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Mmmonk School 2024

8 July 2024

Join us on 22 November, 29 November and 6 December for a new edition of Mmmonk School! Mmmonk and Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (UGent) will host the third edition of Mmmonk school in the autumn of 2024. Mmmonk School offers lessons for advanced beginners about the medieval book. It is an interdisciplinary practice-focused programme about medieval Flemish manuscripts. Experts introduce the main concepts, skills and methods of their given field of expertise. The lessons are online, free and open for everyone. Join us on three consecutive Fridays in November and December!

Programme Mmmonk School 2024

22 November 2024 - Online

4pm CET - Alberto Campagnolo (KU Leuven): An Introduction to Manuscript Collations with the VisColl Tool

5pm CET - Laura Light (Les Enluminures): An Introduction to the New Thirteenth-Century Bible: Changes in Form and Function

29 November 2024 - Online

4pm CET - Lisa Demets (UGent): An Introduction to Multilingualism in Medieval Flanders

5pm CET - Hendrik Callewier (State Archives Belgium): An Introduction to Indispensable Archival Resources for Biographic Research

6 December 2024 - 7.30-9pm - Bruges Public Library (Reading Room)

On 6 December we will welcome Christopher de Hamel in Bruges for an evening lecture followed by a drinks reception.

7.30-9pm

Registration is required, entrance fee €5 at the door (cash and Payconiq).

Registration for the online sessions

Register for the online sessions with Alberto Campagnolo, Laura Light, Lisa Demets and Hendrik Callewier.

Registration for Christopher de Hamel

Register for the lecture by Christopher de Hamel on 6 December at Bruges Public Library.

Detailed programme

22 November 2024 - Online

4pm CET - Alberto Campagnolo (KU Leuven): An Introduction to Manuscript Collations with the VisColl Tool

Manuscript collation, a key aspect of codicology, analyses book composition, particularly gathering arrangements. This presentation examines manuscript collation methodologies through the application of VisColl (https://viscoll.org/), a digital tool for modelling and visualising codex structures. VisColl generates visual representations of these structures, offering new insights into manuscript construction and conservation. This talk will elucidate collation principles, demonstrate VisColl's functionality, analyse its efficacy in enhancing comprehension of historical texts, and discuss implications for codicological research. By rendering complex data more accessible, VisColl contributes to a deeper understanding of manuscript structure, complementing traditional methods and potentially expanding avenues for book history research.

Alberto Campagnolo is Assistant Professor at KU Leuven and Director of the Book Heritage Lab. Trained as a book conservator in Italy, he has worked at the Vatican Library and London Archives. He holds degrees in Conservation of Library Materials (Ca' Foscari University, 2006), Digital Culture and Technology (King's College London, 2009), and a PhD from the Ligatus Research Centre (University of the Arts London, 2015), where he developed automated visualisation of historical bookbinding structures. His current research focuses on the intersection of digital humanities and manuscript studies, particularly book conservation, codicology, and digital representation of books' materiality.

5pm CET - Laura Light (Les Enluminures): An Introduction to the New Thirteenth-Century Bible: Changes in Form and Function

The Bible that most of us are familiar with today–one fairly small and compact volume that includes the entire Christian scriptural Canon from Genesis to the Apocalypse, with the text arranged for easy reading and reference–was a new phenomenon, created only in the thirteenth century. We will begin by looking quickly at selected examples of earlier medieval Bibles from the ninth and the twelfth century, and then explore the new thirteenth-century Bible in more depth, focusing on how changes in the format and presentation of the Scripture reflected changes in how the Bible was read and used.

Laura Light is Director and Senior Specialist of Text Manuscripts at Les Enluminures, where (among other things), she oversees content for the Text Manuscript site, supervises cataloguers, and describes manuscripts herself when time allows. She is the editor, with Eyal Poleg of Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible (Brill 2013) and has written numerous articles on the Bible in the thirteenth century and the Paris Bible. She was formerly medieval manuscripts cataloguer at the Houghton Library and published Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Volume 1. MSS Lat 3-179, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton, New York 1995).

29 November 2024 - Online

4pm CET - Lisa Demets (UGent): An Introduction to Multilingualism in Medieval Flanders

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.

Dr. 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.

5pm CET - Hendrik Callewier (State Archives Belgium):

An introduction into biographical research on patrons: archives to the rescue!

Our knowledge of the context in which medieval art was produced is often limited. Yet in manuscripts, in paintings, or on other objects, we find references to patrons: a coat of arms, a particular iconography, or sometimes even a name. How can we identify these individuals and learn more about them? Based on archival research, it is possible to reconstruct the life and network of patrons and learn more about their motives. Yet this often seems like searching for a needle in a haystack. Focusing on some concrete examples from late medieval Flanders, the possibilities for biographical research based on archival sources are outlined.

Hendrik Callewier studied and history and archival studies at the universities of Brussels and Leuven, where he obtained a PhD with a thesis on the secular clergy of late medieval Bruges. Since 2010, he has been associated with the Belgian State Archives, where he holds the position of Head of Department in Bruges and Courtrai. He also teaches as a visiting professor at KU Leuven Kulak. His historical research includes biographies of singers, composers, painters and their patrons. He is currently working on a biography of Canon Joris van der Paelen, one of Jan van Eyck's main patrons.

6 December 2024 - 7.30-9pm - Bruges Public Library (Reading Room)

On 6 December we will welcome Christopher de Hamel in Bruges for an evening lecture followed by a drinks reception.

With his extensive experience as the librarian of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and as an auction expert at Sotheby’s, Christopher de Hamel is a leading authority on medieval manuscripts. He became widely known to the public through his award-winning book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, in which he revisits famous manuscripts from multiple perspectives, uncovering surprising new insights. This makes him the perfect advocate for the multidisciplinary vision of Mmmonk School!

Christopher de Hamel will tell a little of his life among medieval manuscripts, especially encounters with manuscripts illuminated in Flanders, often for export, and why these are important in English and European history. He will follow the migrations of two Bruges Books of Hours of the Use of Sarum now in New Zealand, and will touch on discoveries made while at Sotheby’s, including finding the Spinola Hours in 1975, and on work on Simon Bening for several chapters of his book on The Manuscripts Club.

What is Mmmonk School?

  • free webinars on the medieval book
  • focus on manuscripts in Flanders
  • introductions to various perspectives and disciplines by experts
  • stimulating a holistic approach of medieval books
  • co-production with Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (Ghent University)
  • open to everyone!

Each component of a manuscript is important: the binding, the text, the language, the illumination, the script, the materials, the traces of use, … To be able to appreciate a manuscript as a whole, it is necessary to study each component individually and in relation to one another. But this is a tall order, even for the most hardened medievalist. Thankfully a lot can be achieved by interdisciplinary cooperation. To encourage an interdisciplinary approach, Mmmonk School gathers specialists from various fields to offer a peek under the hood of their respective disciplines. The aim is not to create new specialists, but to offer insight in the basic methodology and reference points of various disciplines, to remove any fear of the unknown and to stimulate further collaboration and exploration.

Mmmonk School 2023 & 2022