Professor Louise Sylvester is helping to bring Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the medieval history surrounding it, back to life for families and schools.
Detail from a 15th-century manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61. (copyright free/creative commons licence)
There are many things we can learn today from reading Chaucer and other medieval literature – but a complex linguistics and alien culture have made this rich literary heritage increasingly inaccessible to modern Britons. Professor Louise Sylvester’s research and engagement work is helping Chaucer and the medieval world reach a broader audience.
As an international authority on medieval languages, textiles and clothing, Sylvester’s ground-breaking work includes the creation of The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing c. 700-1450. This is the first multilingual dictionary of terms, covering textiles, garments, armour and accessories in all medieval British languages – and is freely available online. Within the first six years of going live, the website had received 634,358 hits (averaging approximately 8,800 per month), with 65,276 unique visitors. The History of Parliament project (funded by the two Houses of Parliament) identified it as one of two “shining examples” of “ground-breaking digital humanities projects covering the Middle Ages”. The Lexis site has been used in schools to innovate teaching of the medieval era, and Sylvester also co-edited the book Teaching Chaucer, writing its chapter on how students can engage with Chaucer’s language.
Visit The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing c. 700-1450 website.
A second life for the Chaucer Heritage Trust
Professor Sylvester was appointed Trustee of the Chaucer Heritage Trust (CHT) in 2013, as part of a broader effort to revitalise the Trust. Her work with the organisation has directly led to the CHT being re-registered with the Charity Commission.
Writing to Sylvester, a fellow CHT trustee said of her work: “The charity is now well established again and active in carrying out its objectives, which I must attribute to you”.
Sylvester designed “The Canterbury Tales Writing Competition”, which launched in 2018 for three different age groups of children and young people. Informed by her work on Teaching Chaucer, the competition uses creative exercises to place The Canterbury Tales into modern contexts children can relate to.
In its first year, Sylvester and colleagues enlisted Stephen Fry and two other high-profile judges and attracted over 500 entries. With yearly entries since ranging from 600 to 800, the contest has given thousands of children their first taste of medieval literature. Alongside individual prize money, the prize-winning schools have collectively received almost £16,000 in library funding.
Sylvester was also central to devising the Schools Visits programme, which provides workshops to 7–14-year-olds at schools that do not have Chaucer on their Key Stages 2 and 3 syllabuses, and to 16–19-year-olds studying Chaucer at A Level. Tailored to individual schools’ needs and priorities, the programme has reached 26 schools and more than 2,000 children since 2017 to resounding positive feedback.
The students have benefited hugely from the workshops, especially as it has enabled them to engage with the Canterbury Tales outside of their usual classroom experience. We have found that they often spark a deeper interest in Chaucer's colourful characters.
– A teacher at a Norwich state school
Visit the Chaucer Heritage Trust website.
Strengthening public engagement at The National Archives
In 2015, Professor Sylvester took her Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain project to the next level, having been awarded an AHRC grant to enhance the public engagement practices and strategies at The National Archives (TNA). Her research team included Dr Mark Chambers of Durham University; Research Associate Dr Charles Farris, then at the University of Westminster and now Public Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and administrator at the Chaucer Heritage Trust; and Dr Laura Tompkins from TNA as Project Advisor.
As Paul Dryburgh, Principal Record Specialist at TNA, explains, many of their medieval and early modern records pose very distinct “conceptual challenges” to adults and children alike. As a result, “our engagement strategies have to be particularly innovative and supported, often, by external partners”.
Sylvester and her team helped “both to test out new ideas and spaces and to broaden the audiences that visit the archives”, maintaining a collaborative relationship with TNA over several years, with highlights including two large-scale immersive events.
The Tudor Takeover Day, a family fun day, attracted over 300 visitors in 2016, and was rated “excellent” by all participants. TNA’s Education Manager writes that: “The workshops were brilliantly attended, with turn-out far exceeding expectations”.
Described by visitors as “inspiring” and “enlightening”, Medieval Murmurings, a Time Travel Club event targeting 5–11-year-olds attracted over 100 families in 2019.
These events and others like them, Dryburgh says, “owed their greatest inspiration” to the project team and could not have been achieved without its “intellectual and financial input”.
Sylvester and her project team further spearheaded a programme of other events, including classroom sessions, storytelling, workshops and craft activities to increase young and non-academic audiences’ awareness and cultural understanding of the period.
The collaboration between The National Archives and the LEXIS project and wider teams has been truly inspirational. It has encouraged The National Archives to innovate in its presentation of collections to children and their parents and given it the freedom to rethink how we engage different audiences with medieval collections in new ways.
- Paul Dryburgh, Principal Record Specialist at The National Archives
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Connect with Louise Sylvester
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