The Algorithms That Automatically Date Medieval Manuscripts

Around a million medieval documents have no date making their historical significance difficult to quantify. But automated computer techniques look set to revolutionise the work for historians.

 An important aspect of any society is the way it keeps records of property and land transactions so that ownership can be properly established and disputes resolved. In medieval Britain, this process was largely carried out by religious or royal institutions which recorded transactions in documents, written in Latin, called charters.

 Today, more than a million charters survive either as originals or more often as ancient copies. They provide a remarkable insight into the pressures at work in medieval politics, economics and society between the tenth and fourteenth centuries in England.

 For example, historians can use these documents to study the rise and fall of military and religious organisations. A good example is the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, a religious and military organisation set up after the western conquest of Jerusalem in the 11th century (the First Crusade). Historians say the charters clearly show how the organisation became militarised in response to the call for a Second Crusade in 1145, triggered by Muslim forces recapturing various towns in the region. Clearly, these documents have huge historical value but there is a problem: most charters are not dated, particularly during the period of Norman rule between 1066 and 1307.

Click here to read this article from the MIT Technology Review

Click here to read the article Dating medieval English charters

3000 year old human sculpture discovered in Turkey

A beautiful and colossal human sculpture is one of the latest cultural treasures unearthed by an international team at the Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) excavation site in southeastern Turkey. A large semi-circular column base, ornately decorated on one side, was also discovered. Both pieces are from a monumental gate complex that provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738 BC).

 “These newly discovered Tayinat sculptures are the product of a vibrant local Neo-Hittite sculptural tradition,” said Professor Tim Harrison, the Tayinat Project director and Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. “They provide a vivid glimpse into the innovative character and sophistication of the Iron Age cultures that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the great imperial powers of the Bronze Age at the end of the second millennium BC.”

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Anglo-Saxons and hand-saex

As an invitation to explore the wonders of Old English, hand-saex is certainly arresting.

The Dictionary of Old English, based at the University of Toronto (doe.utoronto.ca), offered hand-saex as last week’s “word of the week.” Reader Susannah Cameron spotted it and sent the reference to Word Play. “Have to admit it caught my attention,” she said.

 Sadly for anyone expecting new insight into the intimate practices of Anglo-Saxons between the years 600 and 1150, the word refers to a knife or dagger. The knife was a saex, also spelled seax and (yes) sex, and a hand-saex was a weapon held in one hand. The word for hand in Old English was hand. Very handy.

 Saex comes from a Germanic root (sah or sag) meaning to cut. It survives today only in the narrowly defined word sax, a tool used to trim roofing slates. But before the Norman Conquest of 1066 reshaped the English language and gave us Middle English – a process that took about a century to filter down to ordinary folks – saex was all the rage.

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

Professor Hopes to Shed New Light on Medieval Theological Education

Franklin T. Harkins, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology and medieval studies, is working to shed new light on the nature of theological education in the High Middle Ages.

As part of a yearlong Mellon Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Medi­aeval Studies (PIMS) in Toronto, Harkins has been researching how theology was taught and learned at the universities and in the religious houses of medieval western Europe.

His work at PIMS involves editing and studying a Latin text, virtually unknown to modern scholars, that enjoyed wide circulation and use throughout western Europe from the 13th through the 15th centuries. This text appears in some of the manuscripts under the title Filia Magistri, or “The Daughter of the Master.”

Click here to read this article from Fordham University

The Neighbour and the Jew in Medieval England

Should the relationship between Jews and Christians in Medieval England just be characterized by violence and animosity? The answer lies in looking more deeply at the sources, which can reveal some fascinating new details about the daily life between these two communities.

Today, the University of Toronto hosted a lecture today on the topic, “The Neighbour and the Jew in Medieval England,” given by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, where he looks at events in the twelfth and thirteenth century.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Internet Archive reaches Two Million Free Texts

The Internet Archive has announced that with the posting of the medieval manuscript, Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, they have now reached their 2,000,000th free digital text. Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public for free on archive.org since 2005.

“This 1,000 year old book which has only been seen by a select few people, can, with the technology of today, be shared with millions tomorrow," said Robert Miller, Director of Books of the Internet Archive. "Selecting this title for the 2 millionth text is a fitting tribute to the team of scanners who have been carefully working for the past 5 years.”

