2022 Research Awards
Erin Johnson, History
Project: Reconstructing Power Relations in Early Modern British Medicine
In the summer of 2020, I was awarded $1,000 by the MEMS Executive Committee to help defray the costs of an initial research trip to several London archives. With the unexpected and unrelenting complications and restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, that visit had to be put on hold. It was only in April of 2022 that I was finally able to embark on this research.
On April 3, I departed for a three-week trip and arranged to visit three different archives: the British Library (BL), the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), and the Bethlem Museum of the Mind (BMM). In part because of the extensive preparatory work she had performed in advance of my visit, and thanks to the efficiency of archivists, I had a very successful trip.
I was able to photograph materials that will form the basis of my dissertation, tentatively titled “Maternal Affects: Embodying Motherhood in Early Modern England.” These materials include those relating to the foundation and renewal of London’s Bridewell and Bethlem (the 15th-century institution that gave rise to the term “bedlam”) hospitals, Bridewell court records, unpublished sermons given to Bridewell and Bethlem’s Board of Governors, Middlesex and Westminster sessions of the peace, as well as medical manuscripts, pharmacopeia, and letters between medical practitioners and their patients.
I was also fortunate to scan pictorial representations of Bridewell and Bethlem in their earlier forms, which give a greater sense of their imposing presence in the city landscape. These records are vital to my dissertation, which will examine the ways affective regimes and mind-body thinking of the period shaped lived experiences and the gendered nature of power dynamics in early modern London.
Bailey Sullivan, History of Art
Project: Imaging the City in 15th Century Germany
In June 2022, I spent three weeks traveling throughout Germany. The objectives of my trip were twofold. First, to conduct visual and codicological analyses of three objects, all accounts of pilgrimage journeys—Sebald Rieter’s View of the Holy Land (after 1479), now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; Konrad von Grünemberg’s Bericht einer Pilgerreise ins Heilige Land (1486), now in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha of the Universität Erfurt; and a volume of Johann Koellhoff’s Die Cronica van der hiliger Stat van Coellen (1499), also in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Second, to visit the most important collections of German medieval art and view the monumental architecture of cities such as Nuremberg and Cologne. My time in the archives was thus supplemented with a full immersion into medieval and early modern German visual culture. The ensuing trip took me from the heart of Bavaria to the forests of Thuringia, from bustling German metropoles to quiet ducal palaces.
These two research endeavors allowed me to refine my scholarly interests and dissertation topic. In particular, I focused on a longstanding interest, German city-views or Stadtansichten, and their appearance not only in manuscripts and printed books of pilgrimage journeys but also panel paintings, like Hans Memling’s Scenes from the Life of Christ and the Virgin (pictured). Jerusalem itself is an actor in this narrative—figures weave betwixt and between the city’s architectural landscape. The topography of Jerusalem guides viewers through the composition, allowing them to meditate not just on the events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, but also on the significance of Jerusalem as the site of salvation. Viewing these cityscapes in the framework of pilgrimage, both imaginary and physical, I sought to understand how the city was “read” in its late-medieval context.
The manuscripts and printed books I examined were notably influential in shaping the direction of my dissertation research. My first-hand encounter with Konrad von Grünemberg’s 1486 work, which contains numerous views of cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Bethlehem, and other important pilgrimage sites, was particularly fruitful. Several of its illustrations bear a palpable semblance to woodcuts of a printed volume, also published in 1486, of another famous pilgrim’s experience in the Holy Land: Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam. By examining the Grünemberg manuscript I hoped to determine how exactly the artist copied the woodcuts from the Breydenbach volume. In particular, I sought evidence of pouncing, a method of transferring an image from one piece of paper to another. While I found no evidence of the use of this technique, I am grateful for the opportunity to think more about the materiality of print and the materiality of manuscripts in this pivotal moment of bookmaking in the fifteenth century.
Rheagan Martin, History of Art
Project: Logics of and in Early Modern Print
In May, I undertook an extensive research trip to consult printed books that often exist in extremely limited numbers or as sole extant examples. In total, I visited eleven rare books repositories in Italy and Germany, which allowed me to consult devotional texts and examples of printed music produced under the aegis of Venetian publisher Lucantonio Giunta.
These texts contain a corpus of woodblocks reused in books ranging in scale from small octavo Prayer Books, to quarto Breviaries, to the largest choir books printed in the 15th century. I argue that specialist music printer Johann Emerich was aware of contemporaneous theory surrounding the arithmetical and geometrical proportions of musical scales which informed his reuse of woodblocks across the proportional scale of the printed page. Furthermore, I argue that this reuse drew upon specifically Venetian visual cultural strategies including spoliation and the print-like production of tertiary contact relics.
While in Venice I was also able to photograph paintings and works of art in key sites that are central to the first and second chapters of my dissertation. After months of negotiation, I received special permission from the Scuola Dalmata di Venezia to photograph one of their most significant paintings, St. Augustine in His Study by Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio (1502). I argue that the in situ painting, situated next to a window in the façade, takes advantage of the conditions of natural light. In order to represent these effects, I positioned a camera on a tripod at various points throughout the space and used extended exposures to capture the painting without artificial lighting.
I also received special permission from the Vicariate of San Polo to photograph the wooden intarsia in the choir stalls of the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, images that relate to the illuminated first folios discussed in the first chapter of my dissertation.
After returning to London in June, I completed the full draft of the final chapter of my dissertation. Additionally, I have outlined a robust introduction which will provide historical context, explain the theoretical framework and methodology, and set forth the overall thesis supported by each chapter.
Travel funding from MEMS along with earlier funding received from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation allowed me to make substantial progress toward the completion of my degree program.
Julia LaPlaca, History of Art
Project: Getting Started with Tapestry
This past summer, I took a six-week research trip to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England to gather material for my prelim exams, begin early dissertation research, and network. MEMS summer funding supported day trips to collections and monuments outside the city centers where I spent most of my time. I was able to see the Bayeux tapestry in Normandie, arguably the most famous medieval textile. In addition, I visited collections in Bruges, Oudenaarde, Ghent, Tournai, and Utrecht.
