Web 2.0 and the Promotion of Medieval Manuscript Studies

By Giulio Menna

Giulio is an intern on the ‘Turning Over a New Leaf’ project, and a current student on the Book and Digital Media Studies MA program at the University of Leiden

Some weeks ago I decided to write my last paper for my Masters program on “Medieval Manuscripts and Social Media”, investigating whether the use of Web 2.0 could help raise interest in the subject.

I was in need of data regarding interest in medieval manuscripts, so I used Google Insights for Search, a service that allows comparison of search volume patterns for any keyword.  I inserted the keywords “Manuscripts” and, then, “Medieval Manuscripts”. The results were demoralizing: since 2004 (that’s as far as Goggle Insights can go back in time) the interest in “Manuscripts” and “Medieval Manuscripts” has been going down. Constantly. And the forecast is not optimistic at all.

Result for keyword “Manuscripts” on Google Insights for Search

Result for keywords “Medieval Manuscripts” on Google Insights for Search

I was disappointed:  “Why?! Manuscripts are beautiful! Everyone should love manuscripts!” was the most common thought in my mind while I was contemplating the results. Then I realized something: until nine months ago I knew nothing about manuscripts. Or better: I knew they existed, I knew they were written “somewhere, sometime, somehow, and for some reason”, but I had no idea of the different scripts, the different type of parchment, etc. It wasn’t until I met good lecturers that were capable of transmitting to me passion and interest in the subject that I started to become addicted to parchment and ink.

“How can we invert the trend shown by Google Insights?” was the question that came to my mind. “How can we spark some interest in such a specific subject in people?”

A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. This is what Steve Jobs stated in 1998 during an interview with the magazine BusinessWeek. If we accept Jobs’ statement as true, then we have to show people manuscripts.

But, how? Clearly, walking around knocking at doors showing a twelfth-century Gothic manuscript rambling on about how “cool” it looks won’t work (besides, curators of special collections would faint at the idea of a manuscript leaving the safe walls of the library!).

It’s the age of the internet: Facebook has half a billion users; YouTube is visited by millions of people daily. Why not attempt to speak the visual and audiovisual language of the web, rather than that of 300-page long books?  The objective should not only be the creation of an army of new scholars that thrives on Caroline or Gothic script.  It should be one of raising awareness about beautiful artifacts that preserved culture during the Middle Ages, among the greater public.

I’d like to take, for example, the Lux in Arcana exhibition in Rome: the video on YouTube alone collected a total of 290,550 views since the 23^rd of November 2011; a Twitter account, a Facebook Page and an official website helped in reaching an even wider audience than those physically able to visit the exhibition. Without these the exhibition would not be as successful as it is today. Web 2.0 was used and a spark of interest in manuscripts was generated. Wonderful! But there are issues with such an approach: setting up a website and all the social media pages, then keeping good care of them, takes time, some expertise and money. Three elements that are not always readily available. However it would be an investment that would, eventually, make returns in terms of audience and interest.

[Jenny Weston's reaction to the Lux in Arcana video is blogged about here]

Clicking a Link or Taking a Train: Archives in Question

by Jenny Weston

Two weeks ago, the project team was thrilled to hear that Leiden University will offer a month-long trial subscription to the Parker Library on the Web. For one (glorious) month, we have been granted full access to the renowned website, where we can easily browse through hundreds of manuscripts from the Corpus Christi Collection at Cambridge, complete with descriptions, transcriptions, and, best of all, high-quality images with the famous “zoom-in” option.

Parker Library on the Web Homepage

This website is a particularly spectacular example of a digitized manuscript collection, and it has given me cause to think about the future of manuscript research. With the advent of these specialized online databases, will we eventually phase out the practice of “traditional” archive research? That is to say, physically going to the archive and working with manuscripts “in the flesh”?

Indeed, the benefits of working with manuscripts online are significant. Such websites allow researchers who cannot travel to the archives a chance to see the books. Also in some cases, manuscripts are too damaged or delicate, and a digital copy may be the only way to work safely with the book. Digital databases also allow you to spend as much time as you like examining a manuscript, as opposed to working under the pressure of an archive’s (often limited) opening hours. This frees you up to focus on the details, follow curious abnormalities in the layout, or transcribe passages of interest. It is also possible to sip a cup of tea while browsing through the manuscript without the threat of catastrophe…(an important consideration).

With this in mind, why would anyone choose to work in an archive when they can work with online manuscript images from the comforts of their own living room?

