New Website Coming!

The Virtual Paul's Cross Project is in the process of developing a new website.

This website will constitute the chief form of publication for the Project.

You can follow its development if you visit the site here:

http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu

We will soon be taking down the old website, but this blog will remain as a source of news about our progress.

When you visit, if you will help us with editing.

Please email us with comments about anything that needs improvement, either the form and functionality of the site or the contents of the site, we will be most grateful.

I am confident this site will be a work in progress for some time to come, but our goal is to have a fully functional, complete presentation of the project by the middle of December, 2012.

A link to Reality -- St Paul's Links to the Virtual Paul's Cross Project

The good folks at St Paul's Cathedral have made a link from their website to ours, in a kind and generous gesture connecting the cathedral's present to our simulation of its past.

The cathedral's website is here, and their link to our project is here.

The Cathedral describes us as "an exciting development in reconstructing the medieval Paul's Cross and the north-east Churchyard" and notes that the VPCP "reconstructs a sermon of 1622 in the speech of the time, with crowd noises."

Many thanks to the St Paul's staff for recognizing our work, and to our colleague John Schofield for helping to make this possible. 

October 14, 2012 -- Latest Image of the Model of St Paul's

We are developing a new website for publication of the /virtual Paul's Cross Project.

Above is the latest version of our model of St Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard.

A day in early November is likely to be a cloudy, chilly day in London.

The sun at noon was only 20 degrees above the horizon (sharp-eyed folks will note that we are still working on getting the angle of sunlight correct in this image). 

There is only about a 15"% chance it was sunny, and the temperature between 10:00 am and noon ranged (on average) between 43 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a high probability of rain.

Because of the chill, the chimneys in the buildings surrounding Paul's Churchyard would most likely have fires in their fireplaces, hence the smoke in this image.  

Students of Donne's sermons know that Donne's sermon for November 5th, 1622 was not delivered at Paul's Cross -- although it is a 2-hour sermon -- but in the cathedral, "because of the weather."

So presumably it was rainy, in fact as well as in probability.

We have chosen this sermon to place at the center of the Virtual Paul's Cross Project because it survives in a manuscript prepared within days of the actual delivery of the sermon, and exhibits corrections in Donne's own handwriting.

It is therefore the closest of all texts of Donne's sermons to what he actually said from the pulpit. 

We have also chosen it because it wasn't actually preached at Paul's Cross, although it should have been.

Part of the point here is that this project is about creating a way of identifying and assessing our assumptions about early modern preaching. It is not about time travel.

We are not recreating an event that happened, but imagining as fully as possible what this event would have been like had it acutally occurred.

Another way of putting it is to say that Donne's sermon for Gunpowder Day in 1622 is here being heard in Paul's Churchyard after a delay of 390 years. 

Fly Around Paul's Churchyard

Click HERE or on the gateway above to view a Video of our Model of Paul's Churchyard.

Conference on Paul's Cross at St Paul's Cathedral

The St Paul's Institute at St Paul's Cathedral in London will host a conference on Paul's Cross on the afternoon of  September 25th, 2012,beginning at 3 pm in the Wren Suite,  a conference room located in the crypt of the Cathedral.

The conference addresses, broadly, the democratic heritage of England and consists of two sessions.

The one in the afternoon focuses especially on Paul's Cross and is entitled St Paul's Cross: Preachers, People, and Power. It will use historical scholarship, we are told, "to inform public discussion of the obligations and responsibilities of interpreting this democratically resonant part of London."

This seminar features two members of our Advisory Committee, Peter McCullough and Mary Morrissey, who will be joined for the occasion by Dr David Colclough, Lecturer in the Department of English and Theatre Studies at Queen Mary University, in  London.

You can find more information on this seminar here.

The evening session begins at 6:30  pm, and is entitled Models for Social Change: New Debate and Democracy. It will " cover themes of direct democracy, technology and its impact on social campaigning, and the way in which we can help promote and facilitate public discourse that explores the meaning of the common good."

