The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r My last visit to the University of Wisconsin – Madison took place in 2014. At that time, I blogged about medieval material in two campus collections: Special Collections and the Chazen Museum of Art. It was a great pleasure to return to campus this weekend to deliver the keynote for the annual UW Graduate Association of Medieval Studies Colloquium, where I was treated to a dozen very impressive lectures by graduate students discussing their dissertation research. After lunch, I led a manuscript workshop before delivering my keynote at ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r Last week, the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (the learned society of which I am Executive Director) took place at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It was a delightful, congenial, and edifying gathering of more than three hundred medievalists who spent three days learning from one another, viewing exhibits and performances on campus, and generally enjoying each other’s company. After the conference, I had the great pleasure of taking an actual manuscript road trip to Purdue University i ..read more

You may remember this post from 2017, in which I told the story of a 14th-century Venetian manuscript that was repatriated thanks to research by myself and a colleague. Here’s the rest of the story! Home Again: The Repatriation of a Stolen Venetian Manuscript ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r As we begin to make our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, it isn’t only restaurants and theaters that are opening up. Libraries, too, are reopening to the public, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is no exception. After several years of restricted access and closures, the Beinecke is now open for outside researchers, albeit with masks and proof of vaccination required. The Beinecke is one of my favorite places to visit, and when I heard that the Library would be welcoming outside researchers as of April ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r Most of the time, this road trip is virtual, an exploration of digitized manuscripts and their associated metadata and platforms in collections throughout North America. But sometimes I take an actual road trip, visiting medievalists at institutions and heritage sites far from my home in Boston to study their manuscripts in the flesh, as it were. Last week was one of those times. I spent two delightful days in Canada, visiting the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and collection in a small private school three hours from there ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r It’s been a rough few years, friends. We have all been through so much during the pandemic, and for students and teachers the pivots and policies have been particularly difficult and frustrating. Trying to stay safe, learning to teach online, dealing with trauma and loss, getting used to social-distanced and masked pedagogy, in addition to the usual pressures of teaching and learning. It was a particular delight, then, to see my extraordinary Simmons University School of Library Science students here in Boston make their way through t ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r Like all of us, I’ve been working and teaching from home for nearly a year, waiting with bated breath for the vaccine distribution, wearing my mask to keep myself and my community safe, and working exclusively from digital images of medieval manuscripts. My recent appointment as a lecturer in Latin Paleography at Yale meant that when libraries on campus opened to faculty and students I was allowed to, at long last, visit an actual library to do some research with real, not digital, medieval manuscripts. And not just any library, but t ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r Back in 2014, I wrote about a lovely Book of Hours from late-fifteenth-century France that was dismembered by Otto Ege in the 1940s and whose leaves became number 48 in his “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts” portfolios. I demonstrated how the contents of that manuscript identified it as having been made for the liturgical use of Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne), near Reims in Northeast France, in the Champagne-Ardenne region. The manuscript included a lengthy versified Life of St. Margaret, patron of pregn ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r For the last few weeks, working from home as the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been Tweeting long threads about different manuscript-related subjects. But while following up on the latest thread, I made a discovery that is worth blogging about. The thread was a brief tour of a fabulous  manuscript, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140, written and illustrated by Gottschalk of Lambach in the late twelfth century. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140 (Lambach, s. XII ex) At the end of the thread ..read more

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r Greetings, readers! In today’s post, we’re doing some library science and getting our hands dirty by digging into online cataloguing and data models. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! I’ve just returned from the annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age at the University of Pennsylvania. It was an inspiring gathering of manuscript scholars and digital humanists, thinking about how we can collaborate and facilitate each others’ work. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Hooking Up” – in the context of the sym ..read more