Interview with Amy Livingstone and Charlotte Cartwright, Editors of "Medieval People"

0:00 - Becky Straple-Sovers [MIP]
Hey everyone, and welcome to another interview with Medieval Institute Publications. I want to thank all of our viewers for checking out this video.

Before I introduce our two guests for today, I just want to make a couple of announcements. First of all, the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies is now just a few weeks away. We're very excited, looking forward to seeing all of you even if not quite back in person yet. But I do just want to let everyone know that by the time this airs, the meeting site should be fully open. So if you are registered, you have full access to the entire meeting site. If you're not yet registered, you can access parts of the meeting site; you'll be able to see the schedule, find out some information about the Congress. And I just encourage everyone to finish registering so that you can see the full schedule, work on making your own personal schedule in your timezone. And all that vendor-- the Exhibitions Hall should be fully open as well. And vendors should already be starting with uploading their material. So I encourage everyone to check out the meeting site for the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies; I will put a link to that site below. We also--MIP is also offering a 20% discount on all of our titles as part of our Congress celebration. So we--you can check out our virtual conference page. I'll link to that in the description below as well. But please look through our virtual booths and enjoy that 20% discount.

Finally, to celebrate "Medieval People" in this interview, we will be offering a year-long subscription to the journal as our giveaway for our April newsletter. So if you are already a subscriber, don't forget to enter the drawing. If you're not a subscriber to the newsletter yet, you will be automatically entered into the drawing as soon as you subscribe. So I encourage you to... to become a member. We send out newsletters about once a month with all kinds of interesting features like the interview you're about to see, as well as new and featured titles, news and reviews about our authors and our books, discounts, events, all kinds of fun stuff.

So. Without further ado, I think that wraps up my announcements. And we're going to go ahead and get started with our interview with Charlotte Cartwright and Amy Livingstone, editors of "Medieval People."

I want to welcome my two guests today. We have with us Charlotte Cartwright, at Christopher Newport University, and Amy Livingstone, University of Lincoln, the editors of "Medieval People". So to get started today, I was just--was wondering if you could kind of give me an introduction to the journal, tell me a little bit about its history?

2:47 - Amy Livingstone [AL]
Sure. I think I'll go ahead and start with that. So "Medieval Prosopography" was founded in 1980, and "Medieval People" is a relaunch of that particular journal. "Prosopography" came out in the 1980s, when really the first attempts were done to do collective biography, and a way of filling in some of the gaps that we have in medieval history. Because oftentimes, there's not enough information to write a single life, but by putting things together in a mosaic, you can create a collective biography and determine the life course of individuals, and to really kind of get--put more flesh on the bones of what would otherwise be a very sort of reduced narrative. And "Medieval Prosopography" was going great guns, but we realized that it was, well--coming up to forty years old, and in need of a reboot. So, hence the change from "Medieval Prosopography" to "Medieval People." And I'd like to mention that the founding editors, the founding fathers, so to speak, of "Medieval Prosopography" were Joel Rosenthal, George Beech, and Bernard Bachrach.

3:59 - MIP
Ok, thank you. Did you want to add to that, Charlotte?

4:04 - Charlotte Cartwright [CC]
Uh, no, I honestly came in as someone who had read "Medieval Prosopography" for years... I was not there for the founding and for the early editions of the journal. But I was really excited by the idea of a new name that would take the history of "Medieval Prosopography" and the work that has been done for decades in the field of prosopography and the study of individuals who are not typically part of, kind of, the grand political narrative. And then, thinking more broadly about "Medieval People" and moving forward into a newer, more digitally based age, is... is really the thing that I'm really excited to be joining the journal for.

4:45 - MIP
Great. So volume 35, the last volume of the journal, that was the last volume published under the name "Medieval Prosopography," also the last print volume of the journal. Volume 36, which, by the time this airs, will probably be available, is the first under the name "Medieval People." And it's the first digital-only version of the journal, although of course, subscribers can print content from the journal and volumes will be available on a print-on-demand basis from our distributor as well. Can you talk a little bit about that volume, 36, the first one under the new name--the inaugural volume, so to speak, of "Medieval People"? Did you have kind of a specific thematic focus or an editorial strategy while working on the volume? And what kind of people might we meet in that volume?

