Medieval History
So, since we're experimenting here in this blog. A friend and blogger, the mysterious "Euromad," saw the call for contributors I posted and was wondering if we could also do something with relevant excerpts from other person's blogs. If others want to try something similar, right now I'm thinking what the heck. Contact me with an excerpt and link. So long as it's relevant to the site's "mission statement" and you link back here, I'll put it up.
So, here we go:
- Canterbury Tales Manuscript To Be Digitized
Experts from The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library are to spend four days at a beautiful seventeenth century mansion to capture its world famous Canterbury Tales manuscript on camera. From today to March 25th, visitors to the National...
- Is There A Comment For This Blog?
Recently, Jeffrey Cohen wrote a thoughtful blog post (prompted by Christopher Schaberg's post) on why blogging seems like such hard work. Somehow, blogging has come to feel less dynamic and more permanent. The elevation of the blog as...
- Accessible Pasts
Late last night, I saw this marvelous link floating around the interwebs: a digitized version of Cotton Nero A.x, or, the Pearl-manuscript. It's a wonderful thing to behold, and potentially so useful. Not only can we, as scholars of medieval...
- Strasbourg In A Few Words
I returned from my Strasbourg trip (my wife, Judy, also came along with me) over a week ago, and I've had plenty of time to reflect on the trip before posting about it. My primary reason for going was to attend the First Summer School on Christian...
- Gerard Caspary
Sometimes the personal intrudes. I learned yesterday that one of my graduate school teachers, Gerard Caspary, passed away. Euromad has an elegant post up about his mentor. In all honesty, I never saw eye-to-eye with the man but he was a towering intellect...
Medieval History
Euromad: Cutting Edge Technology
So, since we're experimenting here in this blog. A friend and blogger, the mysterious "Euromad," saw the call for contributors I posted and was wondering if we could also do something with relevant excerpts from other person's blogs. If others want to try something similar, right now I'm thinking what the heck. Contact me with an excerpt and link. So long as it's relevant to the site's "mission statement" and you link back here, I'll put it up.
So, here we go:
About ten years ago France opened a new library, the last of the Mitterand monuments. At that point the BN somehow became the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). The new site is known, short hand, as ?Mitterand.? The old one, pictured above, ?Richelieu.? But it remains for me simply ?the BN,? and that parvenu building on the southeastern fringe of the city (about which I will have much more to say in the near future) is ?the new BN.? I handle change, you see. I just don?t handle it well.
Anway, the BN is a real example of 19th-century grandeur, its breath-taking monumental reading room today sitting largely empty of people and of books, inhabited at the moment chiefly by ghosts of readers past. I had originally envisioned this article as a heart-felt tribute to those days gone by, but my last foray into nostalgia left me so emotionally gutted that?it seemed to me?well, enough said.
Let us focus instead on the happy accident that one corner of the grand building has remained largely unchanged, itself as resistant to the ravages of time as am I: the Salle des Manuscrits, pictured above, where I have done most of my work of any consequence as a historian. I really don?t believe that, most of years of my life, I?m much good as a scholar. But to ascend the magnificent stairway and to sit in this lovely, often sun-drenched nineteenth-century space, surrounded by two-tiered grand bookcases, and with literally tens of thousands of hand-written documents at your disposal, all catalogued and indexed with varying degrees of detail (but all catalogued and indexed?hello, Vatican!) . . . well, how could you not get good work done?
Read more...
- Canterbury Tales Manuscript To Be Digitized
Experts from The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library are to spend four days at a beautiful seventeenth century mansion to capture its world famous Canterbury Tales manuscript on camera. From today to March 25th, visitors to the National...
- Is There A Comment For This Blog?
Recently, Jeffrey Cohen wrote a thoughtful blog post (prompted by Christopher Schaberg's post) on why blogging seems like such hard work. Somehow, blogging has come to feel less dynamic and more permanent. The elevation of the blog as...
- Accessible Pasts
Late last night, I saw this marvelous link floating around the interwebs: a digitized version of Cotton Nero A.x, or, the Pearl-manuscript. It's a wonderful thing to behold, and potentially so useful. Not only can we, as scholars of medieval...
- Strasbourg In A Few Words
I returned from my Strasbourg trip (my wife, Judy, also came along with me) over a week ago, and I've had plenty of time to reflect on the trip before posting about it. My primary reason for going was to attend the First Summer School on Christian...
- Gerard Caspary
Sometimes the personal intrudes. I learned yesterday that one of my graduate school teachers, Gerard Caspary, passed away. Euromad has an elegant post up about his mentor. In all honesty, I never saw eye-to-eye with the man but he was a towering intellect...