Exploring Wellcome Library Manuscripts

Another win for open access to special collections holdings is making the news: the Wellcome Library has made over 100,000 high-resolution images of items in their collections available to the public, all under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 2.0) licenses. For good reason, this news is getting due attention. What struck me was the number of medieval treasures now available--especially manuscript images.

In the cases of some of the Wellcome manuscripts, images provided are just the inside pages with modern descriptions (so hopefully more images from these items will appear in the future). In other cases, there are images of full pages. Many of these are fascinating witnesses to medieval scientific practices, such as an unidentified eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript with Old English medical recipes that Stewart J. Brookes discussed on the DigiPal blog.

I highlight a few others to give a sense of the Wellcome holdings.*

Some of the manuscripts contain astronomical lore, such as this Arabic Horoscope of the Mongol Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, showing (according to the description) "the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar's birth on 25th April 1384" (Or MS PER 474).



This horoscope, from The Book of the Birth of Iskandar, is a good witness to the holdings of Arabic items in the Wellcome collection. For example, searching for "Iskandar" with date range between 0 and 1500 calls up 392 results; searching for "Arabic" between the same date range calls up another 83 results.

A few particularly nice images, in fact, are from Arabic books (MS Arabic 421, 437, and 458), showing the bindings of different codices that are instructive for looking at the materiality of these objects:

Other manuscripts contain medical knowledge mixed with other traditions, like the following three images, from a manuscript of the Apocalypse of John (MS 49, c.1420-30): the first, from the Apocalypse; the second, a diagram for urinomancy; the third, a diagram of bloodletting techniques within a zodiac.

For those interested in 15th-century English texts, the Wellcome Images hold a selection of scientific writings from the period. A few good examples: first, a collection of English and Latin scientific tracts (MS 411/3), with the image here from a text "On Unlucky Days"--a particularly fascinating genre of astronomical lore; and, second, a manuscript of the Pseudo-Galen Anathomia in English (MS 290).

This is just a small selection of some of the images that jumped out at me. Certainly the collection is worth much more extensive exploration, and can lend much to bringing medieval artifacts into the classroom.

* On a side note, a few frustrating issues make navigating the site difficult. One is a lack of clear browsing abilities--for example, to browse just manuscripts, or to limit by time or geography. Another is the lack of permalinks for items, making it difficult to cite individual images or item entries in the collection. For this reason, I've provided the low-resolution images here, though high-resolution images are available to download from the Wellcome site.

Review of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps

Over the past few days, medievalists have been abuzz about a new resource for manuscript study in the digital age: the folks at Sexy Codicology (a team made up of Giulio Menna and Marjolein de Vos) launched the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps website. I have been personally eager for this launch for several weeks now, since versions of some maps already appeared on Twitter (Giulio Menna first conceived of the maps in July 2013), as teasers for the main launch this week. If the emergence of digitized manuscripts has caused a major sea-change the field of medieval studies, Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is a rising star to help with navigation.

What are the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps? Most simply, they present interactive visualizations of thousands of digitized medieval manuscripts in hundreds of libraries geographically plotted on world maps. The maps and data are presented in four basic forms. On the "Standard" map (built on GoogleMaps), each point represents a library, which can be clicked on for more information about the institution, its digitized holdings, and a link. The Heatmap (also based on GoogleMaps) presents a visualization of the concentration of digitized manuscripts across geography--the more manuscripts in a location, the more concentrated the visualization; the heatmap is currently presented as a series of static images, with promises of future developments. The "Fancy" map (built on MapBox) is the most fully developed, an improvement on the "standard" map and heatmap. While it is still in development, the "fancy" map is fully usable and fully interactive, and the creators promise future capabilities that will encompass those of the other maps on a single platform. Finally, the creators give full, open access to the original data used to construct the maps--a complete list of libraries that have put digitized manuscripts online.

Little needs to be said about the quality of these maps, since users can see for themselves that the maps are a useful addition to the field. Instead, I want to focus on three foundational characteristics of the project that make this project excellent. First, although this launch presents some already great resources, the project is not complete but in a state of development. While this may seem to be a drawback for those focused on long-term sustainability and other related issues, for this project it suggests much potential for future improvements. In relation to sustainability and quality, my second assessment relates to the use of already well-established tools. The site itself is built on the all-purpose WordPress platform, while the maps are built on GoogleMaps and Mapbox--all apt choices that have been tested and well met in digital humanities work. Third, the entire project is fully open, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The project creators' laudable openness and willingness to share is already evidenced by the posting of complete data sets, as well as the use of other software devoted to open access (notably, WordPress and Mapbox). It is hoped that other projects associated with digitized manuscripts will follow this same path.