This seminar features among its speakers Neil Jameson, Chief Executive of Citizens UK and Lead Organiser for London Citizens; Dr Sara Hagemann,  Lecturer in EU Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science; Ludovica Rogers - Facilitator of General Assemblies and part of the Occupy London media group; and Dr Dan Plesch - Director, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (SOAS) and Co-Founder of Our Democratic Heritage.

There is more information on this seminar here. 

Admission is free, but advance registration is required to attend. You can register by contacting the St Paul's Institute by email at institute@stpaulscathedral.org.uk or by phone (from England) on 020 7489 1011.

Arnold Hunt Joins Advisory Committee

 

I am happy to announce that Arnold Hunt, the distinguished scholar and author of The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640, has agreed to join the Advisory Committee for the Virtual Paul's Cross Project. 

Arnold is also Curator of Historical Manuscripts at the British Library and a member of the editorial board for the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. 

His scholarly background and special expertise in the matter of the relationship between preachers and their congregations in the early modern period will be invaluable for this project. 

I am deeply grateful to him for agreeing to join our merry band. 

Wall Delivers Paper at Paul's Cross Conference

I delivered a presentation entitled "Virtual Paul's Cross: The Experience of Public Preaching at Paul‘s Cross in the Post-Reformation Period" at the Paul's Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640, held in Montreal August 16 - 19, 2012.

I discussed the nature of digital modeling as a research tool, making two points. The first was that digital modeling projects are not exercises in time travel but opportunities to bring together diverse forms of historical documentation and to experience -- and thus to be able to assess -- the appropriateness of our conceptual models.

I also pointed out that neither are digital models castles built in the air, that our models of St Paul's Cathedral and of Pal's Cross and Paul's Churchyard are grounded in specific data provided by careful measurement of the cathedral by Christopher Wren and of the cathedral's foundations by John Schofield and of the Cross's foundations by F C Penrose.

Time on the occasion precluded my saying some of the following, but what I would have said in a more expanded format is worth including here.

Digital models do include typical or representative structures along with specific structures like the cathedral and the Cross for which detailed images come to us through the historic record and for which precise measurements enable us to re-envision them with a high degree of accuracy.

Other aspects of the model are more approximate, although every effort has been made to ground them in hard data. The houses of the book dealers around Paul's Churchyard, for example, are located and scaled according to evidence collected from the survey of building foundations made after the great fire.

No images of these buildings survive, however, so the images one sees in the model are drawn from similar contemporary structures, from surviving mixed-use or domestic buildings found either in cathedral towns or urban areas of England.

So, although it is appropriate to say that our knowledge of the appearance of these structures is limited and approximate, it is not appropriate to say that we know nothing about them.

Our construction of this model has given us the opportunity to assess the quality of the visual evidence for the appearance of these structures. We have, as noted elsewhere, been able to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of the Gipkin painting, our chief source of information about the appearance and function of Paul's Cross.

Our model of St Paul's and Paul's Churchyard enables us to explore the experience of John Donne's sermon for Gunpowder Day 1622, a sermon that was intended for delivery at Paul's Cross on the first Tuesday in November of 1622 but "because of the weather" was actually delivered inside the cathedral.

So we are not recreating an event that took place in the past but creating an event as it might have happened so that we can experience it unfolding in real time, with some regard for the experience of ambient noise -- of, for example, the birds, horses, and dogs included in the Gipklin painting.

Using this sermon also allows us to use the manuscript version of this sermon, which survives in a scribal copy done only days after the original performance, with corrections to the manuscript in Donne's own handwriting, as close a version to the actual words spoken by Donne as we have for any of Donne's sermon.

This has enabled us to explore several issues relevant to the experience of the Paul's Cross sermon.

In my talk, I addressed two of these, audibility of the sermon given possible variations in crowd sizes and the location of the auditor, and questions of preaching as an address by a speaker to a generally passive audience or as a collaborative and interactive performance, in effect, a conversation for which the surviving text of these sermons represented only one side of the conversation.

In the case of audibility, I played three versions of the sermon's opening, the first assuming a crowd of about 350, a crowd size generally in accord with the crowd depicted in the Gipkin painting, with the auditor (see red dot below) about 30 feet from the preacher.

You can hear that recording here.

The second file assumed a crowd of about 2500, and the listener is about 50 feet from the speaker.