The Homiliary manuscript was copied on parchment by at least three different scribes at the important medieval Abbey of St. Martin in Tours less than 100 years after having been composed by Heiric of Auxerre and is the oldest known copy of Heiric’s original text. The manuscript was scanned from the University of Toronto's Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) Library collection.

Jonathan Bengtson, Director of Library and Archives, University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto and Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, said that “this rare and beautiful treasure from the first millennium of Christianity, is one of the gems in the renowned collection of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. The Institute is dedicated to transmitting the inheritance of the Middle Ages to new generations; to deepening our understanding of the life and ideals of Western culture in the time of its first youth."

The University of Toronto has been one of the major partners of the Internet Archive, digitizing books at the rate of over 500 pages an hour, 14 hours a day, 5 days a week. The manuscript and out of copyriight books held at the PIMS Library will be scanned and added to the Internet Archive in the coming year.

Bengtson, one of the main coordinators of the project, notes that the Internet Archive is extremely useful to medieval scholars. "Beyond simply wider and easier access to the digital texts," he explains, "the library is actively collaborating internationally with efforts to build digital tools to exploit computing power in textual, linguistic and visual analyses of digital books and manuscripts."

Some titles of interest to medievalist include:

Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent

Chronicles of the Crusades

A Mediaeval burglary

The Battle Abbey roll, with some account of the Norman lineages

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco that specializes in offering broad public access to digitized and born-digital books, music, movies and Web pages. It partners with the University of Toronto and over 150 libraries and universities around the world to create a freely accessible archive of texts representing a wide range texts which include non-fiction and fiction books, research and academic texts, popular books, children's books and historical texts.

Click here to go to the Internet Archive

Source: Internet Archive

University of Toronto scholars win Mellon Foundation fellowships

University of Toronto medieval historian Nicholas Everett and Walid Saleh, a scholar of religion and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, have each been selected to receive a highly competitive New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to pursue cross-disciplinary research. It is the first time the fellowships, created in 2002, have been awarded outside of the United States.

The New Directions Fellowships are unique in that they enable young humanists to explore new lines of research by gaining additional expertise in a field outside of their area of specialization. For Nicholas Everett, who holds a PhD in history, the fellowship means he can do research shedding new light on the history of medicine and science by undertaking specialized coursework in pharmacology and toxicology.

"There has been an explosion of interest in the medicinal potential of plant, mineral and animal products of the last decade. This renewed scientific interest in natural product pharmacy provides opportunities for a more sophisticated understanding of human interaction with the natural world in the past, and the rationale behind historical traditions of drug use, discovery and theory," Everett says. "By understanding the chemistry of natural drugs and the processes they affect, historical texts on pharmacy can be read more sensitively, claims more effectively evaluated and traditions better understood and explained."

Everett will draw upon his training to pursue three themes in the history of pharmacy which recent discoveries in biochemistry, pharmacology and neuroscience place in a new light: notions of taste and smell in relation to health and pharmacy; traditions of compound drugs; and what constituted proof or the authority to declare a drug effective or safe in the pre-modern world. Tracing these themes across different periods and cultures, says Everett, will make important contributions to our understanding of both the history of science and the history of medicine.

Walid Saleh will use his fellowship to undertake a comprehensive unified history of the Arabic Bible in the Middle East where three of the world's major religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - began and still co-exist side by side. It's a research direction that arose quite serendipitously. "While researching the history of Quranic interpretation, my main field, I came across al-Biqa`i (d. 1480) who used the Hebrew Bible and the four Gospels to interpret Biblical references in the Qur'an. This was an unprecedented use of these two scriptures in Islam," says Saleh. The fortunate find led him to realize that no comprehensive study of the history of the Bible in the Islamic religious imagination had been done. "Such a study is essential since the Arabic Bible represents a truly Jewish-Christian-Islamic event in the collective religious history of the Middle East. The presence of active members of the three communities side by side make for a fascinating relationship to the Bible, with each religious community aware of the other's views of the same book," says Saleh. In particular, Saleh plans to undertake serious training in Jewish study, including Biblical Hebrew, so as to chart a detailed history of the ways in which Islamic religious tradition interacted with the Bible and how each religion's interpretation of the Bible affected and influenced the other.

"Scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries holds tremendous potential," says Meric S. Gertler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. "Some of the most exciting discoveries and insights occur when different fields intersect. We are delighted that the Mellon Foundation is not only enabling these two outstanding humanists to pursue their innovative research but is, through the New Directions program, fostering a standard of excellence for cross-disciplinary research more generally."

The Mellon Foundation has long been known for its support of the humanities, arts and higher education. The New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences by enabling them to acquire substantive and methodological training outside of their discipline so they are able to work with sophistication on the specific research problems that interest them most. Recipients of the fellowships are relatively early in their careers, having have received their PhD between five and 15 years previously, and so the fellowships are viewed as long-term investments in a scholar's intellectual range and productivity.

Source: University of Toronto

Natalie Zemon Davis wins Holberg Prize

Natalie Zemon Davis, a renowned scholar of late medieval and early modern history, has won the prestigious Holberg International Memorial Prize, worth $785,000 US, for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology.

The award will be given to Davis, a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, on June 9th in Norway.

The Holberg Prize Academic Committee said in a statement: “Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the most creative historians writing today, an intellectual who is not hostage to any particular school of thought or politics. Her writing is richly textured, multi-faceted and meticulously documented. She shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action. Her work brings gender to the fore, while insisting that the relationship between men and women is always embedded in the cultural discourses and social organizations specific to their time.

“Davis’ imaginative approach to history, coupled with intensive archival research, makes the past come alive; her fundamental method is to pursue a dialogue between the past and the present. The uniqueness of her work lies in connecting early modern Europe with new areas of comparative history, exploring cultural, geographical and religious interchange.”

Natalie Zemon Davis is well known for her books such as The Return of Martin Guerre, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. She is widely respected in the academic world and has taught at Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Toronto.

"This is simply outstanding news for the University of Toronto and such a fitting tribute to the stature of our humanities scholars in the international community," said Professor Peter Lewis, acting vice-president (research).

The Holberg Prize, which was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003, is awarded annually by the Board of the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund. Both prizes are for scholarly work in the academic fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.

Please also see our earlier article: Natalie Zemon Davis discusses the challenges of being a Historian

Sources: Holberg Prize Website; University of Toronto

Used Bookseller inspired by Medieval Bookshops

A used bookstore in Toronto is taking a page from medieval booksellers to create a new model for his industry. It is the daring idea of Jason Rovito, whose store, Of the Swallows, their Deeds and the Winter Below, will be opening next month as an experiment in providing a new way of selling books.

Rovito became interested in starting a used bookstore while working on his PhD dissertation on symbolic spaces within urban places, and noticed how important booksellers were in the Middle Ages. He said in an interview with Medievalists.net that he was "looking back to the origins of bookshops  and how they were integral to schools and monasteries. Books were not commodities but cultural symbols due to their scarcity."

Rovito wants to recreate this experience with his bookstore by creating a space that sells more than just books - it will serve as a a space to circulate ideas and provide an opportunity for conversation and learning.

He is carefully preparing his store by giving it a sense of exclusivity and making it a destination for Toronto's cultural community. Located on the second and third floors of a Victorian building in downtown Toronto, the final look of store will include Persian rugs and tables to facilitate talks and meetings.

The store is already hosting workshops from the Toronto New School of Writing and plans to base an online journal in this location. He also hopes the store will host classes and readings, what Mr. Rovito says is "part of the larger ecology of reading."

The store opens during a period when booksellers are having a difficult time keeping their smaller stores open in the face of competition from online alternatives and large big-box stores. But Rovito hopes that he worked out an economic model which will allow him to succeed, and will be able to tap into an urban community's "desire for there to be something" that preserves its culture and connection with books.

The bookstore is located on the outskirts of the University of Toronto, and Rovito believes he will able to develop connections and networks within the university community. The store will only be keeping between 3000 and 4000 volumes on it shelves, which will "keep the stock dynamic", and will be arranged in an interdisciplinary fashion that also hearkens back to how medieval universities taught their students.

Of the Swallows, their Deeds and the Winter Below officially opens on April 2nd. Click here to go to its website.

Natalie Zemon Davis discusses the challenges of being a Historian

Natalie Zemon Davis, an influential and widely-regarded historian, talked about her own career and the challenges of being a historian at the University of Toronto last night.

The event, hosted by the university's Department of History and the Graduate History Society, was billed their first Becoming a Historian event. It is described as a chance to explore "the creative process of becoming, being and remaining an historical interpreter."

