Tool Mashing

Our interest in the Devonshire MS (BL Add 17492) for almost two hundred years, now, has been in its role as a central textual witness to the works of Thomas Wyatt, but the movement late last century toward social theories of textuality and textual production has drawn significant and new attention to the manuscript. It is now chiefly seen as the product of a relatively large coterie situated in Queen Anne Boleyn’s court at an exciting time in English history (fictionalized grandly by the Tudors’ miniseries;), and quite prominently as the first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English tradition. Even so, what we now find to be most unique and engaging about the document itself is difficult to access, in part because of academic skills and context necessary simply to read and understand it, but in larger part because the connection between prominent identifiable figures and their expressions in the manuscript — which amount in the best cases to multi-voiced discussions and pontifications on matter important to the authors and scribes of the manuscript — is difficult to sustain in any meaningful way using traditional methods. This talk will represent the work of a largish group at UVic who have been working on an edition of the manuscript and, as part of this, have carried out an experimentation in tool mashing / visualization to allow a more coherent engagement of the connection between the people contributing to the manuscript and the nature of the their exchanges and, via this, to enable a significantly increased ability to understand the interpersonal networks evident in the manuscript.