The Medieval Academy Blog

Laura Light is the Director and Senior Specialist of Text Manuscripts at Les Enluminures, a gallery that specializes in selling medieval manuscripts and art from the Middle Ages. Laura is based in Boston.

First and Foremost, a Medieval Manuscripts Cataloguer

I attended UCLA from 1978 until 1985, when I left to work at the Houghton Library, Harvard University’s main rare book and manuscript library. At that point, my dissertation was almost complete, and that is the way I would still describe it, all these decades later. I realize that many academics may assume that the fact that I never completed my PhD was the circumstance that defined my career (I certainly have friends that probably believe that).  But it wasn’t, or at least I don’t see it that way.  Much more important in determining my career path, was my desire to work with medieval manuscripts all the time – not with manuscripts relevant to particular research projects on occasional (or even frequent) research trips to Europe, but with all sorts of manuscripts, every day, a desire that led me to choose a career as a manuscripts cataloguer.

For me, especially at this point in my life (do the math), the lack of a PhD does not seem very important.  But my years in graduate school, including the research and writing of my almost-finished dissertation under the incomparable guidance provided by Richard Rouse, certainly are relevant, since they were admirable training for my chosen career path, not as university teacher, but as a cataloguer of medieval manuscripts.   As I mentioned, my first real job was at Houghton Library at Harvard.  Those were heady days for manuscript cataloguing in the United States, when libraries recognized that providing the scholarly community with detailed, academic descriptions of their medieval manuscripts was an essential part of their mission.  Funded in part by the NEH, and inspired by the catalogues produced in England by Neil Ker and in Germany under the auspices the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, libraries such as the Huntington Library in California and Yale’s Beinecke Library, to name two of the earliest, embarked on ambitious cataloguing projects, culminating in published catalogues by Consuelo Dutschke and Barbara Shailor that are enduring works of scholarship used by the entire international medieval community.  When I learned that Harvard was beginning a NEH-sponsored cataloguing project, I did not hesitate to apply.  My years at Houghton proved to be challenging, but very satisfying. I was working with a wonderful collection and supported by colleagues who were endlessly generous with a then young, and still inexperienced scholar, albeit one with the right “tools” for the job (training in languages, paleography, and codicology).   And I learned an amazing amount.  Ultimately, there is no better path to being a confident and expert scholar of medieval manuscripts than writing descriptions of them day after day.

At Houghton I was hired to describe their medieval manuscripts, and to write a published catalogue.  This ensured that I spent almost all my time researching and writing about manuscripts in the collection.  Unfortunately, it is very hard to find employment as a medieval cataloguer in a library in the United States today, although opportunities come up from time to time.  The idea of government sponsored funding of medieval cataloguing projects through the NEH proved to be relatively short-lived. And academic cataloguing, medieval or otherwise, is sadly undervalued in many libraries today.

But I am still cataloguing.  When the project at Houghton came to an end due to a lack of funding, after a hiatus, I began working instead for Sandra Hindman at Les Enluminures, a gallery that specializes in selling medieval manuscripts (as well as other art from the Middle Ages).  Working for “the trade” might at first seem to be a major change from working in an academic library.  But working for Les Enluminures is not.  The descriptions I write now for our manuscripts are as detailed and “academic” as the descriptions that I once wrote for Houghton, although they are presented in a different format and are rather chattier, since our goal is not only to describe our manuscripts, but also to provide context that explains why they are interesting. Most people who sell rare books and manuscripts are experts in their fields who devote lots of time to describing their books; it is an essential part of their job.  The pronounced focus on scholarship at Les Enluminures, however, certainly reflects Sandra Hindman’s own background as a published scholar and professor of art history at Johns Hopkins and Northwestern.

During my early years working for Sandra, I was a freelance consultant, paid for each description I completed.  The job has evolved (and I have evolved with it), and I now work for Les Enluminures full-time overseeing our text manuscript site (www.textmanuscripts.com).  Most of our clients are librarians working in special collections at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada.  It is fun to get to know collections, identify good potential “homes” for our manuscripts, and show prospective clients why a particular manuscript is appropriate.  I work on exhibitions at our galleries, travel to antiquarian book fairs, write about our manuscripts in print and for our blog (and these days spend time presenting material on zoom), and supervise our freelance cataloguers. I am involved in the process of identifying new inventory for the gallery to buy.  In short, my job now involves many activities, but I still describe a good number of manuscripts myself each year, and find it just as satisfying as it was when I started at Houghton.

For people looking beyond academia, becoming expert in a skill opens doors.  I was fortunate in having good training and experience with manuscripts during graduate school, and very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at Houghton, immersed in manuscripts.  This background enabled me to continue my work with manuscripts at Les Enluminures, and ultimately led to new career, one that I never dreamt of in graduate school.

Laura Light, Les Enluminures

Dr. Matthew Z. Heintzelman is the Curator of Western European Collections & Special Collections at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a position he has held since 2004. He was awarded a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, in Germanic Studies and later earned a MLIS from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He has presented and published widely and has curated more than nine exhibitions for HMML since 2015.