Over sixty people, many of them graduate students, attended the informal talk, were Professor Davis shared some of the important events in her academic career and gave advice. Davis described her continuing interest historical research and how she saw herself "as a historian who could write critical history."

She noted how her research and career could change because of unforeseen circumstances: in 1952 she began doing research in French archives, but then had her passport revoked by American authorities after speaking out against the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It forced her to change her work and start looking for research in Rare Book Libraries throughout the United States. This resulted in Davis being able to make use of a vast amount of early printed material and deliver fascinating new views on the culture of printing workers in early modern France.

Davis also talked about her focus of interest has expanded throughout the years, to the point where she found herself going beyond the bounds of Europe with her book Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds as well as examining issues on women's history from more than just a Western European point of view.  She encouraged her audience to look at history outside of their own fields of knowledge and "don't just situate yourself in a national boundary" when doing historical research.

Davis also took questions from the audience, which ranged from how she got interested in being an academic historian to how to manage a family and work. For the latter question, she replied that patience and the ability to quickly transition from being one moment a mother and the next a historian were key in being able to balance the demands of both tasks.

When asked about her ability to reach a broad market with her books, Davis replied she would focus her writing in a way that an "intelligent reader" would be able to follow along without already knowing who the characters and events are beforehand. At the same time, she advised that when writing a dissertation the one should assume a professional readership.

Professor Davis has earned a reputation as a top scholar of the early modern era. Her publications include Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives and The Return of Martin Guerre. The Return of Martin Guerre was later made into a movie.

Click here to read our Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis.

New Librarian at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Jonathan Bengston has started his new role as the Librarian for the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) at the University of Toronto, one of the most important libraries for medievalists in North America.

He took over the position earlier this week from Father James K. Farge, who will continue to work with PIMS in a part-time role. Bengston also serves as the Director of Library and Archives University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto (both libraries are located in the same building).

In an interview with Medievalists.net, Mr. Bengston said, "The PIMS library is world-renowned for good reason and it is at once humbling and energizing to have the honour of overseeing such a remarkable resource in mediaeval studies."

He adds, "It also brings my own intellectual and administrative interests full circle having trained as a medievalist at Oxford and then beginning my career as a librarian overseeing substantial collections (including medieval mss) in an institution founded in the 14th century (The Queen's College). I am hopeful that I can use whatever experience and knowledge I might have to enhance and support the mission of the Institute. I am absolutely delighted to be at St. Michael's and at PIMS and look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with both institutions."

The PIMS Library, which opened in 1929, has over 120 000 volumes and 50 000 slides in its collection, along with a strong collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. The library is used by faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto, the leading institutions for medieval studies in Canada.

Jonathan Bengston has held various senior positions in academic libraries in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom — including as the Executive Director of the Providence Athenaeum (founded in 1753) in Providence, Rhode Island, and as the Head Librarian of the Queen’s College, Oxford (founded in 1341). He has worked for the University of Toronto for since 2004, and is currently writing a book for University of Toronto Press on an introduction to medieval manuscripts.

Asked about his future goals for the PIMS Library, Mr. Bengston replied, "Right now I am just listening and learning from my colleagues at the Institute and in the Library. One thing that will remain a constant is the library's emphasis on building broad, deep and well defined collections within the larger context of the remarkable collections at the University of Toronto. Further improving the accessibility of collections through additional description and cataloguing, as well as digitization, will likely also be a priority."

The Materiality of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages

Caroline Walker Bynum will complete a series of three lectures on Thursday at the University of Toronto. Bynum, Professor of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is the 2009 F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas.

She was speaking on the theme of "The Materiality of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages" and this week gave papers on:

"Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles and Their Theorists"

"Living Synecdoche: Parts and Wholes in Medieval Devotion"

"The Materiality of the Visual: How Did Medieval People See?"

University College describes the lecture series: "In the period between 1150 and 1550 a number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects--among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers--allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about.

"In these three lectures, Prof. Bynum will describe the miracles themselves, discuss the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probe the basic assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She will also analyze what modern theorists call 'medieval art' and argue that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that help explain both the animation of images and the iconoclastic resistance to them."

Caroline Walker Bynum studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century. In the 1980s, her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval Studies. Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood and in her forthcoming Christian Materiality, is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century.

