Mmmonk School 2023 Programme and registration

This session takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. (Source)

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor at Stanford University. She is a medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. Her current projects focus on the book as object and the long history of Text Technologies. She researches the hapticity and phenomenology of the medieval book, and has published Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with Oxford University Press in 2021. Her newest work concerns the application of machine learning and AI to investigate medieval manuscripts and the transmission of textual culture. (Source)

At the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Low Countries set the tone on the European musical stage. With their polyphonic music, numerous Franco-Flemish composers built an international career. Even at the time they were created, the manuscripts in which their work is handed down, could be found in churches, chapels, as well as in the libraries of popes, princes, and citizens. The music copyist and entrepreneur Petrus Imhoff, who worked under the pseudonym Alamire, played an important role in the transmission of this musical heritage. The manuscripts produced under his direction and other sources of polyphony from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the subject of this episode of the Mmmonk School.

Ann Kelders studied history at the universities of Brussels (UFSAL – KUBrussel) and Ghent, where she obtained a PhD with a thesis on late medieval chronicles in the County of Flanders. Since 1999, she has been working as a scientific collaborator in the Manuscripts Department of KBR (Royal Library of Belgium). Since 2022, she is acting as curator of the KBR museum. As a research associate of the Alamire Foundation (International Centre for the Study of Music in the Low Countries), Ann Kelders is involved in projects related to the study and valorisation of early music sources.

Biocodicology is the study of the biological information stored in manuscripts. Western Medieval manuscripts were, for the most part, written on parchment, a writing support whose origins are believed to be in Pergamon. Over the centuries parchment has been the foundation for a multitude of media from illuminated Gospels to the archival documents used in everyday life. Manuscripts can not only offer valuable information through their texts, but can also reveal information - that in many cases is invisible to the naked eye - about book production, livestock economies, handling, conservation and the historic use of the object by studying the materials they are made of. This talk will present three recent research projects that were carried out as part of the Beast to Craft ERC funded project, using proteomic and dna analysis.

Élodie Lévêque graduated with a Master's in Book Conservation from the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2010 and completed a PhD in Medieval History in 2020 (Paris X University). For the past 8 years, her main focus has been on medieval bindings from the Clairvaux Collection of manuscripts. She is an associate professor in book and paper conservation at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and an associate reasercher at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT/CNRS) in Paris. She previously worked as a Senior book conservator at the National Library of Ireland and in Trinity College, Dublin. Prior to this, she was a Manuscript Conservator at Montpellier University Library. She worked as a fellow at the New-York Academy of Medicine (Gladys Brooke Book and Paper fellowship, 2010), and as a post-graduate intern at both the Morgan Library and Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009-2010). She is the author of numerous publications about manuscript conservation, in international peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Journal of Paper Conservation; in addition, she is part of the seminar advisory board for Care and Conservation of Manuscripts (University of Copenhagen). She is a member of the International Council of Museums (Committee for Conservation), and of the International Association of Book and Paper Conservators (IADA).

Written culture and the practices that embody it in literary, historical, diplomatic, and scientific productions reflect the creative activity of an entire era. Authors and texts are inseparable from books and reading, and from the institutions that foster and disseminate culture. The Cistercian abbeys played a significant role in the 'documentary revolution' of the central Middle Ages, concurrently with the swift construction of several of their libraries between the second half of the 12th century and the end of the 13th century. The course will explore the following questions related to Cistercian written culture: What are the sources of written culture, and where are they kept? What are the distinctive characteristics of monastic culture, and of Cistercian culture in particular? What are the aims and forms of the Cistercian book? Is there still something unique about Cistercian written culture after the 13th century?

Multilingualism was the norm in the Middle Ages. Traveling from the Scandinavian towns to the Italian city states, language changed gradually from village to village, town to town. Port cities such as Bruges in the Late Middle Ages were vibrant multilingual hubs, facilitating interactions and language exchanges. This raises questions about medieval manuscript culture. Literary language choice and professional language use often overlapped. In this session, we will focus on the contextualization of metadata of Flemish literary manuscripts from 1200 to 1500. What are the dominant factors to analyze multilingualism: language, genre, or social milieu? And what defines a multilingual manuscript? The inclusion of Dutch alongside French or Latin in a multilingual manuscript could indicate both a high or low level of multilingualism: either the book owner read in multiple languages with facility, or the reader’s French or Latin was insufficient to understand the text without instructions in Dutch. And should we include or exclude ‘monolingual’ manuscripts? Can ‘monolingual’ manuscripts hide a polyglot context?

Lisa Demets is a postdoctoral researcher (FWO) at Ghent University. In 2019, she defended her PhD thesis on the manuscript variation of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen. From April 2020 to March 2022, she was stationed as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University on the NWO funded project The Multilingual Dynamics of Medieval Flanders. Her main research interests are manuscripts and their multilingual reading and writing contexts in the late medieval county of Flanders. She has published on gender history, medieval chronicle writing, manuscript studies and the political and cultural history of the late medieval Low Countries.

In the most recent issue of the journal Sacris Erudiri (DOI 10.1484/J.SE.5.133569), Jeroen Deploige and Wim Verbaal propose a new understanding of the composition Lambert of Saint-Omer’s famous Liber floridus (completed c. 1121). Their contribution focuses on the significance of the idealized city. To this end, they move from the historical and material reality of Saint-Omer, one of the most dynamic centres of urban development in early twelfth-century Flanders, to the autograph manuscript of the Liber (MS Ghent, University Library, 92). In doing so, they ask to what extent both the city as a general concept, and more specifically the town of Saint-Omer, are present in Lambert’s work of compilation. They argue that the key to answering this question lies in the Liber’s specific structure, more so than in its actual content. This insight requires them to read and approach the codex no longer solely as a linear composition, marked by an associative sequence of topics, chapters and illuminations dealing with salvation history and creation. Lambert’s work emerges as a markedly circular composition, consisting of different concentric layers and constructed around a specific central text. In their Mmmonk-talk, Deploige and Verbaal will elucidate their key insights with the Liber floridus at hand.

Jeroen Deploige is Full Professor of Medieval History, specialised in the cultural history of Northwestern Europe between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries. Besides subjects on the Middle Ages, he also teaches public history, narratology and historical anthropology. He is Head of the UGent History Department.

Wim Verbaal, professor of Latin language and literature, Ghent University, is responsible for the Scientific Research Network Literature without Borders, member of the International Medieval Latin Committee and of editorial committees at Corpus Christianorum, Sacris Erudiri and Toronto Medieval Texts. His research includes Latin poetics and its development within medieval literature. He also publishes on the cosmopolitanism of Latin literature as European literature in medieval and modern times, on the poetics of cosmopolitan literatures, and on the emergence and impact of the classical paradigm on modern Europe. Moreover, he is an active translator from Latin and publishes on the problems of translating from cosmopolitan languages.