Katherine Hindley

KATHERINE HINDLEY is a scholar of medieval literature, with an interest in the history of magic and charms . She also specialises in the history of the book. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University.

In this conversation, we discussed:

Katherine's journey to teaching medieval literature in Singapore
the roles of charms, spells, and amulets in history and literature
putting together a teaching collection of rare books and manuscripts for NTU

This conversation was conducted in 2019 and has been lightly edited for clarity.

JY 00:01

Hi, everyone, welcome to this episode of Lecture Theatre. With us today we have Katherine Hindley, an assistant professor of English at Nanyang Technological University. Katherine hails from the UK. We met while she was at Yale doing a PhD, and she studies the relationship between magic and medieval literature. Welcome, Katherne. So tell us more about your life story. How did you become an academic?

Katherine 00:34

I guess there are sort of two answers to that. One would be path of least resistance. I enjoyed going to school, and I just kept going until there was no more school to do. And the other would be that it's something that I've always wanted. So when I was little, I wanted to be a teacher. But I always wanted to teach children who was slightly older than I was. And eventually, it became clear that what that eventually would mean was teaching people who are working on completely new research. So grad students. So I did an undergraduate degree in English. And then I fell in love with medieval literature, and did a master's in medieval studies, which brings other disciplines in—I did English history, a bit of archaeology, manuscript studies. And my intention was to take that and go back and do a PhD in English with a bit more background. And instead, I realized that I loved that intersection so much that I continued in a PhD in medieval studies as well.

JY 01:41

So I'm going to be blunt here. How does a scholar of medieval literature end up in Singapore?

Katherine 01:50

The short answer is that there are not that many jobs for medievalists. And so you apply to what there is, and you take what you get, and what I got was Singapore. But that kind of puts a negative spin on it that I don't really want. So I think the better answer is that I'm pleased that the NTU English department is committed to having a good historical coverage of English literature. And I was lucky enough to be the person that they hired.

JY 02:20

What has it been like moving here?

Katherine 02:23

It's been great. Yeah, very easy. In some ways, less culture shock me when I moved to the US, I think, because I was expecting Singapore to be different. And it's not that different. I was expecting the US to be the same as England and it was entirely different. It's been strange being the only medievalist around, after being at Yale where there were so many of us. But that's also kind of forced me to look more at what was happening in Asia during the medieval period, and to make more connections with colleagues who are working on more modern literature. So it's kind of given me a new perspective on some of the things that I study.

JY 03:05

So let's talk a bit more about your research and your book project. As I understand it, your research focuses on the role of magic in medieval texts. So how do you study something like magic? What does the world of charms and amulets tell us about the period?

Katherine 03:26

So I work on specifically charms, which not all scholars would agree fall into the category of magic in the Middle Ages. So mostly medical charms, or protective charms and amulets, and I'm specifically focusing on ones that include words. So whether you're speaking words, or whether you're writing words down, that sort of use of language as a protective or healing component. So the evidence for that is mostly in manuscripts. There are very few actual examples that survive, and sometimes because it's a spoken charm, it can't survive. Sometimes, because you're supposed to write the words on something like cheese—iit s just not going to stand the hundreds of years of time between the Middle Ages and now.

JY 04:21

Oh, cheese?

Katherine 04:22

Cheese for childbirth. You eat cheese, while giving birth, which seems like not something I would really want to do. I have never given birth. Maybe when I do , cheese cravings will kick in. But yeah, cheese, leaves, bread and a lot of biodegradable things. And so what you do have is recipe books which tell you how to perform these charms. So medical books will include generally quite a lot of charm texts. And sometimes you'll also find them written in prayer books, or just in the margins of whatever somebody had on hand at the time. And so those will give some instructions about how the charm should be performed, whether that's speaking it or writing it down. So we don't have the items themselves, but we have the instructions that the people at the time would have had access to.

JY 05:12

And what's the big argument or claim that you make?

Katherine 05:18

So I guess there are two. One, previous scholars have argued that written charms developed from spoken charms, as a way of making the spoken channel more permanent. And I'm arguing that, at least by the Middle Ages, that's not what's happening anymore. There's very little overlap that I see between what was spoken and what was written. And then I have another argument, which is kind of following the use of charms through time. So I start, I think my earliest is eighth century, I think going up to the 15th century, as some scholars have argued, that the practice of charming disappeared and then sort of reappeared. And I'm arguing in part that that's not true. That's true if you look only at English language charms, but there's plenty of French and Latin in the intermediate time. And so one of the things I'm trying to look at is what different languages bring to the practice of charming. And so one of the things that I found was that spoken charms will be in vernacular languages, but they very quickly get translated into French after the conquest, and you get them in English very quickly, as well. They'll be in Latin, too. Sometimes they're in completely unknown languages. But they're often comprehensible for somebody who's using them. Whereas written charms, I can only think of one example that is in a language more commonly spoken than Latin. And a lot of them are in Greek. Or there's some even in you know, invented alphabets. And they'll tell you, "Don't let your patient see this, it will stop working, keep it away from the uneducated commoners, seal it up, don't let it be seen."

