Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts online

A quick post and run today, as I'm just taking a short break from writing. My study has been getting a paint job over the last week, so my work has been a bit disrupted. Now I need to do some catching up! (But I'm very happy with my light, bright and funky new working environment. It's made such a difference to me wanting to sit in here for hours every day!)

Anyway, for those of you in/near Germany or with an interest in Carolingian, Ottonian and Romanesque history (or who simply love beautiful manuscripts), this exhibition should be a cracker. There is also a website where you can access digital copies of all 75 manuscripts. It's great to see more and more of this type of material being made available over the web.

Via ANZAMEMS -

Magnificent Manuscripts - Treasures of Book Illumination from 780 through 1180
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
October 19, 2012 - January 13, 2013

Exhibition Website

With 72 extraordinary manuscripts from the collection of the Bavarian State Library, as well as three exceptional works from the Bamberg State Library, the Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation presents a wide overview of the earliest and most precious examples of German book illumination.These 75 magnificent volumes represent some of the greatest cultural and artistic achievements of the Carolingian, Ottonian and Romanesque eras. Within this library’s extensive collection, the Ottonian manuscripts in particular form a unique nucleus that is unsurpassed worldwide. Owing to their extraordinary fragility, these highly valuable works can hardly ever leave the library’s vault. This exhibition of original manuscripts therefore offers a unique opportunity to discover thousand-year-old testimonies to our cultural heritage. 

For more information about the exhibition: http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Detailed-information.403+M5a20f3cfe33.0.html

For those unable to attend the exhibition, digital copies of all manuscripts on display at the exhibition can be accessed online here: http://pracht-auf-pergament.digitale-sammlungen.de

On York.

I spent last week in York, reputed to be the 'best preserved' medieval town in England (or something along those lines). It's hard for me to know what to say about my experiences thereof. On the one hand, I became fully immersed in my visit to Micklegate Bar, the ancient stone gateway on which the heads of a number of 'my' traitors were displayed to such devastating (though sometimes unintended) political effect in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Mickelgate museum, although tiny,  has a very good exhibition on the battle of Towton, aided in no small degree by a video that explores in detail what has been learned from a recent archeological excavation of a mass grave from the battlefield. (On this, suffice it to say that if 'chivalry' ever lived in the treatment of the vanquished, it seems to have well and truly died at Towton.) At the other end of the historical scale, I also visited a number of wonderful late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century pub survivals. My 'local' was the Mason's Arms, built in the late 1800s and incorporating into its quirky interior a stunningly carved wooden fireplace from the medieval gatehouse of York Castle (long since destroyed). I discovered some of the best architectural and decorative features (art deco tilework, glass etc.) in a couple of 1930s pubs that haven't suffered too much from 1960s and '70s 'improvements'.

But...( and as a great friend of mine always says, 'everything before the "but" is bullshit'), on the other hand, I can't deny that my first impression of the old town centre was an anticlimax. I had heard so much about York's medieval streets and 'walking the walls' that when I first entered the city, I was utterly shocked and disoriented to find that the first buildings I saw inside the walls were those of a 1960s brick housing estate! To be fair, I came in through the somewhat less tourist-friendly Goodramgate, and was primed with expectations that had been set, just two days earlier, by my experience of Saint Malo. Saint Malo was almost entirely reconstructed stone by stone after WWII, so it was able to be kept entirely 'in character'. By contrast, I imagine York is a more organic survival, so it bears many scars of its industrial past. I had high hopes of the Shambles, which is sold as an authentic medieval cobbled street complete with half-timbered buildings hanging over it at wonky angles. But here again, I'm afraid France won out. I saw much more extensive and better-preserved medieval quarters in places like Vannes and Rennes. I'm probably making myself very unpopular with the locals by saying this, but I'm afraid York was simply too over-built and over-touristed to charm me. Not to mention heinously expensive!

On the up side, though, I did have a couple of excellent meetings with professors from the University of York, which has a highly-regarded Centre for Medieval Studies and a very active scholarly press. Both the people I visited are senior scholars with big reputations in my field, so as a lowly PhD student from antipodean  obscurity, I was initially a bit intimidated. However, they both proved to be very positive and encouraging about my research topic and ideas, and they have given me lots of good advice, contacts etc. It is wonderful to have some validation from scholars of this caliber that I even *have* a research topic and questions worth pursuing. Of particular help, I think, is the offer to read and critique my work as I progress. This is an offer I'll definitely be taking up, starting with my attempt to turn my conference paper from IMC Leeds into a publishable article (my first! in academia, anyway). That will be a project for July-August. I already have a pretty rough draft, so I just need to make sure I dive straight back into it when I get home next week.

I'm delivering my paper at Leeds this afternoon. I'm much happier with it now, after some late editing has tightened up the argument and trimmed some loose threads (all those weird/funny little bits that you so want to include for their entertainment value, but which sadly suck up precious presentation minutes). I'll write more on the IMC in a future post. It's my first time here, and I'm a little overwhelmed by the scale of it, but I have met some very cool peeps, including some fellow medievalist bloggers.

Francophilia: Asterix in Paris

Two of my favourite French cultural icons are being brought together with an exhibition of Asterix and friends at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The show, appropriately, is being housed in the museum’s frigidarium, a part of the building that has survived since the Romans ran Gaul.

In the typically irreverent style of Asterix’s creators Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, the show features some great cartoon parodies of classic artworks.