If there is any drawback to the project--a review must have its quibbles, and mine are both minor and hopefully remedied in the future--it is the lack of stable funding. Unfortunately, this does affect the "fancy" map, since the creators are only able to use the free version of Mapbox to create it, and are limited in the amount of space for the maps. Thus, the "fancy" map is limited in numbers of monthly views (currently at 3,000) as well as functionality for zooming in and out on the map. Moreover, the lack of stable funding hinders the overall progress; although the creators seek to improve the "fancy" map, they admit that their efforts at this point must go toward the "standard" map and heatmap. (If you do want to help defray costs, the creators suggest checking out the Sexy Codicology store.) With these concessions, however, it should be acknowledged that the project team has already achieved extraordinary feats without formal financial support. This fact in itself should speak to the potential for still greater accomplishments.

There is no doubt that the launch of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is already a success. Yesterday the project blog reported that "In just 48 hours, the website was visited around 3,000 times." With such positive response, and still more to come from the Sexy Codicology team, the future of medieval manuscripts online seems a bright one indeed.

Our own Orientalism: Why Medievalists are Complicit when Manuscripts Burn and Ruins Crumble

(Modern Medieval is pleased to host this guest post by Prof. Rabia Gregory, University of Missouri-Columbia)

Last month, as French ground forces moved into Mali at the request of Mali’s interim President, horrified whispers spread across the internet: Timbuktu’s manuscripts were in peril. On January 28, the French army moved to recapture Timbuktu amidst rumors that a retreating militia, perhaps the Salafist group Ansar Deine, had torched the Ahmad Baba Library. Later reports revealed that Ansar Deine had protected the Ahmad Baba Library, that the majority of manuscripts had been kept safe by African curators and local citizens, and that rumors of fire were stoked by a Sky News reporter embedded with the French army and confirmed by Hallè Ousmane, Timbuktu’s mayor, exiled 800 km away in Bamako. As images of scorched manuscripts on the tiled floors of the Ahmad Baba library began circulating, medievalists voiced a visceral outrage: to us, more than anyone, the destruction of books is an unfathomable act of barbarism. When fighting in Aleppo set the medieval souks aflame, threatened the Crac des Chevaliers, and endangered Palmyra and Old Damascus, and imperiled the manuscripts of Timbuktu, my friends and colleagues turned to Facebook and blogs to lament that they could never understand how anyone could so callously destroy their own cultural heritage. As if destroying manuscripts marked humans as dangerously different, or subhuman. As if our own armies had not destroyed vast collections of unique manuscript in Hamburg, Dresden, Baghdad, Mosul, Sarajevo, and elsewhere. As if we had forgotten how poor planning, corruption, war, and disaffected citizens had doomed  many of “our” libraries—the 2009 collapse in Cologne, the 1870 bombardment and fire which destroyed Strasbourg’s library and museum, the wholesale destruction and appropriation of books across Europe between 1914 and 1945, the floods which have permanently closed 12 libraries in Louisiana, damaged collections in Iowa, and endangered archives across the Eastern Seaboard. Arson has destroyed more books in the US and UK than in Africa: in 1986, an arsonist destroyed over 400,000 books and manuscripts in the Los Angeles County Library, and the sole surviving copy of the Beowulf manuscript, (BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv.) was damaged by fire in 1731; other unique manuscript copies,including the Life of Alfred, did not survive. Last year, a disgruntled alumnus vandalized and attempted to burn down our main research library last year sprinklers saved the building but water and smoke damaged many books and some of the Missouri State Historical Society’s collection.  Though we now find it quaint and amusing, the Bodleian’s famous oath recognizes the threat fire poses to libraries.

