Category: Medieval Studies
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Digitising the Exeter Book
Between start-of-year meetings with supervisors, the arrival of the freshers, and the rush to finalize conference paper proposals, it’s been a busy first few weeks back in Exeter. In the midst of all of this, though, I’ve also had one amazing opportunity that really deserves a blog post all to itself. I’ve mentioned before on this…
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Digitisation, archive.org, and ways of reading
It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to any readers of this blog that I spend quite a large amount of my time thinking about books. These ‘books’ can take many forms, from manuscripts produced in the twelfth century to the latest works of criticism, but one of the most significant recent development…
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Real-life meetings and digital humanities
It’s been, as usual, a busy few weeks here in Exeter, as things start to settle down in PGR-land. I’m writing this just after my third supervisor’s meeting, which went rather well: having produced a 3,000-word ‘way in’ to my thesis, my focus is now on entering the longer ‘background-reading-and-ruminating’ stage. Of course, I’ll still…
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Responsible adult supervision
It’s been three weeks since the start of the PhD, and things are starting to come together. The disparate mental maps I have of different parts of town are starting to coalesce together into a coherent whole; I’ve found a pleasant spot in which to work (surely the subject of a future post!); and, perhaps…
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I made a thing!
Apologies for the lack of a post last week – arriving in Exeter has been something of an adventure (and one that will certainly get its own blog post in due course!). I haven’t been inactive in the blogosphere, though: one of my projects over the past week has been producing a short little piece on…
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What exactly is ‘Anglo-Norman’?
As obvious as it may seem, every PhD project needs constraints: this mantra extends even to the apparently-arcane field of ‘medieval French literature’. At first glance, the alterity of the field, both in its temporal distance from us and in its language, may appear to suffice in this respect: surely ‘it’s medieval, and it’s in…
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Medieval Didactic Literature
Okay, I’ll admit it: for a so-called ‘PhD blog’, my contributions so far have been very much focused on the last of those three little letters (‘D’ stands for ‘digressions’, right?). In an attempt to redress the balance slightly, the next few blog posts will constitute my attempt to put things right. Over the next…
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Spare me the ‘lecteur’ – Part 4
We finished last week’s blog, in time-honoured fashion, with a classic French-style problématique. As the start of the academic year drew nearer, I was facing the tricky question of how to engage students who were taking my medievalism course, as well as asking myself whether it was even possible to teach modern English using medieval…
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Spare me the ‘lecteur’ – Part 3
If you’ve been following this blog from the outset (thank you!), you’ll likely know there things about me: (a) I like second-person asides; (b) I have an irrational attachment to colons and semicolons; and (c) I never stop talking about my time spent this year working as a lecteur d’anglais at the ENS de Lyon. Today,…
Edward Mills 