a particular item of textual information.

Who Glossed the Canterbury Tales?

Portrait of the Wife of Bath from the Ellesmere MS

In the last post, we discussed how the Latin annotations present in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in various manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales allowed readers the potential for multiple different readings. Many scholars have suggested that Chaucer himself may have been responsible for adding the glosses, and thus also providing these layers of meaning. If this is true, the depiction of the Wife of Bath that most undergraduate students encounter may be very different from the one Chaucer had intended. Chaucer may have viewed the Wife of Bath as more than a bold and independent woman who, perhaps rightfully, refuses to be subservient to her husband. He may instead have intended to create a less flattering picture of the Wife of Bath. Thus, for those seeking authorial intention in the Canterbury Tales, the question of “who wrote the Latin glosses” can become quite important.

Latin Glosses to Chaucer's Tales

San Marino, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Chaucer), fol. 63v

Most people interested in a medieval work will turn to a modern edition in order to read a text. Modern typefaces are easier for most modern folks to read than medieval scripts. Explanations provided by editors of these editions can prove invaluable for attempting to understand parts of the work that use archaic vocabulary or refer to practices or events no longer typically in use. Unfortunately, many of these editions relegate marginal annotations found in the manuscript to footnotes, endnotes, or appendixes – if they are included at all.

User-friendly devices and device-friendly users

This 2000 sketch from the Norwegian television program Øystein og jeg has been a classic since it was posted on YouTube. One reason we (including medievalists) like it is, probably, that it reminds us that information and communication technologies we take for granted today – such as the codex – were once ‘new media’. In other words, reading a book is not learned naturally, like learning language; people have to be trained to use technology.