I had personal tours and meetings with curators at several institutions in Brussels and France, and I was also able to meet other medieval studies scholars at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, where I presented a paper titled: “Removing the 'Border Guards': Eugène Müntz and Aby Warburg on Tapestry” in a session that addressed “Rethinking 'Texts' on Textiles and Tapestries.”
One of my most fulfilling and generative daytrips was to Tournai, Belgium. During my visit, I was able to tour two important cultural institutions for tapestry history and production. First, I went to TAMAT (Musée de la Tapisserie et des Arts Textiles de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles), where I got a personal tour from curator Béatrice Pennant. TAMAT houses ten 15-16th-century tapestries and a collection of contemporary tapestries and fiber-art pieces. I was particularly struck by one of the 15th-century tapestries in the collection and hope to feature it a dissertation chapter. The tapestries in TAMAT’s collection have not attracted much scholarly attention and are not widely published, so visiting them alerted me to their existence and has allowed me to build a foundation for researching them more back in Michigan. Béatrice and I remain in touch, and she has generously agreed to help me with any questions I may have in the future.
Béatrice also took me to CRECIT (Centre de Recherches, d’Essais et de Contrôles scientifiques et techniques pour l’Industrie Textile), the only active tapestry workshop in Belgium. The staff there showed me around their weaving studio, conservation studio, and dying laboratories. They answered my many questions and generously gave me an up-close and hands-on look at how tapestries are made. This experience gave me insight into tapestry production, which has not changed significantly since the Middle Ages. I also learned about design and production challenges facing contemporary weavers. Watching and talking to the weavers helped clarify the production process, and the photos I took there will be great teaching materials should I ever need to explain the tapestry production to students.
2020-2021 Research Awards
Brenna Larson (History of Art) explains tracking down an archive (!) and various finds that will inform her dissertation project. Image: Ligurian and Iberian tiles from the Chapel of St. Antoninus, c. 1526, Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa. Photo by Brenna Larson
Gunay Kayarlar (History) has been looking into the reasons behind exile in Ottoman times and what might account for fluctuation in the number of exiles from period to period. Image: Sinop fortress, in northern Turkey, hosted exiles and prisoners both during Ottoman times and in the Republican era.
Jahnabi Chanchani (Asian Languages & Cultures) considers the place of animals in Indian devotional architecture. Image: Lakshmana Temple in Khajuraho, Central India. Photo by Jahnabi Chanchani.
Yihui Sheng (Asian Languages & Cultures) undertook research in Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Beijing around the multimedia aspects of early modern chuanqi drama -- from the page to song to the stage. Image: Page detail from a late Ming song book, Yi chun jin: Newly Carved, Illustrated, and With Main Beats Marked.
Frank Espinosa (History) tells us about completing a special skills workshop that introduced him to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. Image: liber feudorum maior. ACA. Can. Reg. 1. 1r.
Shai Zamir (History) has been working in Seville's key archive of colonial Spain to explore the expressions of friendship among Spain's colonial elites. Image: The Golden Tower, Seville, Spain.
2019 Research Awards
Project: Early Non-Clerical Reading Practices in England
Annika Pattenaude’s (English) dissertation explores reading strategies that depart from the conventional, formal practices of clerics in premodern culture. This “amateur reading” project focuses on writers and texts of the fifteenth century when literacy, literary technologies, and access to literature were expanding exponentially. Annika approaches her topic from the perspective of affect studies, a field that encompasses the emotional and phenomenological experience of reading, to ask: How did “amateur” readers learn to interpret literature? What heterogeneous meanings could be derived from texts of the era and how can understanding the lay demographic give a more complete picture of the development of literary culture into the Renaissance?
She turned to primers, fables, moral narratives and ballads since these would have been more readily available to non-clerical audiences. Annika is exploring how the form and media of the texts provide clues to how they were being read. Her research took her to the British Library, Bodleian Library, and National Library of Scotland.This trip focused on two chapters. First is the heterogeneous reading practices around medieval fables, a simple genre used to teach young students to read. These were recorded and circulated in diverse formats that could invite disparate reading practices: some formally mark the start of each new story, while others separate the moral and the story, and still others run together the narratives and moral lessons. Some texts are illustrated or illuminated; some are quite plain. Some even interweave fables with non-fable stories. These differences suggest that a genre regarded as straightforward reading instruction actually invited a variety of interpretations.
The second focus was the work of John Skelton, which circulated in both manuscript and print form in the fifteenth century. Skelton’s poems take multiple forms – in manuscripts surrounded by glosses and envoys or printed in neat rectangular stanzas – and the same poem might appear in various formats. Annika’s research explored how these different formats might have accommodated different readerships. Do the various print versions anticipate a wider lay audience? What is the upshot of print versions that simplify the sprawling multilingualism of the manuscript form? These questions will help shape her investigation of the relationship between amateur readers represented in Skelton’s poetry and the actual fifteenth-century readers who encountered his work.
Project: Laboring in the 14th-16th Centuries
This summer Margo Kolenda-Mason (English, pictured here with Cecilia Morales -- research story below) spent two weeks in London visiting the British Library, Guildhall Library (which houses materials for the London Metropolitan Archives), and The National Archives in Kew, where she learned an immense amount about working with archival finding aids, how these different institutions organize and catalogue their material, and general practices of conducting archival research.At the British Library, she saw the Harley 913 manuscript, which contains a unique copy of a poem she is working on, “Lullay, lullay, litil child.” As restricted material, she could not photograph it, “But it was exciting to hold this book in my hands and get a clearer sense of the kind of object it was. I made my own transcription of the poem and its Latin counterpoint and also a digital drawing of the rubrication, decorations, and marginal marks.”Margo is primarily interested in labor legislation and breaches of such regulations. She transcribed the 1474 “Ordinance for Regulating Carpenters, Masons and other Laborers at Calais,” which included salaries, hours, and holidays, as well as the ways masters and wardens were held accountable for their managerial practices. She also reviewed lists of offences against labor regulations between 1327 and 1377, which included over 1,500 names and fines, suggesting that legislation did not necessarily change people’s attitudes toward labor.Building off her dissertation, Margo began researching botchers, English craftspeople who mended and repaired old clothing but were excluded from the guild system. Her initial leads came up dry, but one sent her into the Great Wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which took her to books of wards and liveries, books of fines from the lord Remembrancer, yearly accounts of the Great Wardrobe, Warrants Subsidary to those accounts, account books of Cofferers, Controllers, Exchequers and the Treasurer of Chambers. Still nothing! But she did find lists of wages from 1569-1570 for such occupations as Mole Taker, Ratcatcher, and Iron Kep, as well as a list of 1588-1589 household expenses (sugar, lemons, saffron, etc) that may spark future projects.