JY 07:09

So I'm going to us a couple of centuries forward. In my generation, I feel like the biggest cultural icon is probably Harry Potter. So in a sense, we live in a world where there's almost a revival interest in magic and the occult and charms. So what do you make of that as someone who studies these issues historically?

Katherine 07:34

I think it's great, actually. I don't know if you saw there was an exhibition recently at the British Library and then in New York. I think it was for the 20th anniversary of the first book. But it was bringing together a whole load of JK Rowling's drafts and drawings, and with items that illustrate the history of magic in the Medieval and Renaissance, and I guess later as well. But it was such a well-balanced exhibition, because I was there as a scholar of medieval magic, learning new things and enjoying the exhibition. And going around behind me that was an eight year old kid who's, you know, reading Harry Potter for the first time and having a wonderful time as well. So I think it's bringing a lot of people to learn about what actual magical practice might have been like in the past, and to think about the fact that these are real beliefs that people held and why that might have been. Quite a lot of what you see in Harry Potter is based on real practice. I mean, mandrakes are real. Nicolas Flamel is real. Although he was not really an alchemist, but the rumor that he was an alchemist was real. But I hope that it would make people who enjoy the books find out more about the history. Or at least when they stumble across the history—to be amazed and delighted to find out that you know, Nicolas Flamel, who is a fictional character, is actually a real person. He was living in France.

JY 09:13

So do you believe in magic? Or a charm?

Katherine 09:17

Not personally. I do find when I tell people about my research, I tend to get one of two responses and the first responses are, "Wow, medieval people. That's so crazy. How dumb." And the other one is, "oh, you know, my grandparents still do that stuff." So I think it's something that's still very much in today's culture. And I do find that there's one amulet that's for making people be pleased with what you say. And I'm always kind of tempted to have it, to use it when I'm speaking at a conference. I should have done it today.

JY 09:53

This would be an apt moment.

Katherine 09:55

You put it in some letters that you write in the palm of your hand. And I always kind of want to go to a conference. and when that question comes up, have you ever used a charm? I say, I'm using it right now. But I suspect that that would not go down well.

JY 10:16

So apart from magic and medieval literature, you are also interested in the history of the book. So say a bit more about the field. What is it about and where do you think it's going?

Katherine 10:28

Yeah, so it's a field which is interested in books as physical objects. So part of that would be, you know, the production of books, their circulation, the reception of books. And the thing that makes me interested in that is that the text that I studied come from a period where production is so different from what we see today. So, you know, we are used now to books being printed and being fairly uniform. And in the medieval period, the vast majoirty of it is before the invention of the printing press, or the movable type printing press, if we're being specific. But the books are being made by hand, they are individual, they're much, much more flexible, I think, than we tend to imagine. And so I think that the fact that you can't necessarily trust that your text is stable—you can change your text, if you want to—all of that, I think, should influence the way that we read literature when we're reading something which is produced in a completely different way.

JY 11:36

And so one of the things that you're doing at NTU is actually teaching a class on the history of the book. And as part of that, you have been creating a teaching collection of manuscripts and fragments from around the world, at the library, to support the class. So how do you go about curating a collection like that? How do you decide what to include?

Katherine 12:00

So I guess, mostly, I've been trying to get things that will illustrate something that's useful for teaching. So the teaching comes first. Partly, I've just been kind of grabbing things when I see them. So the other day, I took my students to visit the SPH print center. And I got some of the aluminium plates that are used to print the the newspaper, which is incredible. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was very excited. But also just contemporary printing practices and things that I know so much less about than I do about medieval manuscripts or early prints. So that's kind of useful for me as well, to have something to look at. And for me to understand how that process works, because it's so far out of my time period. Mostly I've been looking for things where I can compare books in two different periods, or very different books from the same period, something where I can give the students two items side by side and have them compare and contrast. Because I think that helps you to see the specificity of each individual item.

JY 13:12

They actually handle it physically.