I had to really think about this one. Why do I still believe it is important, when possible, to see the manuscript in person? Perhaps it is the feeling you get when you open up the cover of an 800-year old book. You can immediately sense the history and life of the book. You can feel the weight of the parchment, take in its musty (yet somehow delightful) scent, and read through it as it was originally intended, carefully lifting each folio, while taking into account the centuries of grease and grime left behind by readers who once held the same book in their own hands. It is the inspiration and connection to the books that you feel while in the presence of such remarkably old manuscripts, and I believe it is this feeling that often makes medieval research so wonderful and compelling.

Seminary Library at Rolduc Abbey

So while the digitization of manuscripts opens the door to new and exciting methods of manuscript research, I only hope that we do not accidentally close the door on archival research as well. While the archives may not be as comfortable as your living room, and the dust may send you into a sneezing frenzy, they continue to be special places of inspiration and discovery.

From Medieval to Millennial in One Week

By Julie Somers

During a very rainy week in April, I was lucky enough to participate in a training workshop on Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age. MMSDA is sponsored by The Institute of English Studies, funded jointly by COST and the AHRC, and run in collaboration with King’s College London, the Warburg Institute, and the University of Cambridge. The experience was amazing, inspiring and exhausting. In one week we covered everything from manuscript production to digital representation.

Guided by Peter Stokes, the program began in Cambridge where for two days we were welcomed into the libraries at Corpus Christi College, Trinity College and St. John’s College. Specialists Andrea Worm, Charles Burnett and Hanna Vorholt, among other amazing librarians, showed us a number of remarkable manuscripts from the library collections, such as the Bury Bible, connecting the morning lectures on palaeography and codicology to the physical object.

Please note that all photos of the Bury Bible are Copyright of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

As we moved from Cambridge to London, our topic focus also changed from the archeology of the book to the planning of digital projects. Simon Tanner led an evening lecture on the importance of communication and collaboration between all participants in a project so that digital access to manuscripts can lead to new and efficient research.

In London, we began at the Warburg Institute where Elena Pierazzo and Agostino Paravicini discussed the principles and practices of transcribing and editing manuscripts which led nicely into the next few days of text encoding with TEI and XML held at King’s College London. Since our training consisted of 20 scholars, we had to break into two groups and choose either a visit to the Wellcome Library or Lambeth Palace Library. It was a tough decision, but I chose the Lambeth Library and after a very soggy journey there, we were welcomed by Michelle Brown and a beautiful 9^th century gospel book.

As the week came to a close, we spent a lot of time learning the basics of text encoding for medieval manuscripts with Raffaele Viglianti, and how we can apply these techniques to our own PhD research. We came across problems such as how to encode decorations and glosses and tried to solve them by using a new tool called T-Pen. The types of questions we all had illustrated our various interests and really added to the learning experience.

The training ended with a great presentation by Tim Bolton of Sotheby’s, whose enthusiasm for his work is infectious. His main focus was on provenance, bringing us back full circle to the beginning of the week.

Often, the moments where we had to find our way across London and on to the next library felt like the “Amazing Race”, but it was worth every minute. It was a week filled with medieval manuscripts, beautiful libraries and most importantly, new friends.

The first medieval poster?

By Irene O’Daly

Last week I was doing some work on life in the medieval classroom and I came across an account in a letter of Gerbert of Rheims (later Pope Sylvester II) of a teaching-aid he had designed for his students.  In a letter to Bernard, a monk of Aurillac, written in early 987, Gerbert describes a schematic diagram (no longer extant) he had created to help his students learn the different parts of rhetoric:

Quorum ob amorem etiam exacto autumno quandam figuram edidi artis rethoricae, dispositam in VI et XX membranis sibi invicem conexis et concatenatis in modum antelongioris numeri, qui fit ex bis XIII.  Opus sane expertibus mirabile, studiosis utile, ad res rethorum fugaces et caliginosissimas comprehendendas atque in animo collocandas. [Gerbert d'Aurillac, Correspondance: Lettres 1 à 220 (avec 5 annexes), ed. and trans. P. Riché et J.-P. Callu (Paris, 2008), p. 220]

‘Last autumn, out of love for them [his students] I made a diagram of the art of rhetoric on twenty-six skins connected together, binding along the long measure, which makes thirteen of two. This is an excellent tool for the ignorant, and useful also for the intelligent students who wish to understand the subtle and obscure parts of rhetoric and place them in their mind.’

Twelfth-Century Personification of Rhetoric, Royal Portal, Chartres Cathedral

This account got me thinking about what such a device might have looked like.  Darlington’s 1947 translation of the passage implies that the act of sewing the parchment leaves together would have resulted in a columnar diagrammatic arrangement: the leaves ‘forming in all two columns side by side each of thirteen leaves’ [O.G. Darlington, 'Gerbert the Teacher', American Historical Review, 52 (1947), p. 472].  Riché and Callu’s note on the letter suggest that Gerbert might be referring to a roll (op. cit. p. 221).