Project: Gender in Military Life
Aidyn Osgood (History) traveled to Stuttgart and Karlsruhe in August 2019 to visit the Haupstaatsarchiv and Generallandesarchiv. This research would set him up to explore how armies responded to the Reformation’s push for gender and sexual disciplining, and how armies were a vehicle through which early modern writers made sense of sexuality.
His most useful takeaway was the paleography skill he acquired over the month, enabling him to read sixteenth-century German documents whose script is notoriously difficult due to lack of spelling standardization, foreign ways of writing letters, and the similarity between several letters in the alphabet. He had spent hours going over marginalia with a German librarian in July, but only after a month’s exposure was he able to, with modest toil, make sense of the documents he found.
While finding no satisfactory records about quartering, soldierly love, and sexual violence, he did locate documents that shed important light on his research questions. For example, documents from Duke Christoph of Württemberg to Charles V of Spain register complaints of Spanish soldiers beating wives, children and servants, usurping the role of the Hausvater in the moral disciplining of his charges. Formulaic in composition, the complaints still register Christoph’s expectation that documenting the harm done to the household unit would best convince Charles V to end his occupation.
Military law codes Aidyn found scattered among different collections filled in chronological gaps in the published codes he had already collected. The codes from between 1520 and 1550 will be critical for tracking the disciplinary push in army life during the Reformation; they also suggest that the prescriptive and didactic military theory he had studied so far mapped only very unevenly onto the actions of military commanders on the field. To date scholars have assumed that sample law codes differed little from their enforced counterparts.
Finally, Aidyn uncovered solid evidence of the presence of women camp followers in campaign life in materials that registered significant concern about their sexual relationships. Documents from the case of the Duchy of Württemberg convinced him that women did indeed follow armies in numbers comparable to those listed in the literature. Letters indicate that the ratio of soldiers to women and children was something like three to two. Muster registers also report the presence of women and children connected to soldiers, and concern with familial politics shows up in official military documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
Project: Lay Women in Reformation England
Taylor Sims (History) conducted core archival research in three county record offices in the UK for her dissertation on women’s lay piety across religious traditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Dorset History Centre, the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre, and the Berkshire Record Office are all situated within the medieval boundaries of the Diocese of Salisbury, and their records shed light on lay women’s navigation of religious continuity and change over the period conventionally called the Reformation.
In Dorset, Taylor began with churchwarden’s accounts and act books, then moved on to transcribing and photographing several collections in Wiltshire, especially sixteenth-century visitation presentments (simple reports to the dean on the physical and moral state of the parish), and finally she looked at archdeaconry and local parish records in Berkshire. Across the three archives, Taylor worked with stellar archivists and staff, making her research trip both efficient and enjoyable.
In addition she visited several towns and parish churches where her subjects would have lived, worked and worshipped. Spending time in these places allowed Taylor to connect the individuals and groups preserved in the manuscripts to their dynamic local contexts and place the day-to-day developments in parish communities within the broader cultural context of the English Reformation, addressing its local precursors and repercussions.
Project: Powerful Women Religious in Fifteenth-Century Spain
In summer 2019 Hayley Bowman (History) conducted research at the Convento de la Concepción in Ágreda, Spain, where she worked in the convent’s locutorio under the supervision of Abbess Hna. Vianney Maria and archivist Hna. Maria Luz. She viewed and photographed over 4,000 manuscript pages of primary materials around the key figure in her dissertation project, Sor María de Ágreda (1602-1665), who corresponded with King Philip IV and other members of the Spanish royal family, as well as important religious and political figures and other religious women in convents in Borja and Madrid.
Besides Sor María’s copious correspondence, Hayley transcribed official and administrative documents, financial documents written and annotated by Sor María in her role as Abbess, including a seventeenth-century copy of her unfinished account of her own life, which details her own experience and family history.
The space of the convent is also important material evidence and in addition to working in situ, Hayley supplemented with a copy of architectural plans for the building (the originals being too fragile) along with the chronicle of construction and financial issues, also in Sor María’s own hand.
In addition, she attended a local screening of Texas before the Alamo, an independent short film that features scenes shot in both the convent and the childhood home of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda. She met with and spoke to the film’s director and actors while attending the event at Ágreda’s community center.
Project: Connoiseurship of Altarpieces
This past summer Brenna Larson (History of Art) traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, both of which house paintings made for Ligurian and, perhaps, Corsican audiences. These are rare items in North America and will be featured in her dissertation.
At the PMA, she worked with senior paintings conservator, Terry Lignelli, to examine Nicolò Corso’s St. Jerome, a single panel which was originally at the center of a now disassembled triptych from the church of San Gerolamo de Quarto, located just outside Genoa. The flesh tones were in particularly good condition, which facilitated comparison with work of Vincenzo Foppa, examples of which hung in an adjacent gallery. Brenna also viewed the curatorial and conservation files for the Corso panel, both of which were enlightening.
In Miami, Brenna viewed a Madonna and Child polyptych attributed to Giovanni Barbagelata. The painting is not currently on view so she was granted access to the work in an off-site storage facility. Her examination of the piece included its three upper-tier panels, which have been very difficult to examine in the other polyptych altarpieces she is working on. At close range she could appreciate various details of manufacture, including techniques of gold ornamentation and the method by which the makers had applied a pomegranate textile motif to garments. She is eager to further investigate the work’s origins in Europe, as a Kress Institutional Fellow based in Florence starting in fall 2019.