5:35 - AL
Well, I'll start and I think Charlotte can come in and give some more specifics. We took "Medieval People" by Eileen Power as our touchstone for the first volume, and indeed for the name of the new journal. Right? We're "Medieval People," but we're also social networks and family and other things as well. And that reflects, as Charlotte indicates, the sort of new digital focus of the journal, which is to look at new tools for uncovering the experiences of people in the past. But "Medieval People," at least for me, personally, was one of the first things I ever read about the Middle Ages, and I was really taken with these wonderful portraits that Eileen Power was able to forge. However, I think we can say that... what is it, almost 100 years old? It's time for a rethink about the lives of some of these people. But so, we were very conscious about sort of riffing off of Powers's lovely little volume. And we do have essays that reflect that, so there's something about--a reboot of Bodo the peasant, a reexamination of Madame Eglantine, the discussion of a clothier in reference to two of the essays in Powers's lovely little book, the Ménagier's Wife of Paris. So we took it as our touchstone, but then we added some new things to it, as well as digital content, to keep up with our mission to reinvent how the journal is delivered, and to give people who are doing these kinds of digital projects a place for their publication, but also to make people aware of what's going on. Many times we aren't aware of, "oh, wow, there's that great database," or "I didn't know that person was doing that." And "Medieval People" will provide a platform hopefully to spread that kind of information and put people in conversation with each other.

7:22 - CC
Yeah, and when Amy first proposed basing our inaugural edition of "Medieval People" off of Eileen Powers's book and kind of riffing on it, and expanding on it--that was a really exciting idea to me, because I think Eileen Powers's book was quite revolutionary, for its time... to look at women, to look at people of the merchant classes, to look at peasants was not something typically done. And now, of course, the field of medieval history is expanding even further and thinking of new groups that have not traditionally been studied. So some of the articles that we have in this volume really reflect newer lines of research: looking at people like manumitted slaves, you know, the eastern half of the Mediterranean, looking at the Jewish population in Girona in Spain, looking at Lombard royal women, looking at early medieval pilgrims whose names we don't even know. There are really fantastic studies in here that I think take, kind of, Powers's approach to the understudied, maybe more ordinary, quote unquote, person, and really try to bring those people to light and make them part of the historical record. And that really is, I think, what... what unites the volume across the board.

8:34 - MIP
Yeah. That sounds really interesting. I'm looking forward to actually seeing it. You... So you sort of already have started gesturing toward this and alluding to this a little bit, but how do you see "Medieval People" changing in the future? So you've talked a little bit about, kind of, the digital directions that you're moving in and new kinds of people, new groups of people that especially this volume, kind of, starts to highlight. So how do you see this journal changing as it goes forward? But also, what do you kind of admire and want to preserve about what the journal has done in the past?

9:09 - AL
Well, I think one of the things that the journal "Medieval Prosopography" did really well was to bring to attention people that otherwise had been sort of ignored. But also, in its time, way back in the 1980s, it was revolutionary, in the sense that prosopography was a new tool that people were using to try to uncover experiences of people, to track networks, to try to understand how the pieces fit together. So, you know, taking that is something we want to take forward. And of course, now we've got all sorts of new toys that we can play with, new tools that we can use to chart people, to put them in conversation with each other, to other--to see relationships that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to see. And I think of Dana Wessell Lightfoot and Alex Guerson's wonderful little essay that they have in the forthcoming volume, where the two of them working together went through a massive amount of material that not one person could have gotten through. But by working together, and by using databases, and making records, they were able to recover a life of a woman that would have gone unknown, or at least would have been very barebones. So, taking that forward is something that I think Charlotte and I are both very much committed to, and exploring the new ways that we can explore the lives of medieval people.

I'd also like to see our geographical focus expand a wee bit, and I know Charlotte agrees with this. "Medieval Prosopography" tended to focus mostly on Western Europe with the occasional, you know, reference to things going on in Byzantium or the East. But I hope that we can become a little more medieval world as opposed to just England, France. And that's certainly reflected in the essays in the first volume, where... and Power herself really didn't go much beyond England and France in her lovely little book. But we have essays from Crete, we have essays from Italy, Germany, and Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, and as a way of expanding the geography of the geographical focus of the journal. And I'd love to see somebody working on medieval Ethiopia, or somewhere in Scandinavia, would be wonderful to be able to add those into the concept of the journal and to have those sorts of submissions.

