Medieval Networks of Memory is a digital project hosted by Stanford Text Technologies and Stanford Manuscript Sciences. It aims to reveal a new and dynamic picture of thirteenth-century religious and social networks and community commemoration. It transcribes, describes, maps, visualizes, and analyses two unique and culturally rich textual artefacts: the Mortuary Roll of Lucy of Hedingham, now London, British Library, Egerton MS 2849; and the Mortuary Roll of Amphelisa of Lillechurch, now Cambridge, St John’s College, MS N. 31. We are immensely grateful to the British Library for digitizing the Egerton Roll, and to Kathryn McKee, former Special Collections Curator at St John’s College.
In an interactive map, our research visualizes the journies of the Breviators–those who visited British religious institutions of men and women to unite them in their condolences on the losses of Prioresses Lucy de Vere of Hedingham and Amphelisa of Lillechurch. The Rolls reveal considerable information about the varieties of religious houses in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, as well as a detailed and fascinating picture of scribal practices in this critical period. From the Rolls and the hundreds of individual entries they contain, it’s also possible to deduce how forms of inter-institutional communication functioned and how script reflects the contemporary socio-economic, religious, cultural, and political landscape of its day. Fascinating information emerges about links between institutions, and about the ways that writers in priories and abbeys responded to the request to write a message of condolence. Further, the Rolls demonstrate how contemporary manuscript scholarship, with its emphasis on hierarchies and labels for writing performances (as proto-Gothic, Gothic, textura, cursiva, hybrida, Anglicana, and so forth) limits how everyday writing could be better and more sympathetically understood. This project aims to address these issues in its research.