2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Call for Papers

July 14, 2024 in International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, POMONA, Societas Magica

2025 International Congress
on Medieval Studies:
Call for Papers

60th ICMS
Thursday through Saturday, 8–10 May 2025
(with Sessions variously
in Person, Online, or Hybrid)

[Posted on 14 July 2024]

Building upon the successful completion of our activities at the 2024 ICMS (see our 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies Report), we announce the Call for Papers (CFP) for next year’s Congress. For the CFP for all Sessions for the 2025 Congress, see its Confex Portal.

Here, first comes general information for your consideration, then we present our curated offerings of Sponsored and Co-Sponsored Sessions for your choice of proposals. Links for each Session show the direct lines to the Congress’s Confex System for your proposals for specific Sessions.

Process and Timetable for Proposals

For information about the Congress, see its official website. There you can also find information and instructions about submitting your proposals. See especially Submissions. Your proposals for papers are due by 15 September 2024.

After the close of the Call For Papers, we will select the accepted papers and design the Programs for the Sessions, with the Papers placed in order and Presiders assigned. Some Sessions may also have Respondents. Notifying you of the decisions about your proposals will come before the deadline for us to submit the Programs for our Sessions to the Congress Committee is 15 October 2024.

Then What?

Next, normally by the turn of the year toward the year of the Congress, on our website we publish the selected Programs for our Sessions and announce our other Activities, while we await the promulgation of the official Schedule for the 2025 Congress. The Abstracts for the Papers accompany our announced Programs. Then, with the publication of the Congress Program (or its traditional preliminary ‘Sneak Peek’), we can add the times and venues for our Sessions. As the 2025 Congress approaches, new, unfolding, and revised information will guide announcements and updates on our website and social media.

RGME @ 2025 ICMS

For 2025, we prepare:

four Sessions, sponsored and co-sponsored
a customary Open Business Meeting at the Congress
and perhaps a Reception.

Four Sessions are our own (Item I). Our co-sponsors for ICMS Sessions in 2025 are:

Societas Magica (with two co-sponsored Sessions)
Polytheism-Oriented Medievalists of North America (P.-O.M.o.N.A.)
Postal History at Kalamazoo

Among our co-sponsorships for the Congress over the years, 2025 marks Year 21 of our co-sponsorship with the Societas Magica, Year 4 with P.O.M.o.N.A., and Year 2 with Postal History at Kalamazoo.

The Session co-sponsored with Postal History at Kalamazoo continues the tradition of our long-term series of RGME Sessions at the ICMS on “Medieval Writing Materials”, which began in 2014. (See, for example, our Congress Activities and 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies Program.)

Our 2025 Sessions

The RGME announces its proposed Sessions for the 2024 Congress and invites your proposals for papers.

Proposals should be made through the Congress’s Confex System. Here we provide session-specific links for each session. The deadline for your proposals is by 15 September 2024.

The Sessions are designed variously as in-person, online, and hybrid. In the case of an In-Person Session, Congress directions state that “only people who plan to attend the Congress in person next May should submit proposals to it. If there is sufficient interest in this topic to support a corresponding virtual session, please fill out the webform to request an additional session.”

The official call for papers will be posted on the Congress website in early July, with links to submit proposals through the Confex system.

RGME Logo in Color.

I. Sessions Sponsored by the RGME

1. “Deviant Images: Text/Image Relationships in Medieval Manuscripts” (ID: 5977)

In-Person Session

Organizer: Cortney Anne Berg (CUNY Graduate Center)

Aim

This panel provides a space to examine the ways that images and texts work together (or against each other) in medieval manuscripts. Scholars who study manuscripts often treat the images and the texts as separate phenomena without considering how a medieval reader would have interacted with the holistic object. Many studies of manuscripts treat the images as mere illustrations of the text, and this panel invites all scholars of manuscripts to explore the ways in which images work or do not work with the accompanying text.

Very rarely do images and texts provide the same information, and very rarely are images just illustrations to the text they accompany. Therefore, how can contemporary viewers understand the relationship between medieval images and the texts they accompany?

This panel invites papers that explore medieval manuscripts and how their images deviate from or conform to the text. We encourage inquiries that describe the important intersections between text and image, and attempt to reconstruct the relationship between the two, particularly as these relationships may or may not map to lived conditions. We also encourage inquiries that reveal interesting information about manuscript culture writ large. Although this panel seeks papers that deal directly with images not just as aids to the text or reading, any methodological approach from literature, anthropology, history, religious studies, art history, or any other discipline that can make interesting connections between text and image would be a welcome addition to this panel.

