#MedievalWiki October 2020 write up

By Fran Allfrey and Beth Whalley

After our first Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in March 2018, we always had in the back of our minds that we wanted to host another wikithon. And while the pandemic has put paid to any in-person meet-ups for the past eight months, we thought we would make the most of this period of physical distancing to gather participants from across multiple time zones and engage in some collective, virtual editing! Thanks to the generous support of Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin, 16 of us were able to get together on the 28th October for three hours of training, discussing, and editing, all done via Zoom. See below for our outcomes.

Screenshot of our Zoom meeting – the final eight participants standing after 3 hours of training and editing!

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Penned it wins a sacred grace: John Donne and the Melford Manuscript

by Daniel Starza Smith

It’s been called one of the greatest literary discoveries of a generation: a hugely significant and previously unknown manuscript of John Donne’s poetry which was lost for years and found in a Suffolk country house in 2018 by Sotheby’s expert Gabriel Heaton. After disappearing from public view during all the confusion of 2020, the ‘Melford manuscript’ has now officially found a home at the British Library.

The Melford Hall Manuscript (Egerton MS 3884) © British Library Board

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A Scratch ‘n’ sniff Ulysses

by Dr Jon Day

One of the loneliest things about life online, I’ve found, is that it denies us the full sensory range of human interaction. In lockdown I realised how much I missed not only seeing and hearing other people (sensory modes which Zoom can just about convey, even if unsatisfyingly) but how much I missed touching and even smelling other people.

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Insight: #AbolitionistCurriculum

Jon Ward and Rafael Lubner will be discussing #AbolitionistCurriculum at the English Department Virtual Research Hour on November 11th, 12.30 – 1.30. In this blog post the pair reflect on how the curriculum embraces Blackness and resists the structures of exclusion within ‘The University’ environment.

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