Click here for information about the time and place of the final lecture.

Latin gaining popularity at University of Toronto

The Romans learned it and more recently so did Harry Potter. The Latin language is gaining popularity and University of Toronto undergraduate classes are filled to the brim with keen Latin lovers.

"We're running four sections of Latin 100 this year as we did last year, so there has been a demand," said Professor Alison Keith, chair of classics. "This year we've got 25 kids in the third- and fourth-year courses."

Professor Jarrett Welsh, who recently joined the faculty, said there's been a revival of Latin for many years now. He teaches intermediate Latin and a third-year Latin class on Roman comedy.

"Latin was the language of the Romans but also of the educated elite of the Renaissance," Welsh said. "People say that Latin died but it never really died. I think some of the interest we're seeing is coming out of new engagement with the history of medicine, the history of science and the study of the Renaissance."

Keith said there was a dip in interest more than a decade ago but now media have played a role in its revival.

"Harry Potter made Latin really popular and fascinatingly, among kids in elementary schools there were lots of Latin clubs. The Harry Potter books really made language play with [English] words and Latin words magical. Gladiator in 2000 was a big spur to things as well. Those civilization video games like Alexander the Great have also made it popular. I think people are just more aware of Latin now."

Keith added that there have been curriculum changes in high schools across the country and while some students coming to U of T as undergraduates in the classics department have taken Latin before, some have not.

"Twenty years ago, Latin was the third most taught language in schools in Toronto after Spanish and French," she said. "But now Ontario is the only province left that teaches Latin in high schools."

Welsh said many of the students in his classes are in the humanities but many also come from the sciences.

"I've had students who are also taking French and Spanish benefit because they find Latin helps them understand the roots of other languages," he said.

Keith agreed that Latin is not a stand-alone course but rather one that can be used in many other areas.

"There are lots of traditional reasons to study Latin," she said. "If you're interested in pharmacy, law and medicine, Latin can also help. It's always the case that studying a little Latin will improve your command of English and your writing skills."

To Have and to Hold: Marriage in Premodern Europe (1200-1700)

The University of Toronto held a two-day history conference, which ended yesterday, entitled "To Have and to Hold: Marriage in Premodern Europe (1200-1700)".

Over 100 people attended the conference, hearing papers on a wide range of topics related to marriage in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Modern periods. Some of the papers dealt with the marriages of clerics during the Middle Ages, marriage practices in minority communities throughout medieval Europe, and reports on interesting marriage cases.

Medievalists.net was on hand and interviewed several speakers. The interviews will be posted to our website over the next couple of weeks.

Our first video is an interview with Professor Konrad Eisenbichler, who was one of the organizers of the conference. We asked him about why they wanted to do a conference on pre-modern marriage and about what was learned here.



A detailed report of some of the papers given will be added to the website later today.

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies awards honorary degrees

The Pontifical Institute in Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) has conferred Honorary Doctorates to three individuals on Saturday during a convocation ceremony at St. Basil's Collegiate Church in Toronto.

The three people awarded the honour were Mario Cortellucci, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, Umberto Eco of the University of Bologna and Elizabeth A.R. Brown of Brooklyn College and City University of New York.

Mr. Cortellucci is President of the Cortel Group of Companies, comprising of a variety of diversified and highly successful enterprises. His philanthropic efforts have benefited numerous causes including education for children and youth in need, health care facilities and First Nations communities. In 2008, Mr. Cortellucci was installed as the Grand Prior of Canada for the Knights Hospitallers of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta (Ecumenical Order).

He was also recognized by the Government of Italy for his sponsorship of Casa Italia, a permanent exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario promoting Italian Art and Culture.

Umberto Eco is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose, which he wrote in 1980. He was also voted number two in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.

Professor Brown is a leading scholar in the areas of feudalism and Capetian France.

The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies is a research institute in the University of Toronto that is dedicated to advanced studies in the culture of the Middle Ages.

The Institute was founded in 1929 as the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto. Étienne Gilson, then of the Sorbonne, was instrumental in its foundation, along with Henry Carr and Edmund J. McCorkell of the Congregation of St. Basil and St. Michael's College.

In 1939 it was granted a pontifical charter by which it was given the power to grant the licentiate and doctorate degrees in medieval studies.