We are delighted to send you our annual newsletter, sharing updates on recent program developments and future projects, plans, and events. We have been through some difficult times, but with the support of many people—staff, students and faculty alike—we not only continued our work but also introduced a range of new initiatives.

The Program in Medieval Studies begins the new academic year 2022-2023 with rising numbers of courses and projects, which are bringing together ever larger numbers of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty members.

Looking forward, we are delighted to welcome our wonderful new Program Manager, Anna D’Elia. Anna started work at the beginning of the summer, and it has been amazing to see how quickly she navigated and organized the diverse agendas of the program. It is already a great pleasure to work as her Director. We look forward—well prepared and ready—to a busy Medieval Studies year. Please join us in welcoming Anna to the Medieval community!

Environmental History Lab

The Environmental History Lab (EHL), explores the intersection of the Humanities and Sciences. Organized by Janet Kay (Art & Archaeology), EHL is funded by a Humanities Council David A. Gardner '69 Magic Grant for Innovation.

Check out the recording from EHL's Iron Smelting Workshop and explore upcoming events on their new website.

LUDUS (Play)

LUDUS (Play) is a Collaborative Humanities project founded by Beatrice Kitzinger (Art & Archaeology) and Jamie Reuland (Music) to explore the active, performed, creative and re-creative study of pre-modern culture.

Join us on Saturday, Nov. 5 to hear the vocal ensemble ModernMedieval perform their acclaimed program of chant by Hildegard of Bingen, Words of Love and Wisdom, preceded by an afternoon workshop with vocalists. 

LAMB

Since 2019, the Late Antique, Medieval and Byzantine Workshop (LAMB) has been reorganized under the umbrella of Medieval Studies as a forum for all late antique and medieval graduate students across every department.

The seminars and workshops bring together an ever larger and more diverse community of more than 60 graduates on a regular basis. We would like to thank coordinating directors, Abigail Sargent (History) and now Lucia Waldschütz (History) for their engagement, enthusiasm and persistence during a time when it was certainly difficult to motivate oneself and others to continue.

Introductory Course - MED 227: The Worlds of the Middle Ages

With generous support from the Humanities Council, we re-booted the introductory course of Medieval Studies (MED 227) as a co-taught class by Helmut Reimitz and Jack Tannous. The first edition aimed to emphasize the wide chronological and geographical horizons medieval studies covers today, and respond to the increasing hunger for more pre-modern “big” lecture courses on campus. It worked. We launched in fall 2020 with an enrollment of 46 and very encouraging evaluations, and we now have more than 70 students enrolled in the fall 2022 course.

And while this is the gateway course of Medieval Studies, it is only one of a wide range of courses taught on late antique and medieval history throughout the various departments at Princeton.

MAFE

Together with the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, chaired by Jack Tannous, we have supported the launch and maintenance of a website to connect Medieval Studies at Princeton to a wider world of late antique and medieval studies: MAFE – Middle Ages for Educators.

MAFE is aimed at university and secondary students, educators, and, more broadly, anyone who is interested in studying, teaching, or learning more about late antiquity and the middle ages. The new website was launched at the beginning of December 2020, and the immediate (international) response was enormously encouraging. We anticipate that the new, expanded site will reach an even wider audience and hope that it will be useful to specialists and non-specialists alike.

Under the leadership of Princeton-coordinator Jonathan Henry, several graduate students have received media training and opportunities for part-time employment through the Center for Culture, Society and Religion (CCSR). A particular focus of this sub project is to teach graduates how our humanities training can lean into the public appeal of academic materials. With undergraduates, we continued to raise awareness of MAFE and increase its usage. Undergraduates expressed enthusiasm, and we hope that in a next step we may motivate them to create articles under the tutelage of their professors and grad mentors.

Read our feature from the president of the Medieval Academy of America.

MARBAS

The Program in Medieval Studies and its Directors, Beatrice Kitzinger and Helmut Reimitz, have been part of a larger and interdepartmental working group (Dimitri Gondecas, Tony Grafton, Barbara Graziosi, Martin Kern, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Will Noel, Marina Rustow, Jack Tannous) to create a formalized structure for promoting the study of manuscripts, rare books, and archives at Princeton.

