“Pacience is an Heigh Vertu”: Managing the Canterbury Tales Project Via Textual Communities

This article functions as both a reflective essay and a pedagogical account of the second phase of the Canterbury Tales Project and the various successes and challenges that unfolded throughout that process. Our focus is how the project both managed the transcription team working locally at the University of Saskatchewan and facilitated transcription workshops abroad. We detail our training process and the transcription workflow as facilitated via the Textual Communities environment. We also examine and evaluate the causes of the project’s challenges—often the result of institutional pressures or technological changes—and our reactions to those challenges, emphasizing successful strategies. Finally, we proffer future changes for the project that we believe would have made considerable positive impact if implemented from the outset of phase two and still have potential as helpful resources now. It is our hope that in detailing our process we can help other large DH projects mimic our successes and, perhaps even more importantly, avoid any pitfalls that challenged us.

Monastic Narrative Practices

Stories comprised the very fabric of devotional life and institutional identity in medieval European monasteries. The monastic habitus encouraged the reading, glossing, composition, and performance of many different kinds of narratives, and the religious men and women who took these tasks to heart became, in a sense, living books. This chapter describes three fundamental ways in which narratives shaped the medieval monastic experience in the Latin West: first, by promoting particular models of holiness; second, by creating a textual basis for coherent, resilient communal identities; and third, by defining boundaries, albeit flexible and permeable ones, between religious communities and the outside world. Each of these narrative functions represents a rich vein of recent scholarship on medieval monasteries as devotional and textual communities.

Considering eighteenth-century prophecy as transformative work

This article explores premodern prophecy as a form of transformative work with connections to contemporary fan fiction. This link is established in three ways: through the archontic nature of prophecy, through the prophet's self-insertion into the biblical text, and by viewing prophetic groups as textual communities marked by affective links to characters. These links are examined through a case study of two prophets, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) and Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), with the conflict between them reconceptualized as an affectively driven dispute over claims to character ownership. The article suggests that approaches from fan studies can offer useful perspectives for historians (and vice versa) while cautioning against overly arbitrary ahistorical comparisons between modern fandom and premodern groups.