English Monastic Archives: Access and Analysis
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Grant Holder:
Professor David d'Avray
The project aims to provide a powerful tool for research on medieval English history by analysing documents generated by English monasteries with the help of databases. The questions the project addressed are: What properties (manors, churches and chapels) did each monastery own? How many monastic properties can be found in each county, and which houses, of which orders, owned them? What genres of documents did monasteries produce? How many documents in each genre have survived? Where are they to be found? How many documents of each type did each individual monastery produce? How many documents of each type did each religious order produce? How many of each type relate to each county? These generic questions open the way to an infinite number of more specific investigations. The wider research context is a general awareness among medieval scholars that monastic documents are crucial for understanding social, economic, religious and cultural history after the public records they are the largest category of English medieval documents. The project will make progress in these fields less piecemeal and more systematic, as well as leading to countless exciting individual discoveries.
Conversion of data to MySQL for web-delivery.
| Project start date: 2000-11 | Project end date: 2006-03 |
Subject domains:
Era(s):
Country/region(s):
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| Cataloguing and indexing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Coding and standardisation | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Data modelling | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Prototyping | Strategy and project management |
| Record linkages | Data analysis |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| System quality assurance and code testing | Strategy and project management |
| Usability analysis | Strategy and project management |
| Interface design | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Web browser scripting | Data publishing and dissemination |
| General website development | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Manual input and transcription | Data capture |
Funding sources:
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created:
Dataset/structured data, Text
Software tools used:
MySQL, Filemaker Pro
Source material used:
The digital resource is derived from too wide a variety of medieval documentary sources to be briefly summarised..
Digital resource created:
The resource is a systematic guide to documents generated by medieval English monasteries: one of the largest and most important sets of documents anywhere in the pre-modern world. A Filemaker Pro Database was chosen to structure the data collected, and proved adequate. One simple kind of search enables researchers to find the manors, churches, chapels and urban property owned by any given monastic houses, and conversely, to identify monastic owners of such properties. For more sophisticated searches, data on monastic documents is structured by genre, so that monastic documents of a given genre can be brought together: e.g. all sets of building accounts or chronicles. The data is also structured by county, by century, by religious order, and by county. Thus a series of combined searches are possible. The primary aim is to open new avenues for research on social, religious and cultural history. A subsidiary aim is to assist genealogists and local historians.
Data Formats created:
FileMaker Pro
Publications:
M. Jurkowski, ‘English Monasteries and Their Records: the English Monastic Archives Project’, PROphile, xiv (Apr 2003), 3-10; (Sept 2003), 1-10.
Eadem, ‘Documents from the Archives of Bermondsey Abbey’, Monastic Research Bulletin, 12 (forthcoming in 2006).
Eadem, ‘Monastic Archives in The National Archives’, (recently submitted to Archives, which indicated strong advance interest in publishing it).
M. Jurkowski and N. L. Ramsay ‘The English Monastic Archives Project: Progress Report’, Monastic Research Bulletin, XI (2005), 22-25.
N.L. Ramsay, entries on monastic chroniclers (Thomas Sprott (fl. 1272), Peter of Ickham (d. 1295), Thomas Hasilwode (fl. 1321), Stephen Birchington (d. 1407), William Thorne (fl. c. 1397), John Stone (d. c. 1481) and Thomas Gardiner (d. 1528/9) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
N.L. Ramsay, ‘‘The Manuscripts flew about like Butterflies’: The Break-Up of English Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, in Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity, ed. J. Raven (Basingstoke and New York, 2004), pp. 125-44. [Turkish translation, 2006.]
N.L. Ramsay, ‘Archive-books’, in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, II, 1100-1400, ed. N.J. Morgan and R.M. Thomson (forthcoming, Cambridge, 2006)
M Jurkowski and N L Ramsay with S Renton: English Monastic Estates, List and Index Society: London (September 2007, forthcoming)
Eadem, ‘Documents from the Archives of Bermondsey Abbey’, Monastic Research Bulletin, 12 (forthcoming in 2006).
Eadem, ‘Monastic Archives in The National Archives’, (recently submitted to Archives, which indicated strong advance interest in publishing it).
M. Jurkowski and N. L. Ramsay ‘The English Monastic Archives Project: Progress Report’, Monastic Research Bulletin, XI (2005), 22-25.
N.L. Ramsay, entries on monastic chroniclers (Thomas Sprott (fl. 1272), Peter of Ickham (d. 1295), Thomas Hasilwode (fl. 1321), Stephen Birchington (d. 1407), William Thorne (fl. c. 1397), John Stone (d. c. 1481) and Thomas Gardiner (d. 1528/9) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
N.L. Ramsay, ‘‘The Manuscripts flew about like Butterflies’: The Break-Up of English Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, in Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity, ed. J. Raven (Basingstoke and New York, 2004), pp. 125-44. [Turkish translation, 2006.]
N.L. Ramsay, ‘Archive-books’, in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, II, 1100-1400, ed. N.J. Morgan and R.M. Thomson (forthcoming, Cambridge, 2006)
M Jurkowski and N L Ramsay with S Renton: English Monastic Estates, List and Index Society: London (September 2007, forthcoming)
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Professor David Levesley d'Avray; Dr Kate Peters; Professor Derek Keene |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | Computing officer(s) / Technical supporter(s), Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | David dAvray |
| Title | English Monastic Archives: Access and Analysis |
| Record created | 2007-03-07 |
| Record updated | 2011-01-14 15:24 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2114 |
| Citation of record | David dAvray: English Monastic Archives: Access and Analysis. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2114> created: 2007-03-07, last updated 2011-01-14 15:24 |