A Medievalist in the Stacks

Finding your path

Father Oliver Kapsner, OSB, the founding director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) once described his initiation to library work as follows: “The career began one month after completing the novitiate in July 1923 when Abbot Alcuin Deutsch, like myself, out for a morning stroll after breakfast, called me: ‘Father Oliver, come here.  I want you to work in the library.’”

Father Oliver went on to spend more than four decades working in libraries, both at Saint John’s University and elsewhere, capping this with several years leading HMML’s microfilming project in Austria (1965-1972).

For most of us—who are not members of a monastic community—such clear-cut occupational direction is an extremely rare commodity. In my own case, a path through medieval studies only converged with librarianship after several years of educational and professional twists and turns. The following account—somewhat unremarkable in itself—relates only one path to alternative careers for medievalists. There are countless more.

Upon entering college in the mid-1970s, I needed to discern a major field of study. Being a rather practical person, I decided on German, which I had just begun to learn, after four years of learning Spanish in high school. While not the most promising major from the standpoint of earning an income, language studies did offer a means to nourish secondary interests in history and cultural exchange. But what does one do as a language major?

Teach or translate

Over the course of my undergraduate years, I frequently heard the assertion that language majors had two professional options: teach or translate. You either studied to become the eventual replacements for your own teachers, or you toiled in the free-lance world of translation, primarily business translation. During the time I was in college, it happened that a large German pharmaceutical corporation bought out a local company, which led to an alternative suggestion that I should take courses in business German and pursue a lucrative position in private industry.

After some consideration, I recognized that one of my fatal flaws was a lack of interest in corporate profit and business practices. It was apparent to me that my motivation lay more in learning about cultural history than selling product. Of course, had I opted for a career with a German corporation, I would likely be wealthier now and probably retired.

Suffice it to say that upon graduation from college, I was still unclear what one does with a major in German language and literature. So, of course, I entered graduate school in German studies at the University of Chicago.

Becoming a “medievalist”

Given the opportunity at Chicago to focus my attention on German, my research interests soon settled on medieval German literature: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, Walther von der Vogelweide, the Nibelungenlied, and especially religious drama.

During my many years in graduate school, I did have the opportunity to try both teaching (English in Vienna and German in Chicago) and translation (with a computer-aided translation company). There were many things about each that I found exciting and frustrating.

After taking two years off to teach English in Austria (where I visited many medieval sites, including libraries, churches and monasteries), I returned to graduate school. Taking time away from studies to earn a living became a pattern that prolonged my graduate studies in the 1980s and 1990s.

During my second, longer break from studies (mid 1980s), I worked in a translation bureau where I gained some initial experience with computers (anyone remember DOS?). Unfortunately, the (mis)management at this company dampened any enthusiasm for the business world.

Returning to graduate school in the late 1980s, I soon found I still needed an outside income and accepted a low-level, part-time position at the University of Chicago library. This proved to be a critical moment in my search for direction as a German major with a focus on medieval studies. Over the course of eight years at the library, I held four different positions. Each new job brought higher pay, more responsibility, and new learning opportunities. The last of these positions was overseeing the rare-book office in the special collections department. With this, I had embarked on a professional path that I found exciting and which appealed to my innate curiosity.

Moving on

After serving in special collections for about one and a half years, I had to give up my position at the library to follow my wife’s job. We moved to another state, where I spent three years as a stay-at-home dad, while completing my PhD dissertation and investigating library science programs. My hope was to solidify my knowledge of how libraries function, cataloging unusual materials, and supporting the study of rare books and manuscripts.

In 2000, I completed my dissertation on late-medieval German religious drama and after graduating that June, I applied to the University of Iowa to pursue the MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science). I imagined myself moving into a role as subject-area specialist in a college or university library.

A few months later, in January 2001, I was officially received into the MLIS program. About that same time, I was approached by a fellow student from the library school, who was about to graduate. In conducting his own job search, he happened upon a posting for a position in Minnesota that called for

• Fluency in German
• A degree in medieval studies
• Experience with rare books and manuscripts
• Emphasis on service in a library (i.e., not a teaching situation)

His comment to me was that he could not think of anyone else who matched this description, except me.

I was a bit flabbergasted, as my thoughts in 2001 were centered on finishing library school (which I had barely begun) and I was not actively searching for a job. In the end, however, I did apply for this opening at the HMML, was hired, and moved to Minnesota in July of that year.

Results

The past 19 years at HMML have not always been smooth, but I cannot imagine any other job—whether in teaching or library work—could have matched my interests so closely. In my work as a curator for western manuscripts, I support scholars in their use of nearly 50,000 medieval and early modern manuscripts on microfilm from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In curating the library’s own collections, I have cataloged about 9,000 rare printed books (15^th-20^th century) and provide access to a very wide range of fascinating materials from around the world.

Other perks of the job have included the opportunity to meet with classes, curate exhibitions, represent the library at major conferences on medieval studies, and much more. Working in a multicultural collection like that at HMML has enabled me to learn about manuscripts and books from traditions I had never encountered previously.

In sum, it still amazes me that my path contains so many elements that other medievalists would share—interest in other languages, computer skills, search for knowledge, etc. In that sense, my path has been somewhat unremarkable. And yet, at every stage of my studies, I have been able to acquire skills and knowledge that directly supported the next advance in my work.

Matthew Z. Heintzelman, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library