Katherine 13:14

Yes, I was quite scared the first time I let them. But they're very good at handling them. They're very gentle. Yeah. And I think that's also a very important thing to do. I don't think that you can really think about the history of the back unless you touch the objects. We have been talking about manuscript rolls. And we don't have a real manuscript roll. But I do have a full-sized facsimile of one of them, and just seeing how much slower it is to get to the text and how you're forced to read. You can't sort of skip around in a roll, the way that you can skip around in between the pages of a book. Physically experiencing that helps you to really internalize the differences in the physical form of the book can create for your reading experience.

JY 14:08

Yeah, just the size and the scale.

Katherine 14:11

My favorite example is a 16th century amulet roll that I've been working on. And I can't remember how long it is, but meters and meters and meters. It's huge. It takes me forever to unroll it in the library. And the whole thing has got three sentences, and they're written along the length of the rope. So if you went to read the text, you have to unroll it all the way to the end, go back again, and roll it all the way to the end again, go back and read that already. And again, go back. So with that, it's so laborious that that seems to me to be a text, which has clearly not been created for the purpose of reading. It's a text which is an object, that is doing something other than providing access to the written word. And I mean, as it's an amulet, I suspect that it's supposed to be protective regardless of whether you read it or not. So you can carry it with you. It doesn't matter whether you've read the text, but that form is kind of preventing you from accessing it as much as it's making it available.

JY 15:05

It's almost making it inaccessible to preserve its mystic quality. So I presume that you've been to libraries and archives to seek out these manuscripts for your research. But in terms of acquiring materials, for your teaching collection, can you say a bit more about the process of doing that?

Katherine 15:26

Oh, well, I was really lucky with that, actually. When I started the collection, or when I got funding to start the collection, I asked a friend of mine, Cindy Johnson, who teaches at the School of Advanced Study in London, if she could recommend any contacts who might have cheap stuff for sale, because she teaches the history of the book there. And she has a lot of contacts in the bookseller world. And she put me in touch with Lawrence Worth, who's a bookseller who ended up being so enthusiastic about the project that he just gave me a whole load of things for free. So I have a lot of amazing stuff that came from him. And then a couple of other book dealers that she put me in touch with ended up having collections of fragments, which I could buy quite cheaply. So a fragment being just an individual leaf from a manuscript or from a printed book. So I've now got quite a few manuscript leaves. Maybe 12 manuscript leaves, and maybe eight early printed fragments before,1499 and earlier. Plus two gorgeous, slightly later things that I'm obsessed with—illustrated and printed on parchment, which is very exciting.

JY 16:47

Do you have a favorite object from that teaching collection you have acquired?

Katherine 16:52

I do. Well, I have one that I fell in love with in the shop and ended up getting it put onto a separate receipt, so that I could take my time to decide whether I was going to keep it or whether I was going to get reimbursed. And in the end, I decided that I loved it so much, and I was just gonna keep it. So I got reimbursed for all the other patches. It was from that from that shopping trip, but I kept this one for myself.

JY 17:15

So it's also teaching you procurement management.

Katherine 17:20

Yeah, well, it's not a great strategy, because I wouldn't ordinarily spend my money on, you know, only printed leaves. But once I have it, I never want to give it away. So I should really buy it on the NTU money from the beginning. And then I'd be saving myself quite a lot of cash. But no, it's beautiful. It's printed. It's two leaves from a book of owls with a full page illustration and manuscripts decoration on the initials and I love it.

JY 17:46

What do you love about it?

Katherine 17:49

It's just beautiful. illustration is lovely. The printing is funny, it's got all kinds of funny and really mean words. The thing that I find funny about it is that in manuscripts, you have these illustrations in the margins that are a little kind of monsters, and sort of weird animals and things. And those are transferred over into the print. So they've printed weird animals. And I find it sort of fascinating that that element, which in manuscripts I tend to think of as being just sort of very purely decorative, that it's worth carving plates or wood carts. To print those weird animals into your printed book—I think it kind of helps to reinforce how much printing is trying to recreate what a book is supposed to look like. It's not that printed books copy manuscripts, it's just that that's how books work. And even though I know that intellectually, it really helps to see those features, which I think of as being slightly useless—and the manuscripts coming into the printed book in that way.

JY 19:00

And so I mean, that obviously brings us to the question of digitization. What do you think that is doing to the history of the book, both as a field, but also as an object of study?

