Databases and Prosopographies: The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) a Case Study

Summary
Dr Hafed Walda
Definition
David Pelteret, of the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England,
wrote that: "in essence prosopography can be interpreted as the
study of identifiable persons and their connections with others
for the purpose of enabling the modern student to discern
patterns of relationships." (Peltertet 13).
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Project (PASE)
is based in the department of History, the Centre for Computing
in the Humanities at King's College London and in the
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University
of Cambridge. The aim of the PASE Project is to record
everything that is known about all Anglo-Saxon individuals
mentioned in any source written between 597 and 1042. This
will create a comprehensive register of the recorded inhabitants
of the period. PASE will be accessible in the form of a freely
available, searchable on-line database.
The past two decades have witnessed enormous growth in the
number and importance of Prosopographies such as PASE.
Following this period of rapid growth will the academic
community find a common technological ground for all these
Prosopographies? This paper explores the issues surrounding
the search for this common ground.
Historical overview
The father of prosopographies is the Corpus Inscriptionem
Latinarum (CIL) edited by Christian Matthias in 1858. After
the publication of the CIL, Mommsen worked on the original
Prosopographicum Inscriptionem Romanorum (PIR) until 1877.
In that he made use of his considerable experience with CIL,
hence his first work mimicked the Inscriptions but was
supplemented by literary sources and papyrology. After a long
delay Professor A.H.M. Jones continued Mommsen's work
with the help of his two pupils John Morris and John Martindale
in the 1950s. The continuation of Mommsen's work became an
international affair. The huge task was divided between the
French (under the direction of H.-I. Marrou) and the British
(under A.H.M. Jones).
A.H.M. Jones died before the first volume of the Prosopography
of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE), covering the years AD
260-395, was published in 1971. He did however manage to
read through and edit the final draft. The British Academy
ensured the survival of the project by providing financial aid
from 1970. John Morris and John Martindale continued to work
on the project, volume two (covering the years AD 395-527)
being published just after the death of John Morris in 1980.
John Martindale was left to edit the third volume, eventually
published in 1992 in two volumes covering AD 527-64, before
he retired in 2000.
The French Prosopographie Chrétienne was divided on a
regional as well as chronological basis. Marrou and Mandouze
produced the volumes for Africa (AD 303-533) in 1982.
Another two volumes covering Italy (AD 313-604) were
published in 1999, under the direction of Charles and Luce
Pietri.
Data and development issues
With the development of scholarship through the increased
availability of written sources, the publication of new editions,
and through the publication of Inscriptions, coins and seals, the
research materials have also increased. New methods using
searchable databases were developed to deal with the sheer
quantity of material available in various formats.
In the past two decades, computer based methods of recording
and manipulating data have offered historians in a variety fields
new opportunities of data manipulation that go beyond what
was formerly feasible for scholars using traditional research
methods geared for paper publication. This was hailed as an
ideal way of converting data into information by processing
and presenting them for human interpretation.
The database approach to the development of Prosopographies
has been found attractive to scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies
(PASE), Clergy of the Church of England (CCE) and
Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW). All these
Prosopographies are based in King's College London and
developed in collaboration with the Centre for Computing in
the Humanities (CCH). The role of CCH involves a whole range of activities, including data analysis, system design, the
application of computing tools, and technical advice and
long-term support.
These Prosopographies have benefited hugely from the technical
and academic knowledge that has been accumulated at King's
College London.
In this paper I will draw a comparison between the various
methods of collecting and displaying prosopographical data in
different formats from the earlier book-based to electronic
editions, and will analyze the advantages of each method. The
comparison will involve using actual historical records.
I will be looking closely at the advantages, costs and risks of
using the Relational Database model to drive the data and the
use of web browsers as interfaces to display the information.
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England database will be
used as an example of a database driven prosopography.
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon
England, 597-1042
Alex Burghart
This section will demonstrate the research possibilities
made available by PASE. It will give a live presentation
of how data from sources has been entered, collated and
reconciled.
A wide range of source types survive from Anglo-Saxon
England, these include chronicles, letters, biographies, and legal
texts. Sources such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have generated a prodigious amount
of secondary literature and probably an uncountable number
of editions in a wide variety of vernacular languages. Yet these
editions could not, on their own, answer such basic questions
as, how many Anglo-Saxons held a certain office; or establish
the links between people and overall groupings with systematic
and accessible structure.
Perhaps the most substantial advance that PASE has made on
standard prosopography is that it records not only data
concerning individuals (their status, what they owned, to whom
they were related, what they ate for breakfast &c.) but also
information about how individuals were connected with each
other. This has been embodied in the database by the creation
of EVENT in which is recorded all meetings / relations between
one or more people. This is a significant step in understanding
Anglo-Saxon history because for the first time historians will
be able to search the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxon sources for
associations between people. This lies at the heart of what
prosopography should be.
The major source of associations in Anglo-Saxon history is
that of the charters. The term 'Anglo-Saxon charter' covers a
multitude of documents ranging in kind from the royal diplomas
issued in the names of Anglo-Saxon kings between the last
quarter of the seventh century and the Norman Conquest, which
are generally in Latin, to the wills of prominent churchmen,
laymen, and women, which are generally in the vernacular. A
large proportion of the surviving corpus of about 1500 charters
is made up of records of grants of land or privileges by a king
to a religious house, or to a lay beneficiary. The corpus also
includes records of settlements of disputes over land or
privileges, leases of episcopal property, and records of bequests
of land and other property. Its importance for PASE lies in what
they tell us about individuals. Most charters include invaluable
information about ownership and status, but, as legal
documents, they also frequently include lists of people who
gave their agreement to the settlement described in the charter.
These names give us an insight into the workings of royal and
local courts and communities which we would have otherwise
been denied. In collating these names and relating them to other
source material, PASE grants the researcher the ability to reveal
something of the lives which hide behind them.
Anglo-Saxon charters are the best represented corpus of
medieval documents on the internet. The completion of PASE
will confirm and bolster this position.
Bibliography
Bradley, John, and Harold Short. "Texts into databases: The
Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography." Paper delivered
at the ACH/ALLC Conference, University of Georgia, Athens
Georgia. Summer 2003.
Cameron, Averill, ed. Fifty Years Of Prosopography: The
Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and Beyond. Proceedings of
the British Academy, number 118. New York: Oxford
University Press, for the British Academy, 2003.
Clergy of the Church of England. King's College London.
Accessed 2005-03-21. <http://maple.cc.kcl.ac.u
k:8080/cce/rochester/index.html> (Not yet
launched.)
Jones, A.H.M., J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris. The
Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Klebs, E., P. von Rohden, and H. Dessau. Prosopographia
Imperii Romani. 3 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1956. A
new second edition was published in 1998. Martindale, John Robert, ed. Prosopography of the Byzantine
Empire I (641-867): The CD of the First Period. King's College
London, 2002.
Peltertet, David. "[Title not provided]." History and Computing
12.1 (2002): 13.
Prosopograhy Centre. Modern History Research Unit,
University of Oxford. Accessed 2005-03-21. <http://use
rs.ox.ac.uk/~prosop/>
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England. King's College
London. Accessed 2005-03-21. <http://www.kcl.ac.
uk/humanities/cch/pase/> ; database site <http:/
/maple.cc.kcl.ac.uk:8080/pase/index.jsp>
(not publicly launched).