Project: Learning Latin
True to the MEMS commitment to premodernist skills training, Erin Johnson (History) was awarded support for a six-week intensive Latin course offered by the University of Michigan’s Summer Language Institute. The course compressed the first two years of traditional Latin curriculum in combination with daily tests, quizzes, and translation assignments from both classical and medeival works. Erin cites Julius Caesar’s invasion of Gaul and passages from a medieval health manual for women called the Trotula as examples of materials covered. She states, “As a result of this class and my commitment to continued independent study, I feel confident in my ability to read the Latin language sources vital to my research and the development of my dissertation.”
Project: Ideas Around Maternity in Colonializing Britain
In July 2019 Cecilia Morales (English) traveled to London to work in the British Library and Wellcome Library for her dissertation, which engages ways the rhetoric around maternity shaped and was shaped by intense cultural debates across seventeenth-century England. When mentioned in literature, maternity was never apolitical or value neutral; it engaged attitudes about not only gender and reproduction, but also emerging concepts of religion, race, and nationality. Her research focus on this trip was to see what case could be made for an ecocritical understanding of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, specifically how representations of the natural world shaped colonial attitudes toward the maternity of enslaved women.
To build a context for understanding Behn’s portrayals of the plants and animals of Surinam (the scene of her work), Cecilia explored materials pertaining to the scientific movement of the seventeenth century, as well as medical texts and recipe books related to reproduction and childbirth. She dove into correspondence between aspiring English explorer-scientists around the world and the Royal Society, the arbiter of knowledge considered to be of scientific importance. Accounts of non-English mothers giving birth were of particular interest: such accounts were written in Latin in a careful hand, bound, and decorated to indicate their status.
But examining the 1665-1667 diary of William Byam, the English governor of Surinam in the period described by Behn’s Oroonoko, proved the highlight of her trip. It describes the hardships faced by English colonists in the Surinam landscape, providing an important counterpoint to the perspective of Behn’s narrator. While Imoida, an enslaved African woman in the story, seems to validate English expectations of “natural” maternity, the fecundity of the land and a tigress present complicating models that resist colonists’ attempts to master and exploit the plants and animals of “conquered” territories. Attempts to assert even narrative control over the Surinamese ecology are in the end undermined.
2018 Research Awards
Project: Learning a New Transcription Technology
This summer Rheagan Martin (History of Art) traveled to Venice, Italy, to consult early printed books in the collections of the Fondazione Giorigo Cini and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. He attended a week-long workshop in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, organized through the Herzog August Bibliothek and Friedrich-Alexander Universität. This course taught an international standard for transcribing manuscripts known as TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) within a digital framework known as XML (Extensible Markup Language). This allows manuscripts to be transcribed and searched digitally not just as text but as recognizable values such as makers or geographic locations. The workshop was a great opportunity to continue to develop the German-language skills for which he used MEMS funding last summer and to advance his interest in digital humanities as it relates to manuscript studies.
Project: Discovering Riches in Salisbury
This past summer Taylor Sims (History) spent two weeks in the U.K. exploring several archives relevant to her research on women, gender, and the English Reformation. From London to Salisbury to Chippenham, she put her MEMS Summer Grant to use exploring archives at various levels of national, church, and diocesan administration. Starting in London, she worked in the National Archives at Kew, the British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archive. With a variety of manuscript sources, including lay subsidies, wills, court records, sermons, and saint's lives, she was able to analyze every-day, local, and gendered experiences of religious continuity and change.
Since Taylor's dissertation project focuses on the Diocese of Salisbury from 1450-1600, she also visited the Salisbury Cathedral Archive. Here, she was able to explore a relatively underutilized source base on social, economic, and pious networks in Salisbury and its parishes. The Cathedral Library also provided surprising sources, including dynamic manuscripts that reflect both consistent and changing local theological concerns. Before arriving in Salisbury, Taylor had not anticipated how rich the archive would be, since her project is not primarily concerned with cathedral administration or Salisbury as the seat of power. However, the prescriptive and descriptive sources she found make the sixteenth-century parish life more legible than she had hoped. While in Salisbury, she also spent a morning in the parish church of St. Thomas & St. Edmund, viewing the medieval stonework, paintings, and memorials.
Taylor went on to Chippenham to visit the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre (the Wiltshire Record Office) to access churchwardens' accounts, visitations, and confraternity rolls. Here, she worked with late fifteenth and sixteenth-century parish records and focused on local dynamics in the county of Wiltshire. Several of the churchwardens' accounts were too fragile to handle; but with the help of understanding archivists, she was able to access most of her sources and compile a substantial source base for her dissertation. While in Chippenham, she was also able to explore the village of Lacock, with its fourteenth-century parish church, tithe barn, and late medieval houses.
Project: In Search of Quentin Mestys
This research trip was crucial to the first chapter of Kate Campbell's (History of Art) dissertation, which situates Quentin Metsys’s work in Antwerp as triggering a paradigm shift in Antwerp artists’ conceptions of their own artmaking practices.
In Belgium she was able to study Metsys’s paintings in collections and archives of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Antwerp. This research focused on the Saint John Altarpiece, made c. 1511 for the altar of the Joiners’ Guild in Antwerp’s cathedral. She studied documents related to provenance and conservation of the painting dating back to the nineteenth century and visited the Antwerp municipal archive to look for documents of the Joiners’ Guild related to the commission of the altarpiece. She was also able to study and photograph an undigitized copy of Franchoys Fickaert’s Metamorphosis (1648), the first monograph on Metsys, in the collection of the Museum Plantin-Moretus.
The second half of the trip was spent at a conference in Belgium and continuing her research in Spain. The Historians of Netherlandish Art, a major conference in the field was held this year at Ghent University, where Kate gave a Pecha Kucha presentation on my dissertation. In Madrid She studied several of Metsys’s works in the collection of the Prado Museum, including The Temptation of Saint Anthony, made in collaboration with Joachim Patinir c. 1520-24. There she met Christine Seidel and Alejandro Vergara, curators of Flemish painting, and discussed Metsys’s working methods with them.