11:29 - CC
Yeah, I think we really hope to take what the journal has done so well, for so long, I mean I think this has been one of the preeminent English-language journals on prosopography, and really was the first one... the first English-language journal for prosopography, certainly. So taking that and continuing that work, and not neglecting the kind of more traditional prosopographical studies of Western Europe, but just expanding that, and broadening our horizons, both in terms of geography, and also the types of people that are studied. And I know one of the things we've talked about is the need for more studies of non-White, non-Christian, non-European peoples of the Middle Ages, to really reflect the fact that the Middle Ages didn't just happen to Europe, and that it's not just Europeans in Europe that can be studied.

12:15 - MIP
Yeah. And that definitely, I think, matches very well with your... the new subtitle about "social bonds and networks," especially. I mean, obviously, there were such wide reaching networks of all kinds in the Middle Ages, and kind of expanding out from Europe into those networks would be a really interesting way to expand the remit of the journal too, it sounds like.

12:37 - AL
Absolutely.

12:39 - MIP
So you've mentioned a few times the digital projects and and tools that people are using for this kind of work. The "Medieval People" website has... the homepage on MIP's website has two sections devoted to digital humanities projects. So what about the journal, or maybe this field, particularly makes digital humanities so significant? Are DH projects kind of particularly well suited for this kind of research?

13:05 - AL
Hm.

13:06 - CC
Would you like me to take on... take this one?

13:08 - AL
I was going to say, Charlotte, why don't you take the lead on that one?

13:10 - CC
Yeah, I--I do think that prosopography is particularly well-suited to using computers, basically. A lot of what people have been doing for decades has been using databases, or creating databases in which you can store large amounts of information from document collections scattered in archives across the UK and Europe, and then be able to sort through that information very quickly, to find the, kind of, often rather sporadic and disparate mentions of individual people that you can then use to build up a biography, or to look at members of groups and start to look for patterns and start to look for connections. That's really essential for the study of these networks that we've talked about.

And basically, just over the last decade, I think, the digital tools have gotten a lot more interesting and have been really used in some new and exciting ways. Really, particularly with the ability to share information between groups of people at very different places, that's really allowed for the expansion of the field. And Amy already alluded to one of our articles, where we have two researchers at different universities in Canada, who have created a database of records from multiple different collections in Girona to study a Jewish couple in Spain. We have another article, similar, that's co-authored by Heather Wacha and Yvonne Seale, who are at different universities in the US, but were able to use a digital manuscript facsimile and share documents to examine a network of donors to the nunnery at Prémontré. And these are really exciting new avenues of research that are being enabled by the use of computers and the internet and modern data sharing, not doing anything necessarily revolutionary, but building on what's been done for a really, really long time. And even our articles that are done by single scholars working on an individual project are quite often using computer databases.

15:13 - AL
Yeah.

15:14 - CC
And--and using that, to track large groups of people, or to look at data from a large amount, a large--a larger number of documents in a bigger document collection. I would say, for anyone who's not familiar with digital humanities, and particularly digital humanities for the study of medieval people: the article by Matthew Hammond in this first volume, I really, when I first read it, I thought, this is one of the best overviews of digital humanities prosopography projects starting in the 1990s, up to the present day, that I have ever read. If you just need an introduction, just read the first half of that article, because it gives you the overview and all of the references you need to really go and introduce yourself to the field of DH for medieval studies. That is something I will absolutely recommend to any of my students, for example, who are interested in starting this research, and doing this type of research.

And the other article, I think, that would be particularly helpful for people who are thinking about maybe dipping their toe into some digital research, would be Katie Mortimer, who wrote a fabulous article for us, that is an overview of current digital humanities projects on the Crusades, with a really great range, from projects looking at individual crusaders up to creating interactive digital maps, digital maps that are medieval maps that are now in an interactive modern format. So if you just want to know the range of possibilities, just thinking what could be done, we actually have really fantastic articles in this inaugural volume, that I think would be a great place to start. For anyone who's interested in thinking more about what you can do with modern software, it's a really, really nice thing to have in our inaugural relaunch as "Medieval People" to kind of introduce people to the possibilities of what you can do with research.