Keywords: Manuscript studies, art history, literature, medieval manuscripts, medieval studies

Proposals

Link to submit your proposals directly to this session by 15 September 2024:

https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=5977

London, British Library, Add. MS 62925, fol. 83r detail. Rutland Psalter in Latin, circa 1260, England (London?). Image via https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/05/marginali-yeah-the-fantastical-creatures-of-the-rutland-psalter.html

2. “Rending the Veil:
The Rupture of Image and Text
in Medieval Apocalypse Commentaries” (ID: 6459)

In-Person Session

Organizers:
Mildred Budny (RGME)
Zoey Kambour (CUNY Graduate Center and RGME Intern Executive Assistant)
Vajra Regan (Centre for Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto)

Aim

This session explores the various discontinuities between images and texts in illustrated Apocalypse commentaries from the Middle Ages. These differences can manifest in several ways. For instance, an illustration might align more closely with the commentary rather than the biblical text. Additionally, variations can arise from established, highly localized traditions or contemporary innovations. Investigating these differences, whether within a single manuscript or across a complete cycle of illustrations, provides valuable insights into the institutional, political, and intellectual contexts of the manuscript’s production.

Methodologies

This session seeks to explore illustrated Apocalypse commentaries from the Middle Ages through an interdisciplinary lens; therefore, we are open to the methodologies of diverse disciplines including, but not limited to, art history/iconography, manuscript studies, religious studies, and digital humanities. By embracing a wide array of perspectives and analytical frameworks, we hope to foster a holistic understanding of medieval apocalyptic imagery and its multifaceted interpretations.

Keywords: Apocalypse, Beatus, Material Culture, Art History, Literature, Medieval, Manuscript Studies, Religious Studies, Digital Humanities, Manuscript Production

Proposals

Link to submit your proposals directly to this session by 15 September 2024:
https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6459

New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.644, fol. 222v-223r. Beatus, Saint, Presbyter of Liebana, -798. Commentary on the Apocalypse (MS M.644). Spain, San Salvador de Tábara, ca. 945. Image via https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/110807.

3. “Women and Manuscripts:
Questions of Authorship” (ID 6310)

Hybrid Session

Co-Organizers:
Jaclyn A. Reed (Research Group on Manuscript Evidence)
Mildred Budny (RGME)

Aim

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. Français 835, fol. 1r, detail. Frontispiece illustration of the scribal author for collection of texts by Christine de Pizan. Image via https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8449047c/f9.item.

Women as authors of manuscripts do not always receive adequate attention or study. This past year, the Research Group on Manuscript [and Other] Evidence held an informal, virtual discussion session as part of its “Research Group Speaks” series (Episode 15) focusing on research of manuscripts or texts authored by women and found that the reception and interest were very high both among those wanting to participate and those wanting to attend. Building upon this momentum, we propose further explorations in a panel for the 2025 Congress.

This session will examine women’s relationships with and representations in manuscripts and other evidence, especially those that they personally authored or created. Authorship has sometimes been limited in scope to literary or narrative texts, which can leave out the types of manuscripts that women were more likely to produce such as commonplace books or other collections of receipts, medical treatments, or a variety of other household notations. We welcome methodological approaches that consider manuscripts or other evidence authored by women including, but not limited to, philology, manuscript studies, material culture, and history of the book.

Keywords: History of the book, Manuscript Studies, Material Culture, Representations of Women, Women’s Authorship, Women’s Literature

Proposals

For this Hybrid Session, we solicit participants who plan to attend the Congress in person, as well as participants who plan to attend virtually.

Link to submit your proposals directly to this session by 15 September 2024:
https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6310

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. Français 835, fol. 1r. Opening of collection of texts by Christine de Pizan. Image via https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8449047c/f9.item.

II. Sessions Co-Sponsored by the RGME

4. Moving the Mail: Letters, Couriers, and Post Offices in the Medieval World (ID: 6312)

In-person Session

Co-sponsored with Postal History at Kalamazoo

Organizer: David W. Sorenson (Allan Berman, Numismatist)

Aim

In a world in which communication was necessarily through the written word, getting it from sender to recipient could be a complicated process. While important correspondence could be sent quickly, ordinary letters might be less speedy, and while royal letters might be sent by an efficient official system, ordinary letters between, say, merchants or clergy, might be much less so. This session is intended as a means of examining the ways in which mail moved, whether in Europe or elsewhere.

Keywords: couriers, letters, correspondence, mail, post office, postal, medieval studies

Proposals

Link to submit proposals directly to this session by 15 September 2024:

https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6312

A courier stands before a figure receiving a letter, with a landscape in the background.