She returned with a better understanding of Metsys’s typical practices and his reception in seventeenth-century art literature, as well as a better understanding of the work of his collaborator, Patinir.
Project: Tracking Down Key Sources
In summer 2018 Kate Waggoner-Karchner (History) completed a research trip to Spain where she visited Oviedo, Salamanca, and Toledo to view and potentially photograph three manuscripts. The first, held at the Oviedo cathedral, is a key part of a dissertation chapter on challenges the Church faced in the fifteenth century. Kate was able to meet with the archivist and study the manuscript and the archive’s catalog, which is unpublished. She was able to confirm the manuscript's origin and that several of the texts in it directly relate to her topic. After taking notes on the features of the manuscript and some of the marginalia, the archivist allowed her to photograph the key text in its entirety, as well as several marginal notes from other texts and watermarks.
Then on to Salamanca, where she met with her advisor, Ryan Szpiech, who was teaching in Granada, and several Salamanca professors, including one who personally held a second manuscript she was interested in seeing. She was allowed to photograph the entire manuscript, which has never before been studied. After carefully going through the photographs and labeling everything, she identified a missing folio, a fact she was able to confirm the next day, along with several other minor features, so she now has comprehensive notes for future use. While this document’s features and contents do not fit directly into her dissertation topics, she plans to write up a short notice about it for one of several appropriate journals on medieval manuscripts.
Finally, she spent a day in Toledo where she met with one of the cathedral archivists and was able to identify the third manuscript (the old catalog did not have the most recent shelf-markings) and study that item in situ. She confirmed not only that this was a copy of Contra legem that scholars had not previously identified, but that it was created in the same context as the manuscript in Oviedo (making it another critical source for her chapter on the Church). In addition to using it in the dissertation, she plans to include it in her write-up on new copies of Contra legem for publication.
Project: Assimilation in Alsace
This past summer, Haley Bowen (History) spent several weeks conducting archival work and carrying out exploratory dissertation research in Paris and Strasbourg. Relying primarily on the correspondence and administrative documents of Cardinal Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, she explored how the Paris government administered the recently acquired territory of Alsace in the late seventeenth century.
When it was seized from German princes, Alsace was viewed by Parisian elites as a war-torn and utterly backwards region, and its enthusiastic new duke went to great lengths to introduce French morals and customs into the territory. This included, for example, the chaste requirement that brothers and sisters no longer sleep in the same bed (incest among the Alsatians being of great concern!) and that local Alsatian elites adopt French modes of dressing. Her research this summer allowed her to place these peculiar assimilation projects in the broader context of French territorial expansion during the seventeenth century. The documents hint that such assertions of soft power were part of an overall strategy to eliminate foreign influence within the region and cement claims that the German-speaking territory did truly belong to France.
Two weeks at the municipal archives in Strasbourg and the departmental archives in Bas-Rhin provided tantalizing evidence of the strategies local Alsatian elites used to circumvent French authority, especially the government's 1685 demand that Protestants convert to Catholicism or leave France permanently. Strasbourg, long a hotbed of Protestantism, managed to gain special exemptions from expulsion through both negotiations with Parisian officials and a careful strategy of calculated avoidance. She hopes to use this research in a forthcoming article that explores questions of local autonomy and assimilation in French borderlands. The trip also allowed her to spend significant time in Strasbourg, a city whose dual identity persists in striking forms even today.
Project: Linking Senegal, Spain, and Peru
In summer 2018 Ximena Gómez (History of Art) went to Senegal and Spain to complete the research for her dissertation. She began her trip in the Senegalese capital, where she attended Dak’art, a biennial exhibition of African art. In addition to encountering contemporary African art and artists, she enjoyed meeting the exhibition’s hostesses, who were dressed in the traditional clothing of Senegalese ethnic groups, including the jewelry she had written about in a chapter on the Virgin of the Antigua. She also acquired a Christian wax-print fabric with the Notre-Dame du Perpétuel Secours, whose West African interpretation of the Virgin she will treat in the conclusion of her dissertation.
She next traveled to Casamance, in southern Senegal, where many of the black Antigua confraternity members she studies originally hailed from. While the ritual objects they would have used are not extant, it helped to see the unique environment that produced them. Seeing how the forest immediately meets the sea in this area, she speculates that enslaved West Africans brought to Lima would have found the coast and fishing culture of Lima familiar, but the lack of wooded areas jarring. She now suspects that the confraternity’s early purchase of a wooden processional image could have had special significance to the Senegambian devotees of the Virgin of the Antigua in Lima.
In Madrid, visits to the Prado and the Museo de América allowed her to see, among other things, a city view of Lima dating to the seventeenth century, which gives a rich visual representation of a city teeming with commerce and a large multiracial population. This, rather than the outdated narrative of a “Spanish city,” is the version of Lima that her project hopes to add to art historical study.
Since her project deals with limeño cults of the Virgin, it was important to see the Spanish cults from which Lima’s developed. Pilgrimages to multiple shrines of the Virgin included the Virgin of Montserrat near Barcelona, the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, and the Virgin of the Antigua in Seville. Though she is no longer well-known, the Spanish Guadalupe used to be extremely popular, particularly in the early modern period and among the first invaders of Mexico and Peru. She found it particularly interesting to see how, despite sharing little more than the title, the Guadalupe shrine in Spain claims a link to the cult of the famous Mexican Virgin (this link is not important at the Mexican shrine). These kinds of transatlantic relationships are at the core of her project, and considering the Spanish perspectives on American counterparts was useful, since these would have affected how colonial peninsulares perceived the indigenous and black cults in the Americas.
In Seville she spent days transcribing at the Archivo General de Indias and evenings seeing the images that most directly affected the religious life of colonial Peru and Mexico. At the AGI she found a number of letters written by early bishops that describe processions and confraternal life in Lima. One from 1619, which lists the confraternities active in the city of Lima and its archbishopric, has been cited many times in studies of Peru’s sodalities. Seeing the letter in full will help her update some of the information on limeño confraternities that has been considered definitive. In another letter, complaints about procession decorum and the (lack of) respect shown to the archbishop speak to how important these occasions were in terms of public display. Evidence like this helps to contextualize the black Antigua and indigenous Copacabana confraternities in Lima and their relationships to religious visual culture.