I love this version of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV -


And here is their take on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, with a fish (what, no roast boar?!) standing in for the human corpse -


It’s interesting to hear how Uderzo and Goscinny incorporated historical research into their artistic process. The exhibition’s curator Emmanuelle Héran says that ‘while neither spoke Latin (they relied on dictionaries for quotations) and weren’t experts on Roman or Gaulish history, they did plenty of school-book research. The exhibition shows them devouring Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and you can see notes Goscinny scribbled in biro on pieces of exercise book paper as preparation for Asterix and the Olympic Games. “No pine trees, cypresses” […] “From 776 B.C. the Games are held for 5 days between the end of June and the first days of September”’.

Apparently, historians were sometimes distressed by their gleeful anachronisms. (I can just imagine the kind of wizened carrot-up-his-bum scholar that would take issue with Asterix. It’s a cartoon, people.) Luckily, Goscinny and Uderzo were more interested in having a laugh than providing accurate depictions of the past. Otherwise, we might never have witnessed the joyous concurrence of a 16th century square-rigged pirate ship and a Viking longboat.

Strangely, while I enjoy reading the Asterix cartoons in French, I think they’re actually funnier in English. I don’t know, maybe the English language is more suited to puns and word play. For instance, the drug reference makes Getafix a much wittier name for a druidic pharmacologist than the original Panoramix. And isn't Cacophonix a more suitable moniker for the no-talent Bard than the French Assurancetourix (which sounds like rental car insurance)?

In French class last term, my classmates and I could get away with drinking wine and waffling about movies, rugby and what we did over the weekend. This term, we have to read French novels and come to class prepared with lots of intelligent things to say about them whilst exhibiting the ability to ‘think in French’. At the moment, I’m leavening my reading of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with liberal doses of Asterix en Hispanie (but don’t tell my teacher).

Torture museums and public history

When I posted recently on the use of scold’s bridle in early modern England, a number of you commented that you felt as chilled as I did when contemplating the role these devices played in the brutal enforcement of gender and class order. Several of you also mentioned you had seen these devices in museums in the UK and Europe, and that set me off on another train of thought.

On the one hand, it’s essential that museums, as educators and interpreters of public history, tell the full story about the past even when it’s unpalatable for the tourists. But on the other hand, I can’t help but be disturbed by the gruesome voyeurism and the titillation that is sometimes enabled (and even promoted) by museums. It seems that as cash-strapped museums struggle to make themselves more appealing to the tourists, the temptation to go for the sensational in the quest to make a buck may just be getting to be too much for some of them.

Something like the London Dungeon is probably an extreme example that, judging by the way it promotes itself, happily blurs the line between museum and ghoulish entertainment. The Dungeon urges schools to “Put aside the textbooks, bring the past to life and give your class a history lesson to remember with a visit to the Dungeons! … Our teams of live actors blend carefully researched historical fact with outstanding special effects to provide your class with an exciting, educational and unforgettable journey into the depths of history that is, above all, seriously scary fun!” Not only that, but with the Dungeons Resource Pack, teachers can “Take history's horrible bits back to your classroom and allow your pupils to build on their new found knowledge and enthusiasm. …Combine the Dungeons' usual dose of interactive fun and gore with national curriculum topics of study.”

The London Dungeon’s shtick promotes a vicarious experience of London’s ‘dark underbelly’, complete with the usual relish in displaying medieval instruments of torture and recounting the ‘fun history’ of sexual sadists like Jack the Ripper*. As another example, the organisers of this major touring exhibition of historical torture devices don’t baulk at promoting the titillation factor, promising, “Students too, will have the chance to satisfy their curiosity on … Tortura’s more flashy and fleshy attraction.” Can you imagine if this same sensibility - or rather lack of it - was applied to museum representations of more recent history? Say, Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Srebrenica? No? So why does it seem perfectly acceptable to make slick ‘multimedia entertainment’ out of it just because the victims and perpetrators lived in the ‘distant’ past?

I hate seeing topics like the European witchcraft persecutions and the Inquisition treated in ways that cynically exploit our seemingly insatiable desire for images of violence and torture as entertainment (images that are often sexualised in highly problematic ways)**. I certainly don’t believe museums should avoid or sanitise topics like this. But whether they succeed in making people think more deeply - both about the past and the present - or merely give passive viewers a cheap thrill depends very much on how things are presented. Put into their wider social, political and cultural context, such subjects can be powerful prompts to question the forces that shape individual lives and wider society, both historically and in our own time. But too often, these types of exhibits never rise above gratuitous displays of torture implements, presented shorn of all context and achieving little but to elicit gasps of voyeuristic horror.

As museums begin to utilise new technologies to make their exhibits more interactive and engaging (read, more effective at competing for the tourist dollar), I think this is going to become a much more sensitive issue. When you replace dusty old glass cases and typewritten index cards with fully sensory, 3D experiences, the line between education and entertainment is bound to get even more blurred. I think that is going to make it even trickier for museums to deal appropriately with the dark side of history.

** As an aside, Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delight does a fine job of locating the Jack the Ripper episode within its much broader and more complex historical and cultural context of class conflict, sexual politics, racism and the role of the media in Victorian England. It’s a scholarly work (careful footnoting of sources, full bibliography etc.) but Walkowitz’s clear and dynamic writing style also makes it very readable for the layperson.

** Do a Google image search on ‘inquisition museum’. I rest my case.