The Medieval Academy Blog

Students and scholars at work, in this manuscript from Flanders, c.1300. (Rothschild Canticles. General Collection, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently announced a grant of $650,000 to Yale University that will allow four of its medievalists and two principal investigators (four MAA members in all) to apply the newest digital technology to various aspects of manuscript research. The four Yale researchers and their projects are:

• Alastair Minnis: An analysis of inks and pigments used in manuscripts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and other Middle English works
• Jessica Brantley: A study of variations in textual and visual elements in copies of English books of hours
• Anders Winroth: The preparation of a new edition of

Gratian’s Decretum

• Holly Rushmeier: The development of an image-analysis tool for the comparison of medieval manuscripts.

According to Yale’s announcement, “The rapid advance of digital information technology is generating new opportunities for scholars of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The proliferation of digitally preserved manuscripts, together with powerful new digital technology with the potential to facilitate their analysis, will enable scholars both to pursue new avenues of inquiry and to develop novel approaches to long-standing issues in the field. In the field of medieval manuscript studies, most research during the modern era has been based on visual observations: e.g., paleographers seeking to identify scribal hands through letterforms; art historians seeking to distinguish the work of an artist through colors, designs, and styles; and textual critics looking for key variant readings in multiple manuscript texts. Today, digital technology can provide scholars of the Middle Ages with new tools that facilitate access and offer new approaches to pursue answers to long-standing questions in the field. ‘Yale researchers will benefit from advances in digital imaging and dissemination technologies’, says Meg Bellinger, director of the Yale Digital Collections Center (YDC2).

“The project will build on digitally enabled scholarship in medieval manuscripts that has been in development at Stanford University Libraries for four years. ‘Given the pioneering efforts by Yale faculty members to apply the new technology to medieval scholarship, as well as the world-renowned collections of medieval manuscripts in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the University is well poised to become the center of cutting-edge research in the field,’ said Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts and a former director of the Beinecke Library.

“Bellinger and Shailor will serve as principal investigators.  The project will leverage Yale’s strengths as a leading center for the study of medieval history and culture, as well as the depth of its collections.  In addition to the expertise of scholars in English, history, and computer science, the project will draw on the resources of the recently established Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage housed at Yale University’s West Campus facility.

“‘Thanks to the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts at Yale University project will realize the potential of new information technology to transform research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences,’ commented Shailor.”

The original version of this article, by Dorie Baker, appeared in the December 10, 2012 issue of Yale News.

The Freeman Foundation and its founder Weston Milliken have generously offered a $10,000 matching grant to the MAA to enable the Academy to award the John Boswell Dissertation Grant annually. To receive these funds, the MAA will need to raise $10,000 by June 30th.

This would bring the number of MAA Dissertation Grants to eight annually, each named for a prominent medievalist. The Committee for Professional Development judges this award competition.

With the money already raised, the Boswell Grant is now biennial, and the first award will be made in 2013.

With $10 from each graduate student member of the MAA — or $100 from each Fellow — the MAA would easily meet this challenge. We urge everyone in between to make a donation in any amount to support graduate-student funding and to honor the legacy of John Boswell. Online donations can be made here.

John Boswell, a medieval historian who taught at Yale University from 1975 until his death in 1994 at age 47, was a pioneer in two fields that have developed significantly over the past two decades: the study of Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations, especially in the Iberian peninsula, and GLBT studies. His scholarly legacy is found not only in his four monographs but in the many students, both undergraduate and graduate, who followed him into the profession. Before his death he also served on the board of the Freeman Foundation, which has now offered this matching grant in his honor.

The 2013 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place April 4-6 in Knoxville, Tennessee and will be hosted by the University of Tennessee, the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium.

Meeting registration is available here.

Hotel registration is available here.

The meeting will feature fifty-eight sessions from a wide range of disciplines and methodologies based around the theme of regions and regional identity.

The program is available online.

Plenary speakers will include Christopher de Hamel (Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), Jan Ziolkowski (Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University and Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection), and MAA President Maryanne Kowaleski (Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor and Director of Medieval Studies at Fordham University).

Please make plans to attend. We look forward to seeing you at a great gathering of medievalists in downtown Knoxville, in the heart of the Tennessee Valley and at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As we reported in the December News, as a new benefit to MAA members, the first 25 book reviews from Speculum volume 88.1 (January 2013), will be soon available online. The second group of reviews will be released a few weeks later, and finally the complete January issue will available online.

With the new digital edition any member will be able to access Speculum at no additional charge. In addition to current issues, members will also have access to the full extent of the Speculum archive digitized to date. This digital archive currently includes all issues back to 1950, and it will soon include the complete run of all issues going back to volume 1.1 (January 1926).

If you are a member, you will soon receive a notice of the release, and you can go to the MAA website where you will be able to navigate under the Speculum column to the tab, “Speculum Member Access.” You will find on that page hyperlinks to the Cambridge University Press page for Speculum, and you will be able to start using Speculum online. No further passwords, hyperlinks, or any other access is required.