Project: Exploring London Bridge History
Between May 31 and August 3, Emmamarie Haasl (History) traveled from her lease in North London to the Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives in Kew, the British Library, the Institute for Historical Research, or the Senate House Library five to six days per week. Besides conducting research for her dissertation, she presented a paper at the Institute for Historical Research and attended weekly seminars there through June. She registered for a workshop at the archives in Kew to learn new techniques for using medieval legal records and participated in a planning symposium at the Museum of London for the 2020 commemoration of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. While attending the International Medieval Symposium at Leeds, she reconnected with a number of fellow scholars, and she made several day trips to the Canterbury Cathedral Archives and the Bodleian Archives in Oxford.
Emmamarie’s dissertation “Belonging to London Bridge” analyzes changing relationship between religion and commerce in communities on and around London Bridge from the medieval into the early modern period. London Bridge House is an important focus, since by the fifteenth century its interests included the chapel on the bridge, a pilgrimage site, multiple storehouses and properties on the bridge and around London, a large permanent workforce for the maintenance of these properties and the bridge infrastructure, connections with local craft guilds, and property-based relationships with various religious houses in the region. Its administration, mostly based at a complex in Southwark on the south side of the Thames, linked all these together to maintain the bridge, fulfilling one of the seven acts of corporal mercy: caring for travelers. She argues that the sixteenth century dissolution of the bridge chapel and the monasteries and fraternities in the bridge’s network were one step in a much longer transition undergone by non-parochial places of religious significance in the urban late medieval landscape.
2017 Research Awards
Project: Exploring Spain's Past
Shai Zamir (History) attended an intensive Spanish language course at the University of Granada in May to improve his skills in reading, listening, speaking and writing while living in a Spanish-speaking environment, surrounded by the rich history of Granada. Being enrolled at level 6 (out of 9) he could practice his Spanish on topics of his own choice, so for instance, he delivered a short talk to his colleagues about the history of the Judeo-Spanish.
As part of the program he took Spanish-guided educational trips to historical sites such as the Alhambra palace, the Granada cathedral, a former Morisco house, Baroque monasteries, and many other places central to the history of Muslims, Christians and Jews in medieval and early modern Spain.
On weekends, he traveled -- to Cordova, the Alpujarras, and Sevilla (where he visited the General Archive of the Indies) to become more familiar with Andalusia's history and pursue other intellectual interests. In Seville, other than visiting the Alcazar and the Jewish quarter, he also had a chance to examine closely Jusepe de Ribera's painting La mujer barbuda, the subject of his final essay in Kenneth Mills' seminar "Conversion and Christianities," as well as other Baroque paintings at the Museo de Bellas Artes and the Hospital de la Caridad.
He writes: "On this first visit to Spain, MEMS has given me the opportunity not only to improve my Spanish, but also to gain a basic familiarity with Spanish history, geography, and culture, which will be significant for my training as an early modernist working on Sephardic history in Spain and the Mediterranean."
Project: Intensive Latin... in NYC?!
Tonhi Lee (English) applied for the MEMS Summer Awards to partially fund the tuition for an intensive Latin program at CUNY’s Latin/Greek Institute. The course consisted of approximately 6 semesters worth of Latin, which covered all the essential skills necessary to read, write, and translate from a wide range of periods. For the first 5 weeks, the course focused on achieving “active mastery” of Latin syntax and learning essential vocabulary. The subsequent 5 weeks were devoted to reading as many real Latin texts as possible, both in prose and poetry. Among the authors that we read are Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Seneca, Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, and Milton, to name a few.
The program also offered lectures on the history of Latin, lexicography, and textual criticism, which helped him better understand the disciplinary tools and traditions that inform our knowledge of Latin texts, as well as the radical uncertainties involved in scholarly efforts at interpretation and translation. This kind of training provided the knowledge and skills he can now apply to his own studies in the early modern period.
Project: German, Metallurgy, and Early Science
This summer Rheagan Martin (Hsitory of Art) traveled to Berlin to take a six-week intensive German language course. This greatly enhanced his research skills, comprehension in museums, and ability to communicate on the ground. While in Berlin, he visited many major museums including the Kunstgewerbemuseum and the Naturkundemuseum (Decorative Arts Museum and the Natural History Museum). Seeing these collections helped him define the scope and content of the dissertation. Having previously focused on the work of goldsmiths, now he is incorporating early scientific instruments and the visual history of science into the work.
Project: Roots in Stone and Slavery: Rootedness, Mobility, and Empire in 17th Century Cartagena de Indias
The second Diane Owen Hughes Scholar, Ana María Silva (History), spent the past month of June conducting research at the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) in Madrid, Spain. In Seville, she read and transcribed manuscript lawsuits, correspondence, administrative reports, and petitions sent from the Caribbean port city of Cartagena de Indias to the King of Spain and the Council of the Indies during the seventeenth century. She focused on archival records related to local conflicts about the urban organization of this Spanish colonial city, especially with respect to the location of nuisance industries, such as tanneries, and the people who lived near them.
At the Archivo Histórico Nacional, she continued to study the formation of Cartagena’s urban and social geographies, this time by looking at the financial archives of a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition located in that city. Specifically, she examined the Inquisition’s records about property that the tribunal confiscated from supposed heretics, especially real estate. Based on this data, she will analyze the impact that the Inquisition’s confiscation practices had on specific neighborhoods and communities in Cartagena, especially among women of African descent.
Both in Seville and in Madrid, she visited museums and libraries, including the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Museum at the Archivo General de Indias, and the Museo de Historia de Madrid, where she explored collections that she might use in future projects.
Project: Intensive Latin Propels Research
Archival work in Italy, and specifically in Genoa, is critical to Brenna Larson's (History of Art) dissertation work and requires at least intermediate reading ability in Latin. Genoa maintained the use of Latin longer than most Italian cities; as a port town, Latin served as an important lingua franca for a diverse population. With the help of published references, Brenna was able to locate items of interest and bring images of those items home. Her time in the State Archive in Genoa during the first half of the summer only reinforced her need for Latin.
