Year in Review 2018-2019

This past year has been one of momentous change in my life. When I was at the Denver Art Museum a few weeks ago, I saw a quote by an artist, Jordan Casteel, who said that she had “been lucky to find her soul’s code early.” This is how I feel about the last year. In the Autumn semester, I was enrolled in our Manuscript Studies course in the MedRen department (one of the only undergraduate versions of this class available in the United States). This course sparked a passion in me I could never have even imagined: a love of medieval manuscripts. For Manuscript Studies, I wrote a paper entitled “From Paris to Akron and Beyond: The Origins, Provenance, and Breaking of the Ste-Geneviève Bible,” in which I explored the history of a thirteenth-century Bible manuscript fragment which has become my main passion in life since then. This paper has since evolved into my planned Honors Thesis for Ohio State, and in the time which has passed since turning in that first, 20-page version of this paper, it has almost tripled in length, allowed me a fellowship to continue my research over the summer, provided me with the opportunity to give my first academic talk, and given me more clarity and purpose in my career than ever before. Time spent following one’s passion is the most fulfilling thing in the world, and I have become more and more aware of this fact the more time I spend working on my project. This year has also provided me with ever closer relationships with professors, mentors, and friends across OSU and beyond. Manuscript Studies is my soul’s code, and I have found it at the perfect tie in my life, because there is no better place for me to pursue it than here at Ohio State.

Illuminations of William de Brailes

One very important facet of my Honors Thesis is the individual study of one of the three Bibles involved in the overall project: a manuscript with the shelfmark MS.MR.Frag.63. This is a sixty-eight leaf fragment of an English Bible produced ca. 1240 in Oxford, England in a professional manuscript workshop known for its master, William de Brailes. This project is a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of Medieval Studies; I have sections of this paper which fall under the categories of Art History, Medieval History, Modern American History, Codicology, Paleography, Fragmentology, and so much more. Although the link included below shows some of the most fascinating and fun illuminations included in MS.MR.Frag.63, these are not the only important aspects of the manuscript on which I work. In fact, illumination is one of the portions of manuscript research that I am the least interested in. People often think that manuscript research is all about the text, i.e. what does it say?, but I actually work on the text itself very little. I am interested in using small physical aspects on the manuscript itself and external records to find the individuals who have handled this manuscripts throughout the last 750-plus years, and in doing this, I begin to reconstruct a small piece of history.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9SmtoxWwQXohrKMg6