It is evident from the account that Gerbert is referring to a sizable device.  Even if we cannot assume that membrana refers to a full skin of an animal, the act of binding more than one together suggests that Gerbert needed large sheets for his diagrammatic scheme.  Must we necessarily assume, then, that Gerbert joined the sheets along the top, as well as along the long side, to make a roll? What if he is implying that he made thirteen separate sheets (of two skins each)?  While there is no direct correspondence between the number of parts of rhetoric (five) and the number of sheets that resulted from his binding (thirteen), there is also no reason to assume that the sheets were necessarily bound to create two continuous columns.  A roll may have had the physical advantage within the medieval classroom of being able to put away without taking up too much space, but we could also speculate that Gerbert was inventing the ‘classroom poster’ – thirteen separate sheets that could be displayed individually, and perhaps looked at by multiple students at once.

The creation of a ‘teaching-aid’ for display purposes could be consistent with Gerbert’s ‘hands-on’ approach in other areas of the curriculum – for example, he introduced abaci for the study of mathematics in the school at Rheims, and used a version of the armillary sphere for the teaching of astronomy.  Evidence of the controversy between Gerbert and Otric the German over the divisions of philosophy (recounted in Richer of Rheims’ Historiae III.55-6) also refers to a schematic diagram that was presented (and corrected by Gerbert) at the court of Otto III.

While we cannot recreate Gerbert’s diagram with any surety, looking again at the Latin text of the letter, and attempting to visualise what Gerbert might have meant proved a useful exercise in my endeavour to imagine the medieval classroom.

First They Kiss and Then They Bite: How Letters in Love Make History

By Erik Kwakkel

If you don’t know when something precisely happened, can you still call it a historical event? What is the historian to do with information from a source that is not dated? What if it mentions how an official was murdered, that he fell by the knife, and that his killer was a student? Details abound, but dateless the event is largely meaningless. Historical information floating in time remains ordinary: a murder is a murder, nothing more.

For the disciplines that study the Middle Ages such undated sources are common. From circa 1500, at the close of the period, we have the luxury of knowing precisely when a source was produced. At that point in time, after all, such information was placed on the first – title – page of the book. How unlucky we medievalists are. We depend on thousands of handwritten sources that were made before the invention of the title page and which are, consequently, by and large undated. How are we to write the history of an age with so much “floating” information? This complex query has a seemingly simple answer: by learning how to date.

In order to so, paleographers like myself study the shape of letters. There is something magical about handwritten letters that makes them irresistible to me. A medieval scribe who wrote information on parchment did so, like we do today, in his own, individual manner. When we receive a letter from a loved one we intuitively recognize his or her handwriting merely by glancing at it. The process takes a split-second and may occur from as much as a meter away. It shows that each individual embeds, subconsciously, personal traits into the letters that flow out of his or her pen. Beholders somehow pick up on these “signals” frozen in the shape of letters. A sentence written on parchment becomes a skyline that might be recognized from afar – because we have visited the city before. An experienced paleographer looking at medieval manuscripts thus recognizes a scribal hand: “Zap!” it goes in his head.

Another “Zap!” moment arrives when the paleographer activates the part of his brain that intuitively tells him how old a specimen of writing is. Curiously, in this case it is not the individual traits that are important, but the generic ones. While handwriting with only unique characteristics is hard to date, one that conforms to contemporary trends is easier to place in time. Instinct and experience are crucial in this process: the experienced eye of the paleographer recognizes the script of an individual as exponent of a style of writing that is particular for a certain period – or geographical location, but that is another story. With such verdicts as “early thirteenth century” or “middle of the fourteenth century” information is secured in time.

One of the most significant challenges for the discipline of paleography is to transform these intuitive verdicts into assessments that are objective and substantiated with quantifiable data. The physical shape of the letter is still the point of departure but it is given a different role to play. In my own work two processes are important in this respect: to describe the shape of a letter (or even an individual stroke) as precisely as possible; and subsequently measuring how the shape evolved over time. In my experience, the latter is best done with manuscripts that, by exception, do contain a date. They are usually written down by the scribe on the last page of the manuscript. From these dated books one can deduce how a given letter was constructed physically at a certain point in time – or even in a particular geographical location, if the scribe also tells us where he wrote the book. If the corpus of dated books is large enough and spans enough years, we may witness how a letter developed over time. When the script of an undated manuscript is subsequently placed alongside this reconstructed time line of script development, a likely date of production may emerge.