Katherine 19:18

I don't think that the physical book is going anywhere, at least for a long time. For the field of medieval studies, at least, I think digitization has been a fantastic thing, because it gives you access to so many objects, which are otherwise only in one library. So you know, I can spend all my time going back to London, looking at the British Library. But when stuff is digitized,I can look at it from my office in Singapore. And then when I go to the library, I know exactly what my questions are, what pages to go to. So all of that is great. The things that you can't really do with digitization— handling objects, like I already mentioned. Sometimes the form is helpful for understanding what it is.

JY 19:59

That's the risk. Students stop going to libraries or archives.

Katherine 20:04

Yeah. And size is very hard to judge. So you know, the digital thing will give you a measurement of what this is supposed to be, but you often don't quite register it. And I find I am often surprised by how massive or tiny something it's once I finally see it in person. For things like Google Books, where it's digitizing academic texts, again, I think that's extremely useful, and I use it a lot. The risk is when they're not digitized very well. So there are particular problems with early print, where the letter forms are slightly different. And in the scans, text is kind of illegible, and therefore unsearchable, because of the way it's recognized. Every long S has become an F. Letters are being mangled in horrible ways. So that can be very frustrating.

For ebooks I'm interested in how much the ebook seems to be doing exactly the thing that the printed book was doing, coming out of the age of manuscripts. So many ebooks seemed to me to be trying to be a physical book. You can turn the pages of your ebook, and it's all trying to look as much like paper as possible. So the desire to have that consistency between what we're used to as a traditional technology and what the new technology is doing. I suspect at some point, ebooks will start doing their own thing a lot more. I mean, some of them already do. But I'm struck by how many are just trying to reproduce in a more portable form what we already have. I remember seeing an ebook— it was the most popular ebook on the iPad for years—but for children. I'm blanking on the name of it, but it's basically not a book. The text kind of falls onto the page, and there's a moving image, and there's somebody narrating the words, but the narrator starts before the words appear. So if you're a child learning to read, you're not paying attention to the text, because the narrator is already going. So I guess I also sometimes have a question about whether these things are designed as books, if we're thinking about books as containers of text. The text is there, but it's clearly not the main purpose of that particular ebook—ebook in inverted quotes.

JY 20:08

To go back to an earlier point you made. We were talking about charms, you spoke about the words that were to be spoken and the interface between the textual and the audio. And how do you frame that in terms of the rise of audiobook? And podcasting, for instance, as an emergent media category?

Katherine 23:19

I guess reading books aloud was the dominant way of getting access to literature for centuries. And I think it's only really recently that people have read alone. I mean, even if you think of like the Victorian period, people would be reading their serializations of Dickens to one another. So I think it's actually a return to a more traditional form of reading. I suspect that everybody having enough literacy and enough disposable cash to have their own books and read them privately is probably more recent than I at least have tended to assume.

JY 24:07

In spite of that, what do you think explains the resilience of the printed book as a technology?

Katherine 24:17

Speaking for myself, they can be very beautiful. Even if it is cheap, it can be nicely designed. I find them more pleasant to read personally, even if not more pleasant to lug around in my handbag, depending on how long the book is. And I find I remember better. I'll remember by what proportion of the book was being held in each hand, like I was two thirds of the way through it.

JY 24:51

And the research bears that out. Printed books are better for retention.

Katherine 24:56

Yeah. But they are more expensive to produce. So I imagined that publishers would be happier to move to ebooks if they could. I'm guessing, I don't know that. They're also nice to have around. I mean, as we look around my flat, I've got no books in it, particularly because they are in my office and it does feel kind of barren without them. Though books are also a decorative object, it's not really the primary reason that I should want books to stay around so that you can put them on bookshelves.

JY 25:31

Well, but even then, they can be conversation starters.

Katherine 25:34

They can. When I first got my Kindle, I remember reading a book that I loved on my Kindle, and suddenly being really sad that I don't have a physical copy. No one's ever going to come in and be like, "Oh, I really enjoyed that, too."

JY 25:54

So let's zoom out a bit and talk more about life as an academic. So what has it been like studying medieval literature in an institution that has s been historically focused on science, engineering and technology?

Katherine 26:11

Yeah, it's been interesting. So my department goes both ways. I guess there are some people who are very interested in the relationship between literature and science—and what literature can provide to more scientific fields. What scientific fields can learn from literature. And there are also people who completely ignore that side of things and work on aesthetics and much more literary topics. Not to imply that literature and science is not a literary topic, but more kind of single discipline topics.

