One might imagine a medievalist’s work as fairly lonesome, spending long hours hidden away in a library reading room, poring over dusty old books and papers. And that is certainly part of the job. But what if those dusty old books have connections to places and institutions that are still alive and running? My project… Continue reading Touring the libraries of Herlufsholm and Sorø
Category: AntCom Materials
Forging human relationships to rediscover ancient words
The path of research is often windy. Ten years ago, on a rainy day, I jumped on a car and set out to carry out a field survey in some municipalities of the Greek minority of Salento (Grecìa Salentina, Southern Apulia). I wanted to see if the surviving literature preserved orally bore any trace of… Continue reading Forging human relationships to rediscover ancient words
Incredible how you can / See right through me
As you may already know from the post titled “A series of unpredictable events”, the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona, the oldest library still operating in the Western world, houses a significant number of palimpsests – i.e. manuscripts whose first layer of writing was scraped to allow their reuse – some in Latin, others in Greek.… Continue reading Incredible how you can / See right through me
A remote past still alive
In an early medieval visionary text, The Journey of Trecenzonius (10th century), the narrator describes how he wanders along a remote and deserted region at the end of the known world, Gallaecia. After the Muslim conquest, everything has been destroyed, but the old Roman lighthouse of Brigantium still stands. He goes to the top, where… Continue reading A remote past still alive
Don’t judge a book by its cover… or maybe do?
Spring 1969. A special delivery comes to Odense from Naevsted, a town of medieval origins southeast of Zealand. 40000 books formerly in the possession of Herlusfholm, a four-century old boarding school, are unloaded at the newly founded Syddansk Universitet, which had just welcomed the first students two years before. A treasure trove, which would become… Continue reading Don’t judge a book by its cover… or maybe do?