Western-educated medievalists are complicit in the ongoing destruction to medieval culture in Africa and the Near East, just as we passively allow the defunding and desecration of medieval archives and medieval studies programs in Europe and the Americas. There can be no apology for criminal actions under the guise of war, no excuses for the weak corrupt governments which cling to power exploiting the citizens of Africa and the Near East. But, as a medievalist who works with German manuscripts, and an Arab-American who follows the news from the Middle East closely, I must point out that many of the worst losses of medieval books and buildings have occurred in Western Europe. As we sit in our offices accusing them of barbarism, many Arabs and Muslims are mobilizing to protect medieval artifacts and memorializing ongoing tragedies through medieval poetry. The destruction of books, by fire or war, should not be an incomprehensible “act of barbarism” to medievalists, who habitually nuance the “barbaric” and often find our own western manuscripts have been lost to war or fire. My own research is hampered by the losses at libraries in Lübeck, Wroclaw, Dresden, and Strasbourg. Only a small portion of the 100 boxes of medieval manuscripts relocated by the Wroclaw City Library in 1943 under threat of bombardment have been recovered; those lost to fire will never resurface. I expect simplistic narrative of savage Muslim destroying priceless antiquities in incomprehensible acts of barbarism from reporters compiling stories from wire reports. Medievalists, many of whom are widely read in postcolonial theory, and invested in recovering evidence of marginal peoples, should know better.  

Editions, Manuscripts, and Digital Spelunking

When I began researching and writing about the use of apocryphal Acts for Old English sermons (for two chapters of my dissertation), it quickly became clear that I would to need to address a widely circulated collection known as the Virtutes apostolorum (sometimes erroneously connected with the name [Pseudo-] Abdias). More particularly, it became clear that the lack of modern critical editions might pose some problems. The last edition of this collection is Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, 2nd ed., 3 vols. in 2 (Hamburg: Benjamin Schiller, 1719), II, 402-742; yet even this edition is only a reprint from an earlier edition by Wolfgang Lazius (1552).

Fortunately, over the summer, I received a Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust Award for Scholars in Old English Studies, as well as the Fred A. Cazel, Jr. Fellowship in Medieval Studies from the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut (it's great to publicly acknowledge this help from both the Trust and UConn Medieval Studies), both of which helped me to attend the First Summer School on Christian Apocryphal Literature at the Université de Strasbourg in June--which focused almost exclusively on the Virtutes apostolorum. There, I worked with a team of scholars (led by Els Rose, the leading scholar on the Virtutes) to examine various aspects of the editions, manuscripts, sources, texts, and receptions of the Virtutes. It was a thrilling experience, and it helped me to face head on some of the issues I had feared. I've also returned to the materials from this seminar often, and they continue to help me with my project.

I've recently returned to some of these issues, and again I've been working very closely with the texts of the Virtutes--and worrying about Fabricius's edition. But, again, I was fortunate. This time, I am most grateful for digital repositories online, which have opened opportunities for reading these Acts in the manuscripts: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 12641; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 22020; St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 561; and Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Weissenburg 48. While none of these digitized manuscripts on its own solves the problems of lacking a modern critical edition, together they do allow me to do a kind of archival work without which my scholarship would surely suffer in ability as well as quality. It's been a great experience, seeking out these digitized manuscripts, reading them, playing with them, and incorporating them into my project. I like to think of this work as digital spelunking. This is still not a complete solution--but that could only be had (lacking a critical edition, still years in the making) if all of the repositories holding manuscripts of the Virtutes apostolorum would digitize them and make them freely and openly available.

So I find myself recalling some of the conversations currently being had about digital humanities, especially about digitized manuscripts. A few weeks ago, I was elated to find out that the British Library had freed its manuscript images to the public domain. Of course, William Noel has been calling on institutions to do this for months (e.g., see here and here). But it's great to see things moving forward like this, to see more and more digitiemerging, and to be able to benefit from these developments. To be honest, my work would be less for it.

A Reflection on Digital Bibles

Title page of 1765 edition of the
Bibliorum sacrorum, Volumen IV,
taken by Brandon W. Hawk (owner)

This past May, I wrote and submitted an essay for the annual ArtStor Travel Awards on the value of digital images to scholarship and teaching. Since the essay wasn't among those selected for the award (the winning essays may be accessed through the above link), I wanted to share it here. Below is a slightly revised version. I view this essay mainly as a reflection on several inter-related issues that I see in my own work, and that I hope to incorporate into my scholarship and teaching in the future. Unfortunately, the ArtStor image group is unavailable outside of my institution, but hopefully these reflections work without them--though I have supplied a few similar images as replacements.* No doubt readers will find resonances in it of things I've discussed in my previous posts.

