Care for the description of medieval documents

For the 2025 International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI, to be held from May 8 to 10, papers are invited for a special hybrid session of the International Society for Medievalist Librarians on The Care and Keeping of Medieval Documents. The official description of the call for papers follows here unchanged: “Cultural heritage professionals at libraries, museums, and other institutions play an active role in ensuring that medieval documents are accessible for researchers and other patrons, but many of these processes remain obscured. People working with medieval manuscripts, incunabula, fragments, and similar items at cultural heritage institutions are invited to shed a light on their behind-the-scenes work. The organizers solicit papers exploring ethical acquisition, metadata issues, conservation concerns, and other topics for this multidisciplinary panel. Case studies highlighting collaborative efforts to research and care for documents are especially encouraged.”

Logo Fragmentarium - Quelle:Frgamentarium - Quelle: https://fragmentarium.ms/

In my view the study of fragments surely is closely connected witt the themes to be addressed by this session. Choices in describing and preserving fragments and their context can immensely influence the way they become accessible and visible for scholars and the general public at large. In the field of fragmentology the coordinated efforts to make Fragmentarium the central hub and portal of a whole discipline, too, have implications and consequences which call for reflection.

The online form of this call for papers for the 2025 session at the ICMS is open until September 15, 2024. Any questions concerning this session can be send to the session organizer, Allie McCormack (allie.mccormack@utah.edu).

Musical manuscript fragments in archives

Photograph with lituyrgical fragments - source: IRHT

After a period with several lockdowns it is good to see live scholarly events can take place again. The role of medieval fragments in enhancing our knowledge of medieval literature and science is steadily growing. They help very much to make visible what was long thought lost forever or went literally unnoticed. The Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) in Paris and Orléans has chosen the title Remembratio codicum: Fragments de manuscrits en archives for a two-day conference in Tours and Angers on June 23 and 24, 2022. This initiative shows clearly the value accorded to fragment research by a major institution for philological research. In particular the musicologists of the IRHT within its Quadrivium program will come into the spotlights.  The parchment of liturgical works were often used as covers for archival registers.

On June 23, 2022 the Archives Départementales d’Indre-et-Loire in Tours will host the first day of the conference. Attention will in particular be given to fragments of liturgical manuscripts. At the AD Indre-et-Loire Yves Le Sage de la Haye created a Répertoire numérique, série I: feuillets et fragments de livres manuscrits avec et sans notation musicale (IXe et XVIe siècle) (2 vol., Tours 2002-2001). On the second day Angers will be the scene, not only the Archives départementales de Maine-et-Loire, but also the Bibliothèque patrimoniale d’Angers. The announcement at the website of the IRHT gives you the names and affiliations of the main contributors from several French and Italian institutions, but alas the link to the program does not work properly. I checked alas in vain at the blog of the IRHT for more information, but you will surely find always other interesting information for philological research.

Discarded and reused documents

Documenti scartati = screenprint program (detail), Università di BolognaLive, hybrid or only online, scholarly events are being organized in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Bologna a hybrid two-day conference will be held on December 2-3, 2021 around the theme Documenti scartati, documenti reimpiegiati. Forme, linguaggi, metodi per nuove prospettive di ricerca [Discarded documents, reused documents. Forms, languages, methods for new research perspectives]. The program of this conference (PDF, 4,8 MB) merits your attention when you are involved in the study of fragments.

The first day of the conference organized by the Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica of the Università di Bologna will be devoted to papers concerning documents in Latin from Northern Italy. Themes range from fragments of documents in libraries at Trento used to reinforce book bindings (Adriana Paolini) to fragments of legal documents concerning the region controlled by the Este family (Cristina Solidoro) to a palimpsest manuscript at the Archivio Capitolare di Vercelli (Giacomo Vignodelli) and the reuse of discarded notarial registers in Northern Italy (Marta Mangini).

On the second day you can expect contributions dealing for example with documents from Central and Southern Italy. Simone Allegri will discuss the place of reused documents in the documentary production of the Apostolic Penitentiary. Corinna Drago will look at reused documents in Apulia. The covers of notarial registers made from discarded documents in Salerno are the subject to be presented by Giuliana Capriolo.

The second section on Friday December 3, 2021 will touch other languages. Maura Perani, the creator of many catalogues of Hebrew fragments in Italian archives, will present a typology of reused Hebrew documents from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Giuseppe di Gregorio will discuss fragments in the Byzantine empire. The way Ethiopian documents were reused will be addressed by Alessandro Bausi (Hamburg). The transmission and use of Slavic documents in the Adriatic region is the subject of a paper by Barbara Lomagistro.

The last section concerns uses of digital humanities for studying fragments. Christoph Flüeler (Fribourg) will discuss the problems of design, terminology and searchability for the fragments at the Fragmentarium portal. Francesco Tomasi will look at the phenomenon of documents as vehicles for transmitting knowledge. Fragments of archival records in the holdings of the Archivio Arcivescovile in Bologna and the use of digitization for creating and adding metadata are the theme in the final contribution by Roberta Napoletano. The concluding round table has as its central theme introduced by Maddalena Modesti the relation between traditional ways of looking at reused documents as just parts of shipwrecks on one side, and the impact and benefits of digital knowledge to study such fragments and give them new relevance for scholarly research. I admit I expanded here the very concise description of the theme for the final session to an extent that would be most interesting to discuss. If this makes you curious to attend the conference, do contact the organizing committee (Roberta Napoletano, Cristina Solidoro, and Annafelicia Zuffrano). They will provide also online access to this interesting scholarly event which will be certainly not limited to themes touching medieval Italy.