17:09 - MIP
Yeah, and Katie Mortimer's article, links... gives direct links to many of those projects, and people can really easily check them out for themselves, too.

17:19 - CC
Yeah, and that's the advantage of the digital format of publication, is we can have--we can host appendices of data coming from researchers' databases, we can have links to all of the projects that you can really easily follow. And it makes it really accessible for people who are reading this work to then go and try out the project for themselves and see what they can learn from it.

17:42 - AL
And I think, you know, that's one of the great things about those articles is, they're so user-friendly, that they demystify some of the things that people might want to explore in terms of doing digital humanities projects. And I have to say, Katie Mortimer's article's fabulous, and so is Courtney Luckhardt's data visualization project. I am a visual learner, and by looking at those diagrams, things appeared to me in a way that I would not have put them together if I was just looking at text. And I think the other thing that is certainly resonant with digital humanities, but also what we're hoping to do with "Medieval People," is also include a little bit more on material culture. And so digital humanities are great for bringing home uses of material culture, you know, giving people examples of how they can use it in their research, putting people in conversation with each other. And I have to say, that's one of the things I'm looking forward to the most, in terms of where the articles are going to go in the forthcoming volumes of "Medieval People." Because as we all know, we've had a material turn, and you know, this is a really important part of the scholarship.

And as Charlotte points out, being online and available digitally really helps give people the resources that they need and they can follow up on something. You know, you can read about a URL in an article, sure, but just being able to go there and click on it and go there immediately... If you're like me, you look at that long string of you know, alphabet and numbers and inevitably mistype it if it's just from a print source. So having those links, I hope will encourage people to get out there and explore and put people in conversation with each other.

19:19 - CC
Yeah, and the other thing I would add to that is that a lot of the projects that are highlighted in Katy Mortimer's article, but also in articles in our volume, such as Matthew Hammond's People of Medieval Scotland, or Maryanne Kowaleski's Digital Londoners database, these are projects where researchers are often working in teams to digitize medieval records, to make them available to researchers from anywhere. So anyone reading an article in "Medieval People" can go follow that to the actual database, and you can go look at the data and play with it, and in some cases, could help contribute to the projects and then use that in your own research. So I really think that the... the digital humanities aspect of this is important for opening up the field of medieval research and making medieval information about people more accessible.

20:08 - MIP
Yeah. And several of those projects you both just mentioned are linked straight from the two sections I mentioned on the "Medieval People" website. So people can go--and I'll link to that, to your homepage, in the details below, so people can very easily get there--but they can go explore those... those sources, including the Editor's Choice this month, which is Middle Ages for Educators, which has a lot of really great resources for people teaching the Middle Ages, at all different levels. So that's another... another place to check out on your website as well. You've talked a little bit already about several of your, kind of, goals and your aims, I guess, as editors going forward... did you want to add any anything else or... you've covered a few things already.

20:58 - CC
I have one thing I would add, which is for, for me, I think, I want "Medieval People" to be a place where scholars working in the digital realm know that if you come to us to publish, you're going to have a set of editors who are familiar with digital humanities projects. I'm someone who started my Ph.D. thesis, making my own database, and putting together a database of individuals who appeared in a collection of medieval charters. So you know that when you come to us, you're going to get a supportive editorial team, who has a base familiarity with some of the software that is being used. I'm in the process now of dipping my toe into data visualization, which Amy alluded to, from Courtney Lockhart's study of looking at networks of early medieval pilgrims, who are all unnamed, but where she can start to reconstruct their travels and their experiences by creating these very visual maps of how--who interacted with who and who was present with who at different places.

This is a kind of new, exciting new direction for me, as well as for the journal and I think for the field of prosopography as a whole. So this, this is really the goal of the journal, is to bring people in who are doing some of this newer, more cutting-edge work, maybe, you know, using software that we haven't heard of, but you know you're going to get a supportive editorial team and supportive reviews of your work when you come to us for publication. That would be my hope as we move forward, is that we're able to continue to grow the type of research that we publish while, of course, remaining true and loyal to our roots, and always focused on prosopography. That... that I hope is the place that we are.