An enormous amount of teaching and research on manuscripts, rare books, and archives takes place at Princeton and the university has incredibly rich collections in these areas. The hope is both to recognize and coordinate the work currently underway, and eventually create a center devoted to researching these materials.

In collaboration with the Princeton University Library, we’ve launched a biweekly series of events exploring Princeton’s vast holdings of rare books, manuscripts, and archives. Princeton-based experts offer hands-on, interactive presentations on objects in Firestone Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections followed by informal Q&A. Presentations in Fall 2022 include Greek papyri, Zoroastrian and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts and Chinese documents.

Keep an eye on the MARBAS website for details, as well as projects, workshops, trainings and resources, and sign up for announcements by emailing marbas@princeton.edu.

The Numismatic Collection 

Alan Stahl 

The Princeton University Numismatic Collection has recently acquired two large and carefully selected collections of Byzantine coinage, totaling 18,000 new pieces. Together with the existing collections of Firestone Library, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Byzantine coins from Princeton's Antioch Excavations of the 1930s, we now hold the largest and most comprehensive collection of Byzantine coinage in the world -- a fitting complement to our strong academic commitment to Byzantine studies. 

The new acquisitions, like many over the past two decades, were done with the support of the Stanley J Seeger Hellenic Fund, which has also supported the hiring of Dr. Elena Baldi, a specialist in Byzantine coinage, to catalogue the collection in our online database and develop a shared-open-data platform for all public collections of Byzantine coinage. 

The Index of Medieval Art 

Pamela Patton

The Index of Medieval Art happily welcomes researchers to our temporary reading room in Green Hall 2-C-10, where they can take advantage of both the Index files and the books in the Index library. Among the enhancements is a major accessibility upgrade to our online database, aligning with the university’s commitment to making digital resources accessible to a wide range of people. Index staff have also prioritized backfiles cataloging, with the goal of uploading and then archiving the print photos for at least four of the Index’s original “Medium” groupings before the next office move in 2024.This effort has yielded some dramatic finds, including 1930s photographs and little-known provenance for works of art that were lost or damaged in World War II and the Spanish Civil War, the records for which have been regularly coming online for researchers.

Volume 43 of Studies in Iconography appeared both in print and online, and May 2022 saw the publication of the Iconography Beyond the Crossroads: Image, Method, and Meaning in Medieval Art, edited by Pamela A. Patton and Catherine A. Fernandez, and co-published with Penn State University Press. Index conferences have also continued, and we look forward to hosting the next in the series, “Looking at Language,” on November 12, 2022. Most recently, the Index has undertaken a project that responds to the risk posed to both medieval works of art and medievalist scholarship by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With the support of a Flash Grant from the Princeton University Humanities Council, in Fall 2022 Prof Julia Matveyeva of the O. M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv will collaborate remotely with the Index to add print-only records of Ukraine’s medieval cultural heritage to the online database. 

The Library 

Eric White

Princeton University Library’s Special Collections has acquired a unique resource for the study of fifteenth-century European books: a rare set of 21 printing types (cast metal sorts), manufactured and presumably used at Lyons, ca. 1473-1500.

Almost all fifteenth-century printing materials have disappeared. A rare exception resulted from the survival of several hundred early types that were discovered in 1868 in the mud of the left bank of the Saône by scavengers who were searching for precious metals discarded by goldsmiths’ shops that formerly lined the riverside. Analysis of the various fonts represented by the types pointed to a single printing shop, that of Guillaume de Roy, active in Lyons from ca. 1473 forward.     

Most of the recovered types came into the possession of the Paris book scholar and avid collector Seymour De Ricci. At his death in 1942 De Ricci bequeathed his collections, including most of the precious Lyons types, to the Bibliothèque Nationale; others went to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Lyons. A single “p” was presented by De Ricci to the Scheide family in the 1930s, and it has long been at the Scheide Library.    

A smaller group of 21 of Guillaume de Roy’s types, from the same excavation, was owned by Gabriel Brassart of Montbrison; these later went to the typographic scholar Maurice Audin of Lyons, who published them in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch in 1954. In October 2021 this group came up for auction as a single lot offered by the DeBaecque firm in Lyons. Princeton University Library was the successful bidder, and remains the only known owner of fifteenth-century printing types in America.