Dear All

 

May I take the opportunity of the beginning of a new year to bring you up to date with TASC, the project for building inventories of religious devotion at the local level.

 

The major event of the past year was that the 30,000 or so records (each dealing with a single locale) so far available from the Trans-national Database and Atlas of Saints’ Cults have been acquired by the UK Data Service (acting on behalf also of its other European sister data-banks). This is important for the security and maintenance of the datasets, as well as providing a back-up for the on-line availability of the records from the TASC web-pages (which are generously maintained by the University of Leicester): http://www.le.ac.uk/elh/grj1/tasc.html

 

New initiatives have sprung up and associations formed in places as far apart as Mexico and Georgia (the latter assisted by a large financial grant from the British Academy, for which we are most grateful), but also including France and Italy.

 

There will be a colloquium this year at St John’s College, Oxford (July 1-3) devoted to dedication datasets. It would be very good to hear from anyone on the Med-Rel list (and please pass on the invitation to on-list-members) who has a list of religious dedications which they would be willing to share with TASC, whether relating to a single locality or a whole region. To remind you, we are interested in the dedications and naming of churches, chapels, altars, images, lights, and so on, feast- and fair-days, and landscape features such wells and mountains. We are concerned with cults divine, saintly and angelic, and the project is multi-confessional and multi-period, coming right up to the present day. This is not a project concerned solely with Catholic western Europe in the Middle Ages!

 

Best wishes

 

Graham