22:40 - AL
Or as we call prosopography now, "social network analysis."

22:43 - CC
Yes.

22:44 - AL
But, and I--to be frank, part of the reason that, well, a motivation for changing the title of the journal is, when you say "prosopography" to people these days, sometimes they don't know what you're talking about. But "social network analysis" seems to have sort of come in to replace that general term. And I would just say ditto to what Charlotte has said about supportive editing experiences, not only for people working in digital humanities, but we also want to encourage a range of people, early career scholars to, you know, the venerated... basically the giants of our field, to feel free to submit to "Medieval People" as well, so.

23:24 - MIP
Great. Thank you both. Do you have a favorite mostly "unknown..."

23:31 - AL
Oh...

23:31 - MIP
...medieval person? Can you pick one, I guess? (laughs)

23:35 - AL
Oh, a dangerous question for the two of us, yeah... How much time do you have? Um, wow. Um, I would let Charlotte go first while I ponder that, because I have to narrow my selection down a little bit.

23:46 - CC
I do have a favorite, although there is some recency bias here, I will confess, because my favorite is Emma of Ivry, and I... I finished a study of her just a few years ago. And for me--she's a cousin of William the Conqueror, I think people who've studied the Anglo-Norman world closely may know her, although they're more likely to know her husband Osbern the Steward, which is always a little frustrating, that everybody knows the husband and not the wife. And I first encountered her in some mentions in Norman charters while I was making that database I talked about for my Ph.D. And I started going... I went back to look at that database, and this is where having a database is really helpful, because you can go through and go, "Ooh, I didn't--I wasn't thinking about her when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. But guess what, she's in there." I can pull up every record of her that I have from the, from the Anglo-Norman charters. And putting together those charter records with these kind of, you know, mentions of her and her family in chronicles from the time, and I realized I was able to actually piece together a lot of her life, and that she was at the center of Norman power for a very long period of time before the conquest in 1066. And that was fabulous, to do that detective work and to realize that actually, this woman is at the center of everything... was really exciting.

And I will admit I was--this is also partially because I was burned out after my Ph.D. thesis, and it was that project on Emma that got me back into research and got me feeling excited about picking through these documents and picking through these little mentions of people and putting together this bigger picture that you can't do from one single record, but what you can do from looking at lots and lots of tiny, short little mentions in many different records. Which, of course, is the core of prosopography and really the core of modern social network analysis as well. So that that's why... I still love Emma for that, for getting me back into it, for showing me what's possible. And for revealing a woman who's not completely unknown, but mostly unknown, in such an important place, in a very critical moment in medieval history, I think.

25:53 - MIP
Very cool. Thank you. Did you decide, Amy?

25:57 - AL
Oh dear. Well, can I do two?... If I talk fast?

26:02 - MIP
Yes, I think we can do that... (laughs)

26:03 - AL
(laughs) I want to provide some gender balance, because you know, the one that immediately comes to my mind in terms of my favorite... Well, my favorite medieval person of the moment happens to be Ermengarde of Brittany, and I can get back to her. But in my last book, I spent a great deal of time examining the Beaugency family, a family of lords from the mid-Loire region. You know, they were a very interesting family, they weren't super high up in the social hierarchy, but they were definitely powerful and important. And I learned a lot about one of the lords. He was a crusader, he took part in the First Crusade, his bravery is praised in the chronicles. But what's really interesting about--his name is Ralph, and he is affectionately known in our household as Wreck-It Ralph...

26:49 - MIP
(laughs)

26:48 - AL
...was that he came home from Crusade, he was very prominent in the area, he was, you know, an important vassal to the counts of Blois-Chartres, particularly Countess Adele, but then things kind of go awry for him.. it all looked great, starting out... he ends up marrying the daughter of Hugh the Great of France, you know, he's... really seems to be a social climber. But then things really begin to sort of fall apart towards the end of his life, partly because he and his wife separate, and she is so well-connected that he ends up alienating the Capetians and a few other important people, which, as you can imagine, had serious ramifications. So he was known to people, but going through the itsy-bitsy bits of charters, and, you know, pulling out little bits of information from the chronicles, a whole different view of, of our friend Ralph emerges. And yes, he was a prominent and valiant crusader, but that's not the whole story. And in some ways, the Crusade was his undoing, because it led to his marriage, which led to his disaffection with some very important people. So, Wreck-It Ralph. And if you want to learn more about him, I'm gonna put in a shameless plug: feel free to read my book!