This summer, with the support of a MEMS Summer Award, Brenna completed the intensive Latin course at the Summer Language Institute at the University of Michigan. The course covered the grammar and vocabulary of the first two semesters of Latin and provided a great deal translation practice; the class worked through many texts typically introduced in second year Latin. With her new skill set in place, she is now able to fully explore the documents she'd obtained earlier in Italy.
Project: Paleography in Play: Manuscript Work in Middle English
This past summer, Annika Pattenaude (English) writes, she spent a week at the Huntington Library in Pasadena researching late medieval manuscripts. Her purpose was to expand and develop her paleography skills. Focusing on five manuscripts: HM 114, HM 143, HM 744, HM 503, and HM 111, which contain popular medieval works like Troilus and Criseyde, Piers Plowman, Mandeville's Travels, a Wycliffite sermon in Middle English, and some of Hoccleve's shorter poems, she focused on transcribing Anglicana and Secretary hands. Using the guidebook Opening-up Middle English Manuscripts and other online guides as working aids, she learned to be attentive to subtle differences in individual letters, for instance, the double compartment "a" or the distinct "r" that looks like a "v" in Anglicana script. I also learned to recognize certain abbreviations, like the p for "per," þ with a superscript "t" for "that." The work was tedious but productive. Having some knowledge of paleography from previous graduate courses, this research trip was an excellent opportunity to put what she had learned into practice.
In addition, this experience highlighted the difference between reading a medieval text in manuscript form and in a modern edition. She focused not only on what the manuscript said but also how its manuscript medium affected her reading and interpretation of the text. The creative decorations in HM 143 (shown here), a series of detached faces floating out of illuminated initials in Piers Plowman, influences how we perceive the text as a clouded network of voices. That is, the floating faces elaborate on the text's formal and narrative structure, which might be understood as a pattern of various speeches on good living. Other paratext or irregularities raised similar issues: How does the marginal glossing in different versions of Piers Plowman and Troilus and Criseyde guide our reading experience?
2016 Research Awards
Project: Intensive Latin and Other Basic Skills for Premodern Research
While getting a jump-start with intensive Latin here at Michigan, Taylor Sims (History) also spent the summer working as a research assistant and a mentor in the Academic Success Program. Taylor’s research interests deal broadly with women, gender identity, and religion in medieval and early modern England. Thanks to the eight weeks of work on morphology, syntax, and vocabulary, and translating classical and medieval poetry and prose, she can now work with a broader base of sources. Over the summer Taylor also looked at the Husting Court wills on microfilm. The wills date from the mid-fourteenth through the sixteenth century and are entirely in Latin, so in combination with the intensive class, this work advanced the development of her paleographic skills. This year Taylor has taken on co-coordinating the Forum on Research in Medieval Studies.
Project: Plotting a Course: A Preliminary Field Survey of the Kamo River
Last June Esther Ladkau (History) set off to explore the city of Kyoto, Japan, on foot. She visited museums, archives, temples and shrines, and hiked the mountains to get her bearings in the city and its environs. Using GIS software, she was able to track her expeditions and map landmarks and trails. The point of this was to trace the course of the river and physically experience the places and spaces of her subject: people’s experiences around the Kamo River, in particular disasters that occurred there in the medieval period. Personally visiting the area gave her a sense of place otherwise hard to imagine from the documents alone.
In addition to learning the area, Essie reconnected with local researchers, spent time in archives and research centers, and networked with established scholars in the field. Local scholars offered suggestions and resources she would not have found otherwise on this short visit. (Funded in part by a MEMS Summer Award.)
Project: Mediterranean Studies Skills: Reading Aljamiado
Hayley Bowman (History) visited the University of Colorado to undertake an intensive seminar on a mode of writing used by Spanish Moriscos (Muslims who converted to Christianity after the Reconquista) and mudejares (Muslims who remained in the Iberian peninsula but did not convert) from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The script is written in Castilian using Arabic characters. But this seminar was more than a simple language-learning experience: Beyond the analysis of the words, letters, and paleography of the sources, students were encouraged to consider the manuscripts as objects and were provided the opportunity to work with materials otherwise unavailable.
Hayley especially appreciated the range of source materials: she worked on a manual on magic, a fortune-telling book, and a prayer for a newborn, all interesting avenues into the lives of marginalized groups in the late medieval and early modern Spanish world. All this has led her toward larger interests in the complex religious climate of the Spanish world, as well as offering opportunities to expand her language skills and do valuable networking. (Funded by a MEMS summer award.)
Project: Archives, Conference, and a Workshop: Into the Weeds of English Literary History
Megan Behrend spent July 2016 in England running between the Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and the New Chaucer Society’s 20th Biennial Congress at King's College, which included a two-day paleography and manuscript studies workshop.
Megan was able to conduct manuscript research on two of three extant versions of her topic poems, the trilingual De Amico ad amicam and Responcio. Of particular interest was their appearance in both an early canonizing collection of Chaucer texts (since they are not attributed to Chaucer) and a mid-late fifteenth-century “scrappy student notebook.” She studied their placement in these manuscripts and compared them with the form and treatment of pieces around them, and concluded that these macaronic (multilingual) poems were in fact not marginal in the literary cultures from which their manuscripts derive, as has been suggested elsewhere. She is thinking through interesting new questions about the relationship between these texts and their history.
Using Latin, French, and English, the poems also stand out from the mostly Latin academic genres such as riddles, proverbs, and grammatical treatises gathered in the second manuscript. This version of the poems is quite close to that in the Chaucer collection, but their presentation parallels that of the Latin riddles, with their bracketed tail rhymes recalling the bracketing of the riddle solutions. This points to a closer relationship between academic exercises and poetic play across languages than previously assumed. (Funded by a MEMS Summer Award.)