You can hear that recording here.         

The third file assumes a crowd of about 5000 and the listener is about 100 feet from the speaker.

You can hear that recording here.

The sound of the speaker's voice here is approaching inaudibility, suggesting that Donne is right in a sermon from the late 1620'sthat some people in attendance at his sermons had trouble hearing him.

Several people have commented on the pace of speaking that Ben Crystal used in making this recording. Ben told me he adopted this pace specifically with concern for audibility. I think this last recording suggests the value of his doing so. On the other hand, this also suggests that a preacher at Paul's Cross might have adjusted his style of delivery to the size of the congregation.

In regard to the second question, the matter of the sermon as conversation, I acknowledged the challenge of recovering the congregation's side of this conversation, but suggested that congregational response was sometimes scripted, as in in its participation in the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the sermon.

You can hear that recording here.

Other times it can be inferred from the way the preacher structures his presentation, seeming to invite certain kinds of response.

For example, when the speaker is especially emotive, a quality contemporaries of Donne include in their accounts of his preaching.  You can hear a sample of that kind of interaction here.

Or when the speaker is being witty, as in the opening of the sermon when Donne plays around with the question of whether or not the Prophet Jeremiah wrote the Book of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, here. 

You will also notice the inclusion here of traces of the ambient noises of the birds, horses, and dogs shown in the Gipkin painting.

All these audio files are from Ben Crystal's realization of Donne's Gunpowder Day sermon for November 5th, 1622 with random ambient noise and hypothetical congregational responses.

New Video of the Model of Paul's Churchyard

Our model builder Josh Stephens has created a video of the new version of his model of Paul's Churchyard.

You can see it here:

Enjoy!

New Images of the St Paul's Model

Josh Stephens, our master modeler, has produced new images of St. Paul's and the Churchyard.

These are part of our experiments with the color of the cathedral.

 
The Gipkin painting shows the cathedral looking as though it has just had a new coat of yellow paint.

The actual stones from the building, on display outside St. Paul's Cathedral Library, are in a grey-to-whitish-grey color, at least some of which, according to John Schofield, is the remains of smoke from the Great Fire.

I continue to be impressed with Josh's skill with Google SketchUp.

Overall, and in detail, this is stunning work. Your preferences for the color of the cathedral are welcomed.

 More later!

Wall Delivers Paper at the John Donne Conference

I delivered a paper entitled "Hearing Donne: The Experience of Donne‘s Preaching at Paul‘s Cross" at the annual Conference of the John Donne Society, held in Leiden June 26th - 29th, 2012.

I discussed my understanding of the Paul's Cross sermon as a collaborative and interactive performance.

I suggested that the Paul's Cross sermon was a conversation, and that the text of these sermons represented only one side of the conversation.

I acknowledged the challenge of recovering the congregation's side of this conversation, but suggested that congregational response was sometimes scripted, as in in its participation in the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the sermon.

Other times it can be inferred from the way the preacher structures his presentation, seeming to invite certain kinds of response.

As part of this presentation, I played five audio clips combining Ben Crystal's realization of Donne's Gunpowder Day sermon for November 5th, 1622 with hypothetical congregational responses.

Updated: John Donne Returns to St Paul's

There is a new statue of Donne, which is located on the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral, on the southeast corner, between the east end of the building and the street that is called, at that point, St Paul's Churchyard, according to Google Maps, but which is also known in that area of London as Ludgate Hill and Cannon Street.

The statue was erected this year, according to a sign on the statue.

UPDATE: There is a detailed account on the website of St Paul's, HERE, including a fine image of our Advisory Board member Peter McCullough who assisted at the unveiling of the statue on 15 June 2012.

According to this account, the statue was commissioned by the City of London, under the leadership of Alderman Robert Hall, the sculptor was Nigel Boonham FRBS, and the stone carver responsible for the elegant lettering was Andrew Whittle.

The inscription on the plinth says, "John Donne/poet and divine/1572-1631."  At the base of the statue is a quote from Donne's "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward": Hence is't, that I am carried towards the West,
This day, when my Soul's form bends to the East.

