My next academic book is a “casebook” about Owain Glyndwr. It’s shaping up to be a terrific volume, with a number of great essays and (most importantly, I think) the primary medieval and early modern sources about his life, presented in their original languages (mainly Latin, Welsh, Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Middle English) and facing-page translations.
In some ways this is a much easier project than the casebook for the Battle of Brunanburh. I have a co-editor this time (Welsh scholar John Bollard), and there are fewer languages and fewer essays to deal with. On the other hand, Brunanburh only had 53 sources, and I was only responsible for 14 of them. This time, there are (at current count) 88 sources, and I am responsible for 31 of them. Since I am also (as with the Brunanburh book) doing all the formatting and book design myself, this means I’m sorta kinda busy even when I’m not teaching and grading and what-not.
What’s been fun, though, is that many of those 31 sources I’m editing and translating are in Anglo-Norman, a language I’ve dabbled in but never had to utilize extensively. No longer! This morning, for instance, I will spend most of my time in the office translating a letter written by Hotspur to King Henry IV in November 1401.
Don’t even try to tell me my life isn’t pretty cool.