I guess it sort of forces you to think a bit more maybe about what impact literature can have in the world, since much of the research is coming out of NTU is technological and Fourth Industrial Revolution. I feel like the Literature department is sometimes being asked to explain how our work fits into that. And particularly as a medievalist, that can be a difficult question, because in some ways, there's no direct relationship. If you erased every manuscript of Chaucer from existence, that would not affect the progress of artificial intelligence one bit. On the other hand, Chaucer, and many other writers, talk a lot about technology, and what we find kind of creepy about it or helpful about it— technologies that are unclear whether they're magical, or mechanical. And how people think about that, and that ambiguity. I think literature of any period thinks about how science and technology influence the day to day experience of the world. And that's not necessarily something that I would have thought of quite as much if I weren't surrounded by the scientific research that's going on here.

JY 28:55

I think it's a real opportunity, because we're in the moment where we are just grappling with the implications of technological progress: AI, social media, and yeah, election tempering. And so I think it'd be a shame if scientists wouldn't take humanists seriously. And vice versa.

Katherine 29:18

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make it sound as if all of NTU is sort of science focused and that we're just a little afterthought. There are also plenty of parts of the department that are completely non-scientific. We've got a creative writing writer in residence. So like Simon Armitage was here, which was great for me because he translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which my first years read. So we had a completely creative literary conversation. If we can understand people are talking about the world and how people are thinking about the world, then that helps us to maybe see how technology will impact the way that we perceive the world around us.

JY 30:13

So, Katherine, do you have any advice for any aspiring medievalists out there? How do you situate yourself in the field, where, frankly, funding is on the decline, as you alluded to earlier?

Katherine 30:35

In terms of funding, I guess that's also a question of relevance. So stating the relevance of a field which is historically distinct from our own time. And I think part of what you can do is to see the medieval period as one instance of a broader question about how humans think and live. So in my project, I'm looking at charms in medieval England. But there are broader questions there about how we interact with text. How do we turn to text when we're scared or sick? What kinds of strategies do people have for dealing with illness or with the danger? And those questions are not ones that have gotten away. And so the fact that I'm looking at those questions in the medieval period—if you want to understand broadly how people address those concerns, you have to understand how people have addressed them in the past, in the present, in different cultures, through different religions. And so that way, I think medieval studies becomes part of an answer to a question, which is of current concern. To any aspiring medievalists out there, I guess my main advice is just to read about medieval stuff—it's great, keep enjoying it. And then tell the funding bodies what they want to hear.

JY 32:13

Yeah, I think there's value in knowledge for the sake of it — doing something becauseyou love it.

Katherine 32:22

Yeah, and also seeing something which is so different from what we think of today. And one of the things that I always find fascinating is reading medieval texts, and kind of recognizing my own responses to situations—all things which are totally different human responses, that I would never have. It can both make you realize how very similar you are to people in the past—but then it also makes you realize how things that you think are fixed and permanent, are completely contingent upon the historical context. Various studies of race and gender in the Middle Ages, for example, show that race and gender are not black and white categories. And to see medieval literature treating them as if they are treating them very differently from the way that they get treated in popular culture today—it does remind you that these are things that we as societies kind of decide amongst ourselves—how we're going to treat these.

JY 33:37

Decentering the present.

Katherine 33:39

Yeah. Yeah, That's a much more coherent way of putting it.

JY 33:43

So speaking of decentering the present, one last question. What do you think you'd be working on in 10 years time?

Katherine 33:50

Good question. So one thing that I would really like to work on—we will see how feasible it is. We were talking about the history of the book earlier, and I am really fascinated by manuscript rolls. Because I think that all of the current academic narratives about them are kind of inadequate to explain why they're being produced. So yeah, the very kind of potted history is that you have the scroll, and then the Codex, which is the kind of book that we're familiar with now, when pages gets invented. And then that goes until you get the ebook.

But actually, you still have scrolls being produced for centuries and centuries and centuries after the Codex was invented. So I'm interested in why people choose to put their text into that form. And so I would love to do a really detailed survey of how these things were made, like the real practical details. You know, are they glued are they stitched together—all that kind of stuff. And I would also like to look at annotations on them to see how people continue to use them. So are they in a scroll form or a roll form? Are they more for display? Or are you really editing the text? Are you really using them? How are you adapting texts to fit into that kind of unusual form or a form that we think is unusual? Now maybe it wasn't as unusual? A nerdy, detailed academic study with measurements and stuff like that. I think it'd be fascinating. It's been done for the Codex. And so now you can look at the construction of a book, and you can date it and place it and say a lot about what, who it might have made for; what quality the production is. And there's really not much of that for rolls.

JY 35:49

Thank you very much for listening in today. If you enjoyed this episode of Lecture Theater, tell friends about it. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud.

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