The base has pointers toward the 4 cardinal directions, and the inscriptions note important events in Donne's career --  (for east) "birthplace/Bread Street,"  (for south) married/Anne More of Losely," (for west) reader/Lincoln's Inn, and (for north), "dean/St Paul's Cathedral."

The statue itself seems to be modeled on the portrait of Donne as Dean that hangs today in the library of the Deanery at St Paul's. Always good to be reminded of Donne's connections to St Paul's.

London, 2012 -- Revisiting Paul's Cross

I made this photograph on my way to meetings at St Paul's to discuss Stage Two of the Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project.

It was possible, just for a moment, to see at one time Josh Stephens' model of Paul's Churchyard in 1622 and this stark reminder of the reality we are trying to recover.

Powerful . . . . .

Paul's Cross Project on Television

Go HERE to see a local TV station's story on NC State's Hunt Library.

The spokesperson for the Library is Maurice York, with whom we are working for the installation of the Virtual Paul's Cross Project as part of the opening of this library early next year.

If you bear with him for about a minute and a half, he discusses our project.

You know you are getting close when he starts talking about the Navy's installation of a ship simulator in the other multi-media lab, the one we are not using.

The First Sounds of Paul's Churchyard

You are sitting on a bench about 20 feet in front of the Paul's Cross Preaching Station, surrounded by a crowd of about 500 people.

The date is November 5th, 1622, at 10:00 in the morning. The crowd has gathered. The preacher has processed to the Cross and taken his place in the pulpit. The cathedral clock has struck ten.

Click HERE.

This recording starts at the beginning of the sermon and runs through the opening prayer, concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

Feel free to join in.

Wall Delivers Paper at SDH-SEMI Meeting

I delivered a paper on the Virtual Paul's Cross Project on May 28, 2012, at the annual meeting of Canada's Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs.

This meeting was held as part of Canada's annual CONGRESS for the Social Sciences and Humanities, held this year in Waterloo, Canada.

My paper was entitled  "The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: Documenting the Experience of Public Preaching at Paul’s Cross, London, in the Post-Reformation Period." 

I discussed the challenges of recreating the experience of the Paul's Cross sermon, including the complexities of interpreting primary evidence, of understanding relative degrees of approximation, and of holding in tension past and present models of interpretation. 

The highlight of the event for me was the chance to play our first effort at recreating performance in the acoustic space of Paul's Churchyard. 

Damian Murphy Joins Advisory Board

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Damian Murphy, Lecturer in Acoustics at the University of York, has accepted an appointment to the Advisory Committee for the Virtual Paul's Cross Project.

Damian's research is focused on physical modelling, spatial sound, and virtual environment modeling. You can learn more about him and his work here (his professional web site) and here (his site at the University of York).

Damian's role will be to advise us on best practices as we move forward on the Virtual Paul's Cross Project and also as we prepare to apply for funding for the Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project.

He has experience in modeling large gothic buildings with unfortunate histories, having been involved in a project to recreate the acoustic properties of Coventry Cathedral.

You can find links to some of his work on this project here.

John Schofield's St. Paul's Before Wren is Celebrated in the Press

 
John Schofield's St Paul's Before Wren, the book which provides -- literally -- the foundations for the Virtual Paul's Cross Project -- is beginning to get very positive notice in the press.

The website of St. Paul's Cathedral happily organizes this response for us, here:

http://www.stpauls.co.uk/News-Press/Latest-News/Archaeological-account-of-St-Pauls-well-received-by-critics

Congratulations to John!

Linguistics Students Record Ambient Sound

Professors Walt Wolfram, Robin Dodsworth, Jeff Mielke, and a host of outstanding graduate students in NC State's Linguistics Program gathered yesterday in Raleigh's PostPro Recording Studio to record ambient noise for the crowd that will fill Paul's Churchyard and respond to Ben Crystal's delivery of Donne's Gunpowder Day Sermon from 1622.

The group used David Crystal's early modern London pronunciation script to record the response "And with thy Spirit" to Ben's "The Lord be with you."

They also recorded the Lord's Prayer, following along with Ben's rendition, and a resounding "Amen" to conclude the sermon.