Take the following example from the twelfth century, the period studied in our “Turning Over a New Leaf” project. Over the course of this century we notice how letter pairs with contrasting round strokes – like be or od– undergo a remarkable development. Blown up on a 29-inch screen it becomes clear that at the outset of the century the pairs are always separated: white space is clearly visible in between the individual parts that make up the pair. Halfway the century, however, we witness how the couples hesitatingly (but barely) start to touch one another, a process that is called “kissing”. Near the end of the century, finally, the pairs slightly overlap, a process known as “fusion” or “biting”. From distant strangers to couples in love: the stages of development turn out to be perfectly datable.

No kissing occurs in "hoc"

Letter pair "do" is kissing

Now the historian can do his thing. With an accurately dated source, information is given its rightful place in history, turning ordinary murder into historical event and adding to our understanding of the medieval period. Letter shapes thus calibrate our sense of dating. They anchor events in time so they can make history.

 

 

Want to know more about script development in the twelfth century?

 

Erik Kwakkel, “Kissing, Biting and the Treatment of Feet: The Transitional Script of the Long Twelfth Century,” in Erik Kwakkel, Rosamond McKitterick and Rodney Thomson, Turning Over a New Leaf: Change and Development in the Medieval Book (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 79-126.

Animals and their Books

by Jenny Weston

As I was perusing through some images of my current corpus of Norman manuscripts this week, I came across an old folder titled “animals and their books.” When I first began my doctoral research, I made a collection of folders to store anything I found interesting, regardless of their relevance to my current research, just in case they might be useful later. This particular folder contained all kinds of manuscript images depicting animals carrying, holding, reading, or dictating books.

Gospels from Saint-Évroul, Rouen BM 31 (1113-43)
Image courtesy of Enluminures ©

In many of the examples, I found animals such as the lion, the eagle, or the ox —figures commonly used by medieval artists to symbolize the Evangelists. The following example demonstrates a winged ox protectively clutching the Gospel of Luke:

Gospel of Luke, Dijon BM 15 (1109)
Image courtesy of Enluminures ©

In a manuscript from the Norman abbey of Jumièges (Rouen BM 312) I found a similar image of an ox peeking his head into the frame of an illuminated initial and whispering into the ear of a scribe as he writes:

Ox dictating words to the scribe, Rouen BM 312
Image courtesy of Enluminures ©

At first this scene appears to be fairly typical: the animal, representing the Evangelist Luke, dictates the words of his Gospel to the scribe—until I realized that the scribe was actually writing the Gospel of Mark, typically symbolized by a lion (or in some cases a man). The manuscript itself comes from the Norman abbey of Jumièges and, just as the scribe’s words suggest, it contains the Gospel of Mark. So what is happening in this little illuminated initial? Why is Luke (symbolized by the ox) dictating the Gospel of Mark? Should that not be a lion in the corner?

While some early medieval theologians did assign the symbols to the Evangelists differently, three prominent and widely read Latin Church Fathers— Augustine,  Jerome, and Gregory—all agree that the symbol for Luke is the ox. After a brief foray into the world of medieval symbols,  I came across an early Christian author by the name of Pseudo-Athanasius, who appears to be one of the only authors to portray Mark as the ox. Pseudo-Athanasius is a particularly shadowy figure and difficult to track down; many of his works are known only by the fact that they were wrongly attributed to the Greek Church Father Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373). He also does not appear to have been widely read by Norman monks in the twelfth century as none of his works appear in the surviving book lists of the abbeys of Bec, Fécamp, or St-Évroul.

So why did this illuminator choose to depict Mark as the ox? Was he more familiar with the work of Pseudo-Athanasius than he was with the writings of Augustine, Jerome, or Gregory? Was it a simple mistake—the illuminator putting horns on his beast instead of a lion’s mane? While the study of religious symbols is well beyond my field of expertise, this mini-research adventure has encouraged me to pay closer attention to the illuminations in the manuscripts of my corpus. Although my “animals and their books” folder was originally designed as a humorous side-project, perhaps it deserves a little bit more attention in the future.

Lieftinck Lectures in Medieval Manuscripts

Lieftinck Lectures, a set on Flickr.

The VIDI-project “Turning Over a New Leaf” (co-)organizes several public lectures and colloquia related to medieval manuscripts. The theme for 2011-2012 is “Books and Readers in Medieval Britain and Ireland”. Modest displays of manuscripts allow the audience to get in touch with the topics discussed. Please enjoy the pictures from the Lieftinck Lectures held at Leiden University Library.