Private Collection, Courier delivering letter. German translation of Petrarch (1559).

Societas Magica logo

5. “Grimoires of the Greater West (2): Multicultural Solomonic Magic:
The Case of the Almandal” (ID 6392)

In-person Session

Co-sponsored with the Societas Magica

Organizers:
Vajra Regan (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto)
>vajra.regan@mail.utoronto.ca
Gal Sofer (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Matthew Melvin-Koushki (University of South Carolina)

Aim

The Almandal and Almadel of Solomon were among the most influential books of ritual magic in the late Middle Ages. These texts survive in multiple versions that intersect with different cultures and knowledge disciplines. The Almandal was adapted into Latin, most likely in the twelfth century, from one or more lost Arabic exemplars. The fragmentary state of the oldest extant version raises several questions. The text seems to present a work of ritual magic, but certain elements point to an astral magic component. The composite nature of the text has prompted researchers to inquire about the form of the archetype, the role of the Christian translator/editor, and whether the “Almandal” as we know it ever existed in Arabic.

The Almadel first emerged in the fifteenth century and represents a significant Christian revision of the earlier Almandal. Scholars have shown considerable interest in the Almadel for at least two reasons: first, it accrued a complex angelic cosmology that appears to have its origins in the Jewish tradition of the Liber Razielis (The Book of the Angel Raziel or The Book of the Mysteries); second, it exhibits a new, spiritual orientation, absent in the Almandal, thus providing a unique window into the early formation of what many now refer to as “Christian Theurgy.”

To date, scholarly attention has focused predominately on the Latin Almadel and its various vernacular translations (English, German, Italian). This imbalance may be attributed partly to gaps in the manuscript tradition that have isolated the Almandal and obscured its connection with the Almadel. However, over the last fifteen years, the discovery of several Latin and Hebrew manuscripts has helped to clarify the early tradition of the Almandal/Almadel while at the same time complicating previous assumptions about its origins.

This session seeks to reevaluate the history of the Almandal/Almadel in light of these and other discoveries. We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to:

The history of the text
Its Christian and Jewish reception
Connections to traditions such as the Liber Razielis, the Ars notoria, and Berengar Ganell’s Summa sacre magice
The role of these texts in the universities and their adoption and use by lay readers

We welcome papers that explore these themes and contribute to a deeper understanding of the Almandal and Almadel and their place in the history of ritual magic and religious practice.

Keywords: Manuscript Studies, Almandal, Magic, Societas Magica, History of the Book, Multicultural, Solomon, History of Magic

Proposals

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by 15 September 2024. All paper proposals must be submitted via the official Confex proposal portal.

Link: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6392

Halle (Saale), Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, 14 B 36, fol. 243r: Image image of the almadel or “table of spirits”. Astro-magical texts on paper, circa 1400. Image C.C. BY 4.0, via http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/33754.

6. “Sendalphon, Send Me a Dream:
Dream Books, Spells, Divination, Incubation, and Interpretation” (ID #6171)

Online Session

Co-sponsored with the Societas Magica
and
Polytheist-Oriented Medievalists of North America (P.-O.M.o.N.A.)

Organizers:
Phillip Bernhardt-House (Independent Scholar)
Claire Fanger (Department of Religion, Rice University)

Aim

From ancient Mesopotamian cultures, dreams are associated with divine encounters and intervention, particularly with foretelling future events directly or symbolically. Dream interpretation literature is rife with these understandings. Magical operations eliciting divinatory dreams are widely encountered. Particular sacred locations specializing in cultivating divinatory sleep for healing and other purposes, known as “dream incubation,” offered interpreters to assist those who sought such dreams. This session will explore many examples of dreams in/as divination, the outcome of spells, and through particular practices of incubation, as well as their interpretations and practices related to them in manuscript and other sources of various periods.

Keywords: Dreams, Dream Interpretation, Spells, Divination, Manuscript Studies, Magic, Societas Magica, Dream Incubation

Proposals

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by 15 September 2024. All paper proposals must be submitted via the official Confex proposal portal.

Link: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6171

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 7. Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, Commentum Macrobii Ambrosii in somnium Scipionis. Dated 1469 Feb. 7. Image Public Domain via https://houghtonlib.tumblr.com/post/146944005911/macrobius-ambrosius-aurelius-theodosius-comentum.

Note on the Image
Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis (Commentary on The Dream of Scipio), by Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (fl. c. AD 400) for a portion of De Re Republica by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC).

Image Public Domain via https://houghtonlib.tumblr.com/post/146944005911/macrobius-ambrosius-aurelius-theodosius-comentum.

