Created in collaboration with Alexandra Gillespie’s Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto, Communities of Practice is a SSHRC-funded research project that explores how the multilingual urban bureaucracy of London—the world of Chaucer and his contemporaries—shaped late medieval literature. Bringing together linguistic, palaeographical, literary-historical, and computational methods, the project examines how networks of clerks employed in government offices contributed to the production, circulation, and transformation of literary texts between 1377 and 1471. By pairing innovative machine‑learning techniques with traditional manuscript study, making full use of the increase in digital access to archival documents, the project aims to move beyond linking single documents with individual clerks. Instead, it works towards a broader understanding of the distinctive scribal practices that arose in particular office communities and the role played by these scribal communities in the development of literary culture.
Publications
These publications built the foundation for Communities of Practice, demonstrating the need for an examination of the period covered by the project, making a case for the methods we adopt, and applying those methods to small case studies.
Grieggs, Samuel, C. E. M. Henderson, Sebastian Sobecki, Alexandra Gillespie, and Walter Scheirer.“The Paleographer’s Eye Ex Machina: Using Computer Vision to Assist Humanists in Scribal Hand Identification.” 2024 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), January 2024, 7216–25.
Sobecki, Sebastian. “Communities of Practice: Thomas Hoccleve, London Clerks, and Literary Production.” Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 51–106.
Sobecki, Sebastian. “The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks.” Review of English Studies 72, no. 304 (2021): 253–79.
Sobecki, Sebastian. “The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King’s French Secretaries.” In Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, edited by Margaret Connolly, Holly James-Maddox, and Derek Pearsall. York Medieval Press, 2022.
Sobecki, Sebastian. “Quo Vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay.” Speculum 99, no. 3 (2024): 780–804.
AI Tool
One strand of Communities of Practice is the building of a machine-learning tool that uses computer vision to support expert palaeographers in handwriting attribution, particularly by suggesting the most likely government office in which a scribe worked. In “The Paleographer’s Eye ex machina”, we showcase a preliminary version of the tool through analysis of manuscripts associated with the fifteenth‑century clerk and poet Thomas Hoccleve. Over the course of the project, this tool will be trained on a much larger corpus of documents from the offices of government in London, 1377-1471.
Team
Principal Investigator
Sebastian Sobecki, Professor of Later Medieval English Literature, University of Toronto, Department of English and Centre for Medieval Studies.
Collaborators
Samuel Grieggs, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Euan Roger, Principal Medieval Records Specialist, The National Archives, UK.
Project Partners
Alexandra Gillespie, Vice-President & Principal, University of Toronto Mississauga, and Professor of Medieval English Literature.
Walter Scheirer, Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering, University of Notre Dame.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Seamus Dwyer, Department of English, University of Toronto.
Bard Swallow, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Postgraduate Researchers
Emily Dimou, Department of English, University of Toronto.
C.E.M. Henderson, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Rebby Onken, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Seema Bassant, Geographical Information Science, University of Toronto Mississauga.