Finally, they recorded "walla," ambient crowd sounds of indistinguishable syllables to represent crowd response to Ben's/Donne's preaching.

Students participating in this recording included Arika Dean, Jason McLarty, Hayley Heaton, Charles Farrington, Channing Johnson,  Michael Fox, Jon Forrest, Katey McDonald, Caroline Myrick, Christi Schwaller, and Liang Zhang (who took the photo, above).

I am deeply grateful to all these folks for their enthusiastic participation. 

 We are getting close to having all the pieces in place so that Ben Markham and his colleagues at Acentech can work their acoustic magic.

Wall Delivers Paper at Anglican Studies Conference

I delivered a paper entitled "The Early Modern Sermon as a Collaborative Experience: The Case of John Donne at Paul's Cross," at the annual meeting of the New England Anglican Studies Conference, held at Harvard Divinity School on April 20-21, 2012.

This paper was, of course, based on what I have learned about early modern preaching while working on the Virtual Paul's Cross Project.

The Feast of John Donne -- March 31, 2012

March 31 is the Feast of John Donne on the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts.

This image of Donne is of a painting in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, made by an unknown artist about 1620. There is another version of this portrait, generally regarded as a copy of the one in the V&A,  that hangs in the Library of the Deanery of St. Paul's Cathedral.

This is the Collect for John Donne's Day in the Episcopal Church's Calendar:

ALMIGHTY God, who in this wondrous world dost manifest thy power and beauty: Open the eyes of all men to see, as did thy servant John Donne, that whatsoever has any being is a mirror wherein we may behold thee, the root and fountain of all being; through Jesus Christ, thy Son our Lord. Amen.

Rendered Images from Josh Stephens' Draft Model

Josh has rendered some images from his draft model of Paul's Churchyard, which means adding shadows, figures, and the like. The results are stunning.

Here is the Cross with the Cathedral in the background.

Here is the Churchyard as seen through the gateway on the northeast corner.

And the Churchyard with the east end of the Cathedral.

Here is the Crossing and the North Transept.

If you look closely at the figures, you will see that they are in modern dress, so what we see here is how Paul's Churchyard would look today if the Great Fire had not happened and the Cathedral had been restored after the Restoration without Christopher Wren's baroque revisions.

Enjoy!

Complete DRAFT Model -- Paul's Churchyard, March 2012

Josh Stephens, our Sketch-Up expert, has completed a First Draft Model of St. Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard.

This model, lovely to look at though it may be, is a DRAFT model.

John Schofield is reviewing the model to compare it to his findings as reported in his St. Paul's Before Wren (English Heritage, 2011). Josh will be making revisions to the model in light of John's comments later this summer.

Right now, Josh is at work converting this model into the model to be used by Ben Markham and his colleagues at Acentech, in Cambridge, MA, to recreate the acoustic properties of Paul's Churchyard.

This model will be much less detailed. It will only show the surfaces that are acoustically significant, but it will include information about their absorptive and reflective properties.

In the meantime, the model is worth contemplating, since it shows St. Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard -- approximately -- all together for the first time since the day before the Great Fire of London.

Congratulations to Josh for his fine work. Enjoy!

Recording John Donne -- Anechoic Chamber, Salford, England, 9 March 2012

This photograph shows Ben Crystal and John Wall standing inside the anechoic chamber at the University of Salford, near Manchester, in England, yesterday, during a break in recording.

Ben spent 7 hours yesterday inside this special studio recording Donne's Gunpowder Day Sermon for November 5th, 1622. 

The recording is done; we will soon have the master recording for Ben Markham and his acoustic engineering colleagues at Acentech in Cambridge, MA.

Ben Crystal worked tirelessly under very difficult recording circumstances. He had no acoustic feedback for his performance. He was standing on a wire floor that was acoustically transparent but also springy, like a trampoline. He was working with 3 different microphones.

Ben performed Donne's semon with the goal of making his performance powerful and moving in its own right, and also congruent with contemporary accounts of Donne's preaching.

I think the results are brilliant. We have reached a major milestone in the course of this project.

