But wouldn’t the monks themselves be distracted from prayer by all the gargoyles dotting the cloisters? These monks, however, were incorporating such “distractions” into their own godly work producing and decorating religious texts, a practice that fed back into the development of art as we know it. These embellishments were all well and good for the general congregation, who needed something superficial to drag them to church. Over there on a fish we see the head of a quadruped.” “Here on a quadruped we see the tail of a serpent. “What is the point of those unclean apes, fierce lions, monstrous centaurs, half-men, striped tigers, fighting soldiers and hunters blowing their horns?” he wrote. “The students have to basically do the work of a librarian or historian.In his “ Apologia ad Guillelmum” of 1125, the Cistercian monk Saint Bernard of Clairvaux attacked what he saw as superfluous decoration in the day’s art and architecture. “Rauner has a lot of fragments that have very minimal metadata,” Gaposchkin says. On some of the edges, the text cuts off and I have to figure out what the words are.” There are scribal notes in the margins and superimposed text in another hand from a later period. “It’s a fragment of a folio that was torn out of its original manuscript and repurposed as part of a binding for another manuscript. “I’m looking at a martyrology from the 11th century on Saints Palatias and Laurentia,” says Salame. “It’s hard, but fun to put yourself in the scribe’s position-in the shoes of the person writing the stuff that we’re reading for homework,” says Hadley.įor their final projects, the students document manuscript fragments from Rauner’s collection-artifacts that no one may have looked at closely for hundreds of years. The students learn about manuscript conservation from Dartmouth Library’s collections conservator, Deborah Howe codicology, or the study of books as physical objects, from special collections librarian Morgan Swan and visit the Book Arts Workshop, where Program Manager Sarah Smith shows them how to make oak gall ink and quill pens and lets them practice writing their own Gothic calligraphy. “You need multiple pairs of eyes on a manuscript in order for someone to see something that perhaps you can’t see in the moment.” “ I t’s a fundamentally collaborative discipline,” Salame says. The professors weigh in with pieces of historical and linguistic context. The students have transcribed and translated the text in advance, and they go around the circle sharing interpretations. In a typical session, the students gather in Rauner’s Ticknor Room with a manuscript open on table, the page under discussion projected on a screen and a library cart of reference books nearby. ![]() “It’s like solving a puzzle,” says Elizabeth Hadley ’23, a member of School House from North Caldwell, N.J., who calls the class “ one of the best experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth.” “A u with a line over it equals the letters um-they just didn’t want to fit the last character in at the end, the way we would write ‘tho’ instead of ‘though.’ ” In manuscript shorthand, “DNO means domino (lord), DS is deus (god),” says Salame, who plans a modified government major. “It’s literally the same thing,” says Kamil Salame ’24, a member of the School House residential community from Greenwich, Conn., comparing abbreviations used by medieval writers to modern shortened forms, such as LOL or OMG. ![]() ![]() Today, making sense of these works requires knowledge of everything from calligraphic styles to idiomatic Latin expressions and abbreviations-think textspeak for the Middle Ages. “They’re doing graduate-level work.”īefore the printing press, European scribes wrote and copied manuscripts with quill and ink, in Latin. “It is amazing that we have 10 students who want to learn this,” she says. Paleography-the study of historical manuscripts and handwriting-isn’t usually taught at the undergraduate level, says Gaposchkin. The class-“Latin Paleography,” co-taught by Jennifer Lynn, language program director in the Department of Classics, and medievalist Cecilia Gaposchkin, a professor and chair of the Department of History -was a one-of-a-kind opportunity for undergraduates interested in Latin, medieval studies, and the history of books. Throughout the fall, a group of students met in Dartmouth Library’s Rauner Special Collections Library to decipher handwritten texts from the Middle Ages.
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