Project: Manuscripts and Remnants of the Religious Culture of Medieval England
Thanks to a MEMS summer grant, together with other funding, Rebecca Huffman (English) visited archives in England and France, as well as undertaking a religious visual culture survey in Norwich and East Anglia. She examined nearly a dozen manuscripts related to her dissertation at the British Library, including copies of The Canterbury Tales, Julian of Norwich's Short and Long Texts, and Nicholas Love's Mirror as well as several anonymous works. At Longleat House's archives outside Salisbury, she studied vernacular religious manuscripts--in particular a unique copy of Chaucer's Parson's Tale that was separated from the rest of The Canterbury Tales and compiled together with religious verse and prose (she plans to center her Parson chapter on this manuscript).
She discovered over a few weeks in East Anglia a really engaged population of medieval readers and writers. She collected site-specific information for her Julian chapter and gained a much better context for regional medieval religious culture. Pictured here is the rare surviving anchorhold at All Saints Church in King's Lynn.
Project: Precursory to Theories of Rhythm in Thirteenth-Century France
This past summer William van Geest (Music Theory) undertook Latin training at the Centre for Medieval Studies (University of Toronto) and attended a Historical Notation Bootcamp hosted by Yale University. The former, running six weeks, had students preparing their own translations that they then read in class as well as sight reading other texts from a variety of genres – poetry, legal records, historical narrative, hagiography, sermons and epistles – and from different provenances and time periods in the Middle Ages.
The Notation Bootcamp provided a three-day introduction to musical notations employed from earliest times in the Western tradition (c. eighth century) to the advent of musical printing (c. 1500). This program is meant to supplement current curricular gaps, in particular music paleography, in today’s musicological training. Familiarity with historical notations is essential for scholars of medieval music and the Yale program not only taught the participants to read various notations, but also introduced issues surrounding notation that William thinks are central to the emergence of rhythm theorizing at that time. (Funded by a MEMS Summer Award.)
Project: The Painted Fortified Monastic Churches of Moldavia: Bastions of Orthodoxy in a Post-Byzantine World
Alice Isabella Sullivan (History of Art), the first Diane Owen Hughes Scholar, spent four weeks in Europe this past May for research and study, first visiting Vienna to examine fifteenth and sixteenth-century Moldavian manuscripts housed in the Austrian National Library, and then visiting medieval monasteries in Romania (at Pătrăuţi, Putna, Moldoviţa, Probota, Voroneţ, and Suceviţa). She also examined many icons, embroideries, metalwork and other manuscripts from the monastic collections at Putna, Moldoviţa, and Suceviţa.
At Putna, she studied key liturgical books and tetraevangelia from the reign of Stephen III (Stephen the Great, 1457-1504) and worked with monks and priests there, making useful contacts for future engagement with the Stephen the Great Research and Documentation Center, which organizes a yearly conference on medieval and early modern Moldavian history and culture. She also met and discussed her work with Romanian historians from the University of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Iaşi.
At the moment, she is finishing up the last two chapters of her dissertation on developments in monastic church architecture in Moldavia, as well as on the iconographic programs of select churches that took on a new visual rhetoric in the decades following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
Project: Ties that Bind: Land, Inheritance, and Kinship in Medieval Japan
Kevin Gouge (History) spent the summer working through early documents in several University of Tokyo archives with local scholars. The archival work brought him closer to completing his case study of the Nejime family, whose different branches identified by their courtly name, Takebe, but were also known by names drawn from the villages or large farms in the physically scattered lands they controlled.
Kevin's project compares the loose network of the expansionist Nejime with the relatively isolated and concentrated Ichikawa family, following their stories through the Kamakura and Nanbokucho periods (1185-1392). His tracking of both families will allow a close comparison and analysis of broad political and social trends, as well as the relationship between social structure and the environment. (Funded by a MEMS Summer Award.)
Project: Desiring Discord: Political Conflict in Medieval Romance
Maia Farrar (English) has been working on issues of reader reception and reading practices around early English romances and ballads. This past summer she compared the romance Amis and Amiloun in the fourteenth-century Egerton Manuscript, with the popular Bevis of Hamtoun and Florence and Blanchfloure for signs of reader engagement.
Questions in her final dissertation chapter include, How did readers interpret scenes of political conflict? Did they prioritize amorous over political moments, and how did they react to the prevalence of conflict? In Amis, tension is highlighted when the knights Amis and Amiloun choose their oath of brotherhood over the "truth" of the larger political and social fabric.
Though the Egerton ms has water damage and signs of heavy use, the Amis and Amiloun section is intact and shows signs of reader engagement -- pen tests, rubrication (marking in red) and marginalia – which suggest both active and distracted readership. A later reader of Amis added red illumination to identify and highlight the text's rhyming couplets and capital letters, a time-consuming and engaged practice. However, these marks end barely halfway through the romance on a leaf that bears a marginal doodle partially obscuring a line in a key scene wherein Amis breaks with the larger community by killing a steward's horse and then the steward in defense of his brother knight.
Compared to other popular romances that show no such mark-up, indicating passive reading, Amis stands out as a clear instance of reader engagement and a space where we can extrapolate from the romances outward to the reading community. (Funded by a MEMS Summer Award.)
Project: Vernaculars of Print in the 17th c. Netherlands
Jun Nakamura (History of Art) is a historian of early modern visual culture who often finds Latin inscriptions on works he studies. This past summer, with MEMS support, he enrolled in a ten-week Latin bootcamp at CUNY, equivalent to four to six semesters of college Latin. By weeks seven and eight the class was reading Vergil’s Aeneid, and Augustine’s Confessions in weeks nine and ten. Livy, Tacitus, Lucretius, Petronius, and others made appearances along the way.
Embarking on research travel immediately after completing the course, he examined drawings at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett and later, 16-17th century medical books at the Sächsisch Landesbibliothek, Staats- und Universitatsbibliotheck in Dresden. All these works carried Latin inscriptions, but the books were especially interesting. Both were published in Latin and contained hand annotations, also in Latin. From a long flyleaf inscription he determined that one had been given as a present to a medical student upon completion of his dissertation in 1739. Another was inscribed by two separate hands, one apparently 17th century and the other 18th. These and other marginalia shed light onto the uses of the books in the centuries following their publication, providing first-hand accounts of their provenance. (Funded by a MEMS Summer Award.)