But the next topic of my book is Ermengarde of Beaugenc--Ermengarde of Brittany, who is the daughter of Ermengarde of Beaugency, which is how I ended up with Ermengarde. Ermengarde was Countess of Brittany, she lived between 1070 and 1147, and for what Charlotte said about Emma, I'll say the same--I could just say, ditto, for Ermengarde. A fascinating person, had her fingers in so many different pies, and yet, completely anonymized in our scholarship today. She's just not part of the narrative. When she is mentioned, kind of like Emma, it's as an appendage to men.

27:04 - CC
Mmhm.

27:21 - AL
She did some really remarkable things. And like Emma was at the center of power in western France, for much of the early part of the twelfth century. And she also travels to the Holy Land and does some pretty interesting things there too. So Ermengarde of Brittany and Wreck-It Ralph...

29:00 - MIP
(laughs)

29:00 - CC
(laughs)

29:00 - AL
They're actually uncle and niece, two of my favorite "unknown" medieval people.

29:08 - MIP
Well, thank you, those are all great stories. Good to hear more about. So is there anything else you would like to tell us about the journal or anything else you would just want to talk about a little bit?

29:18 - CC
I would put in a shameless plug for the fact that we have sponsored sessions at both Kalamazoo and at Leeds, so the two kind of big medieval conferences coming up this summer. These sessions feature speakers from our inaugural edition talking about their research, and also a couple of people who will be publishing in volume 37, that will be forthcoming. And I am blanking on the dates of our Kalamazoo session right now, but I know our one at Leeds is actually on July 4th, which is, I like to think an auspicious date for an American journal sponsoring a session at a UK conference.

29:50 - AL
(laughs)

29:56 - MIP
Mmhm.

29:56 - CC
So you can come out and see us at the University of Leeds on the fourth of July.

30:01 - AL
And I think our Kalamazoo session is Monday, May 10th [NB: the date is actually May 9, 2022]...

30:05 - CC
Ah.

30:06 - AL
...so do feel free to come out for that as well, and we're hoping--we will be planning further sessions, I believe, for Kalamazoo in 2023 as well as Leeds, and keep tuned because we may do some sort of nice launch event in the forthcoming months, perhaps at a conference... we're still working on that. And I'll put in a shameless plug for anybody out there interested in submitting to "Medieval People," please get in touch. We'd be delighted to talk to you about what you might be interested in submitting and providing any feedback that we can.

30:44 - MIP
Yes, I wanted also to encourage any of our listeners who work in this field to submit to the journal, and they can do that at the journal's ScholarWorks page. There's also submission guidelines and details available on that page and I will link to that below in the details as well. "Medieval People" is also available to individuals at two subscription rates; we have a discounted rate for people like students, precariously employed, retired, that kind of thing, and institutional subscriptions are also available.

If your institution doesn't already subscribe, you can request that they do so--we have a library recommendation form, I will also link to that in the comments below, and the subscriptions page, and it's very easy... It's just a quick form to fill out, with any other MIP book or journal you also think your institution should have... so yes, those will be linked below. I'll also link to "Medieval People"'s homepage on the MIP website, where you can find all of this and more, including the featured digital humanities projects which will, you know, we'll add more as Amy and Charlotte want me to do so and an Editor's Choice section and the contents of the current issue.

Finally, this interview is the feature of our April newsletter, and we're, just a reminder, featuring a one-year subscription to "Medieval People" as the prize of our April drawing. So if you're already subscribed to the newsletter, make sure to scroll down to the bottom and enter the drawing, and if you're not--if you're seeing this video elsewhere and you're not already subscribed, you--I'll link to the newsletter page below as well and you'll be automatically entered to win in the drawing when you subscribe, so. That's exciting, somebody will win a subscription! So good luck to everybody.

So thank you so much, Amy and Charlotte, this was really fun. I'm glad we got to talk about this and, yeah, just get more information about the journal out there to more people. So thank you so much!

32:33 - AL
Thank you for the opportunity.

32:35 - CC
Thank you for having us.