With a few clicks on a laptop, the modern world melts away. In a darkened conference room in Stanford’s Lathrop Library, a large overhead screen displays thousands of ornate letters — culled in an instant from medieval manuscripts. Calligraphic gems in vermillion, green and lapis flash in crowded rows across the screen.
“You could make wrapping paper from that,” quips Ben Albritton, digital manuscripts program manager at the Stanford Libraries and a medieval musicologist. It’s not such a far-fetched idea. The medieval world, a period from about 500 to 1500 CE, is right here with us, thanks to technology — and who knows? Maybe someday we will wrap a birthday present in its secondhand splendors.
The sense of historical continuity and awareness the digital images give us is a gift in itself — the feeling that the medievals are familiar to us and part of our story too. “These were people. They’re not that different from us. They’re not inaccessible,” says Albritton.
Major university libraries and museums snapped up many of the best medieval manuscripts and art long ago, but Stanford is now staking its own claim in medieval studies. First, it is digitizing images from libraries around the world. Second, it has assembled a cadre of scholars who are expanding the very definition of medieval.
The letters from the medieval “wrapping paper” presentation were collected for Stanford, along with McGill University, the École de Technologie Supérieure and Groningen University, via a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Another Stanford collaboration is the International Image Interoperability Framework, through which anyone can compare and analyze image-based resources without having to access them through the host libraries’ own sites. “As an example, one could, in a website hosted at Stanford, put images from the Vatican, the [Bibliothèque nationale de France] and the British Library side by side without ever having to download or rehost the images,” explains Albritton. In the years to come, the project will make 80,000 medieval manuscripts from the Vatican Museum, more than 15,000 from the BnF and thousands from the British Library publicly available online.
Elaine Treharne, a professor of English and one of the leaders of Stanford’s medieval moment, says many people will be surprised by “how incredibly sophisticated and thoughtful our medieval forebears were. They were not like Game of Thrones — they were like us.”
Images regularly go viral online, thanks to the ease of sharing via Twitter and Pinterest. Especially popular are medieval caricatures of people and fantastical animals. Long-ago scribes filled the margins of their pages with their whimsy to test the newly cut nibs of their quill pens. Bored or preoccupied, they doodled — just like we do.
Academic interest is burgeoning too. Budding scholars “see more images than previous generations saw in their entire career,” says Albritton. “Not only can they look at them, but they can do things with them.” Transcriptions and annotations are searchable online — a bookmark in cyberspace that invites participation, hence crowdsourcing scholarship across the globe.
Treharne’s two-part online course sequence, Digging Deeper, in which she trains students to describe and interpret medieval manuscripts, has welcomed more than 9,000 participants. A third course is planned as part of the sequence. And Treharne’s classes on medieval calligraphy attract dozens of undergraduates.
A score of Stanford medievalists collaborate through workshops and research groups, bringing in guest lecturers and offering classes in the reading and interpretation of manuscripts, history, literature and more. Consequently, the notions of “medieval” are expanding. One class, for example, considers pre-Christian forerunners of the medievals, the Vikings and Goths. Treharne’s and German studies professor Kathryn Starkey’s course Speaking Medieval: Germanic Vernaculars and Their Remains, covers the period from 100 BCE to 1100 CE, including the tongues that would merge into Gothic, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old English and Old High German. Treharne calls this extended epoch “the long Middle Ages.”
If the Middle Ages have lengthened, they’ve also broadened, welcoming additional fields of study into the fold. Long before “interdisciplinary” became an academic buzzword, the Middle Ages exemplified the term.
Think of Dante. The greatest literary masterpiece to come out of the era was his Divine Comedy. To study Dante is also to learn the political and social history of the time, the rise of Italian as a language, medieval theology, a dash of Latin and even the history of science, which Dante sprinkles liberally throughout his epic poem.
It’s also to learn medieval music. William Mahrt, associate professor of music at Stanford, saw the mismatch between Dante’s scriptural quotes and corresponding passages in the Vulgate Bible, a Latin translation in wide use at the time. He observed that the poet’s words instead match the liturgical passages in the Gregorian chant. This music would have been in medievals’ bones. For them, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso would have reverberated with music.
ELEVATING THE STORY: An initial A in The Ascension by Turone di Maxio (Verona, 1356–87). (Image: Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives/Stanford University Libraries)Except at the end. As Dante approaches God at the end of the Paradiso, the music stops. Why? Music is inside time, and the prime mover is outside of it. As Mahrt, PhD ’69, explained in a 2015 talk at the University of Pennsylvania, “The unmoved mover, the source of all motion and music, transcends all that came before and stands brilliant but motionless in perfect silence, streaming light and ‘the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’ ” (Paradiso, XXXIII). Music, literature, theology, all in one medieval masterpiece.
Similarly, Bissera Pentcheva, professor of medieval art, has written books on multisensory aesthetics, on “the body as a conduit to the world.” She wants to know not only what our forebears thought but also what they saw, heard, smelled and tasted. In her work to revivify the Byzantine chant of the basilica of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, she joined hands with science and technology. Jonathan Abel, a veteran of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, helped her re-create the basilica’s acoustics using precise measurements of its interior to trace the path that human voices would have traveled so many years ago.
For avant-garde medievalists, “interdisciplinary” takes on a broader meaning geographically — roaming far beyond Byzantium, Christendom’s easternmost outpost. The Stanford cadre includes Chinese and Islamic scholars too. While the interdisciplinary emphasis isn’t unique, Stanford has an extra focus on the Pacific rim, says Treharne: “We look to the West, toward Asia. That has a significant impact.”
Treharne points to two samples on her wall: One, from 12th-century Spain, has formal, precise calligraphy, and is anonymous and undated. The other, from 8th-century China, has a looser, loopier calligraphy, and is signed and dated. The West, she says, was centuries away from signing and dating artwork. In the Middle Ages, the Western tradition subdued individuality and personal expression; Chinese and Arabic traditions celebrated it.
Cross-cultural studies are at the cutting edge of medieval studies. Why the sharper focus on collaboration? “It’s about knowing,” says Treharne. “The reason we didn’t collaborate very well before is that we didn’t know what the others had to offer. We’re learning that we have a great deal to offer each other.”
So when will the entire tsunami of text and images be online? Probably never. “There is far more material available than anyone could ever completely finish interpreting. Two percent of what exists is online,” says Treharne. Albritton, who works with the wealth of material, confesses to being overwhelmed: “I was never trained to deal with data sets this large.”
FLOURISHING: Detail from a fragment of a missal (1100–1499). (Image: Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)“New texts emerge all the time,” says Treharne. “I’ve discovered new texts in every university library I’ve visited.” At Stanford, she came across a 16th-century text tucked into a manuscript of Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey, and at West Virginia University, she found a racy epistolary love poem in Latin from Lady Elizabeth Dacre Howard to Sir Anthony Cooke, a leading humanist scholar and a tutor to Edward VI.
We may never catch up. Digitization aside, transcription is one of the most pressing problems for the humanities, and crowdsourcing is only beginning to make a difference. It’s enough to drive one back to printed letters on the tactile page. In that case, know that Stanford Libraries also has a very good collection of original manuscripts. For example, in 2014, Stanford acquired a 13th-century prayer book that once belonged to Elizabeth of York (1466–1503), mother of Henry VIII. The slim volume, with its early Gothic script, suggests there was an interest in old texts even in the Middle Ages. It turns out that medievals treasured their heritage as much as we treasure ours.
Cynthia Haven’s most recent book, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, will be published this spring by Michigan State University Press.