My thanks to Ben for his generosity with his time, talent, and energy, and to Danny McCaul who runs the Acoustic Facilities at Salford, and especially to recording engineer James Massaglia, who handled the actual recording of Ben's performance.

James also took the photos above of Ben and me and of Ben in recording pose in the anechoic chamber. 

Thanks, James, for helping us document the progress of the Virtual Paul's Cross Project.

John Donne in Manchester, March 8th, 2012

I am in Manchester for Ben Crystal's recording of Donne's Gunpowder Day sermon for November 5th, 1622.

I know that John Donne is here with us.

Yesterday, at the airport, when we were picking up luggage from the luggage carousel, I saw a bag go by on the conveyer belt with a wide red strap around it.

On the strap, in large white letters, was the name "John Dunne."

Suddenly, a hand reached out from the crowd and picked up the bag. The crowd closed around me again before I had a chance to see who had picked it up.

Nevertheless, a good omen, I think, for our work here.

Latest Images of the Virtual Paul's Churchyard

Josh Stephens, our virtual cathedral contractor, has provided new images of the current state of his model. The image above shows the Choir and north transept of St. Paul's, the Paul's Cross Preaching Station, and the beginning of the commercial/residential buildings to the north of Paul's Churchyard.

These buildings were, of course, the home of the English book trade in the early 17th century.

And here is an overhead view.

Josh has also begun to work on the interior of St. Paul's in anticipation of our application for funding to recreate the experience of worship in the Choir. Here is his current version of a model of the Choir.

This image shows the Choir area without the Choir Screen or the stalls or the side walls, or the other furnishings familiar to us from Hollar's engraving.

So there is still much more to do on this model, but we have definitely come a long way in the Cathedral's  reconstruction.

John Donne at the University of Salford

Ben Crystal will be recording John Donne's Gunpowder Day Sermon for November 5th, 1622, in the Anechoic Chamber of the University of Salford, near Manchester, in early March.

An anechoic chamber is a room without echo, a room without reflections from the walls, floor or ceiling.
This means that the room adds no acoustic properties of its own to a recording made there.

As a result, when the sound of Ben's voice is heard in the virtual acoustic environment of Paul's Churchyard, it will sound as though it were being heard in that space, not in the space of the recording studio at the University of Salford.

The sermon Donne preached on November 5th, 1622, was, as we know, intended for delivery at Paul's Cross but was actually delivered in the Choir of St Paul's Cathedral "because of the weather."

So when Ben's voice realizes for us the words of Donne's sermon through our acoustic model of Paul's Cross, those words will be heard in the space where Donne intended to speak them, 400 years ago.

Plans for Roll-Out at the James B. Hunt Library

We have agreed with Susan Nutter and the administration of the Libraries at NC State for the Virtual Paul's Cross Project to be featured at the opening of our new James B. Hunt Library (see above) in January 2013.

This library will have state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment. We have been promised use of one room which will enable us to do a surround-sound and 360 degree visual presentation of our Virtual Paul's Cross and Donne's Gunpowder Plot sermon.

Here is an image of yours truly and David Hill, as we toured the building under construction last week to look at the space we will be using.

Clearly, we were not made to be construction workers.

3-D Model of Paul's Cross by Josh Stephens

Josh Stephens, our model-building expert, has developed a preliminary 3-D model of Paul's Cross and printed it out on a 3-D printer.

I must admit it is exciting to hold this model in my hands and be able to see it from all sides. 

Josh has based this model on two sources.

One is the set of specifications developed by Frances Penrose during archaelolgocal excavations of Paul's Cross in the late 19th century, published in Archaeologica in 1883 under the title, "On the Recent Discoveries of Portions of Old St Paul's Cathedral."

Penrose determined that Paul's Cross had an octagonal stone base that was 37 feet across, and that the pulpit structure itself was 17 feet across.

The second is of course Gipkin's painting.

Here, as in other questions about the overall model of Paul's Churchyard, we have discovered that Gipkin had a different sense of perspective than we do.

The figure Josh has placed in the image for the purposes of scale is (in scale) 5' 8" inches high, an average height for a man in the 17th century.

Is this how you imagined Paul's Cross to look? Comments are welcomed.