For many students and scholars, access to the digital is often a prime gateway to approaching premodern topics, and digital resources are a growing demand. One subject that benefits from the integration of digital images is the history of the Bible in Western culture. Indeed, approaching the subject of the Bible is enriched by the digital in allowing not only access to images but also integrated ways of conveying the relevance of the subject matter for contemporary study.

The importance of the digital for the study of the Bible is demonstrated by the accompanying image set, made up of eighteen images on the subject. Of foremost concern in this image set is interdisciplinarity, as the subject encompasses disciplines of religion, art, history, and literature, to name just a few. Encompassing these concerns, this image group is generally arranged both chronologically and thematically, in order to facilitate two perspectives simultaneously. On the one hand, the group is structured upon the history of the book, both the Bible specifically and the topic more generally, from the earliest forms (scrolls and papyri) and manuscripts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls and Codex Sinaiticus) into the early modern period (printed forms and translations). On the other hand, the group is structured to trace important themes such as biblical textuality (critical editing), illustration (manuscript decorations), scholarship (glossing), printing (from Gutenberg onward), and modern translation (e.g. Coverdale and Tyndale Bibles). Significantly, this image group also emphasizes how we now consider all of these topics alongside current digital media that make these images available.

One productive way of viewing the history of the Bible is through the same type of interactivity, even hyper-visuality, that we continue to face in the digital age. For example, the integration of multiple modes of reading is depicted in many of these images, especially in the integration of multiple texts, illustrations, and glosses. Intersections of the biblical and digital are brought together most powerfully in late medieval glossed pages, represented in this image group by Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Lat. 9, folios 16r and 16v [see a similar substitute, with discussion, here]. The layouts of these pages are deeply hyper-visual: they contain numerous layers of the text, decorated initials, and the proliferation of glosses.* It is further valuable to consider issues surrounding the fact that we gaze upon these pages virtually, mediated by electronic screens, rather than experiencing their materiality.

It is clear that the digital opens up relevant approaches to the Bible in our own society. How we respond to all of these themes is telling, as we wrestle with notions of transcendence from two perspectives--in both cultural venerations of the Bible as well as the transcendence of the digital in our own lives.

* According to ArtStor's terms and policies, I cannot share the image group with those outside my institution's access, nor on an unrestricted website--but the site does allow sharing with private subscribers, so please email me with details if you would like to see the image group as a slideshow.
** I recently (since first writing this essay) read a good study by Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009), which deals with some of these same themes; I have also ordered (through ILL) another recent book that approaches these same issues, David A. Salomon, An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria as Medieval Hypertext (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2012).

On Manuscripts and Love

So far this summer, one of my projects has been dealing with manuscripts. Specifically, I've returned to a project I started for a paper on St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1395, which is described and digitized online here. I had begun by looking at the biblical materials and their paratexts (especially peritexts) to consider how scribes interacted with the Bible in the early medieval period--all of the fragments in this collection are Continental, from between the fifth and tenth centuries. The overall project is much too large for right now (I hope to go back it again sometime), but I've returned to a specific part of this collection that has been largely overlooked--a text of Colossians with glossing in the margins--for a shorter piece that describes and offers a transcription of the fragment.

I've been puzzling over the fragment, transcribing the text and glosses, and trying to brush up on my paleography skills to be able to discuss the texts, the scripts, and compare them to others. What I (re)discover every time I start working with manuscripts is that, despite having experience in various seminars, the only way to understand them is actually to do it: to be immersed, to explore. I have (as seen in the picture) a stack of books on paleography (Lindsay, Lowe, Bischoff, Brown, etc.), along with a hoard of articles from ILL, and I spent much of yesterday looking through plates in the Codices latini antiqiuores and other resources to get a handle on Insular minuscule and its various traits. I've also spent a lot of time with digital descriptions and images on the e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland website--a fantastic resource for medievalists.


And I've remembered how much I love looking at, pouring through, and working with manuscripts (even if only in facsimile, digital or otherwise). As monuments of the past, they are beautiful, frustrating, curious, riddling, and screaming at us from every page to pay attention to their idiosyncrasies. So I've been trying to pay attention. And I'm hoping to continue.