Los Angeles, Getty Center, Ms. Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), fol. 1. Image Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Note on the Image

Los Angeles, Getty Center, Ms. Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), fol. 1.

Scipio and Guillaume de Lorris Lying in their Beds Dreaming

More information: SEE HERE.

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Questions? Suggestions?

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Join the Friends of the RGME. Send your favorite recipe for Lemonade (and perhaps its Story) for our Competition.

Attend our next Events if your timetable allows. Our next Events:

Episode 17. RGME Retrospect and Prospects (Saturday 21 September 2024 online)
2024 Autumn Symposium “At the Helm” (Friday–Saturday 25–26 October 2024 online)
Episode 18. “Women as Makers of Books” (Saturday 14 December 2024 online)

Consider making a Donation in Funds or in Kind for our nonprofit educational corporation powered principally by volunteers. Your donations and contributions are welcome, and can go a long way. They may be tax-deductible to the fullest extent provided by the law.

Remember to send your Proposals for Papers for RGME Sessions at the 2025 ICMS by 15 September 2024. See the instructions above.

We look forward to hearing from you and welcoming you to our events.

*****

Los Angeles, Getty Center, Ms. Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), fol. 1. Scipio and Guillaume de Loris Lying in Their Beds Dreaming. Image Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: Almadel, Almandel, Apocalypse, Art History, Beatus, Correspondence, Couriers, Digital Humanities, Divination, Dream Incubation, dream interpretation, Dreams, Grimoires, History of Magic, History of the Book, Letters, Literature, Magic, Mail, Manuscript Production, Manuscript studies, Material Culture, Medieval manuscripts, Medieval Studies, Multicultural, Post Office, Postal, Religious Studies, Representations of Women, Solomon, Women's Authorship, Women's Literature
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Three-Step Program, Lemonade Included

June 25, 2024 in Announcements, Design, Manuscript Studies, RGME Competition, RGME Recipes

Favorite Recipes for Lemonade

Entries Invited

A Recipe Competition
for the Friends
of the
Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

[Posted on 25 June 2024, with updates]

Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Jacob van Hulsdonck (1582-1647), Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Pomegranate. Image Public Domain.

As we launch the new community of Friends of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, we consider activities which might be both welcoming and easy to organize, as well as fun.

In considering what sorts of activities the Friends might like, we thought about gatherings for conversations with refreshments.

We began to dream about coffee mornings, tea parties, cocktail parties, receptions, and the like. While our gatherings would be mostly online, some would be in-person or hybrid. The online format would require that, in such cases, the refreshments would take the form of Bring Your Own (BYO), but we could easily share recipe tips.

Contents of the Goody Bags, with Stories and Baked Goodies created by Linda Civitello. Photograph by Hannah Goeselt.

Already some of our online events have featured recipes, including a demonstration.

South Italian Cuisine Before Columbus (Linda Civitello)
Episode 15. Women Writers from the Medieval to Postmodern Periods, including cookery books and historic recipes (Linda Civitello and Hannah Goeselt)

Our 2024 Spring Symposium in hybrid format featured a generous Goody Bag created and home-made by our Associate Linda Civitello (see also Linda Civitello), culinary historian and exclusive caterer.

2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar College: Report

This experience, together with our natural interest in food and sharing refreshments with friends in good company, led to the subject of recipes, shared recipes, and refreshments. Plus competitions, with prizes. And so, we offer a Competition.

A Three-Step Program

We call this Competition a Three-Step Program. In three steps, it sets out a plan to feature lemons, although other citrus fruits and other comestibles might pertain, to taste.

On the Subject of Lemons

“Native to South Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and Australia,” the genus Citrus comprises oranges, mandarins, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, and limes. Used, cultivated, and domesticated by indigenous cultures since ancient times in these tropical and sub-tropical regions, the cultivation spread from there “into Micronesia and Polynesia by the Austronesian expansion (c. 3000–1500 BCE); and to the Middle East and the Mediterranean (c. 1200 BCE) via the incense trade route, and onwards to Europe and the Americas.”

— See Citrus (Wikipedia)

History as Background

The RGME has had some Competitions with Prizes before. For example, in 2015, with a book as prize, we asked for entries giving the transcription and translation into modern English for two medieval charters. One award per charter.

Private Collection. “Preston Charters” Faces. Numbers added to the photograph report the present owner’s numbering for the set, from 5 to 7 and 9 to 13. Photograph Mildred Budny.

I was researching a group of medieval charters from a Private Collection, with discoveries about the people, places, place-names, and landscapes which they evoke at specific moments in history regarding particular locations of land in the possession of various individuals and carrying signatures (or marks) of named individuals involved in transactions regarding those lands; some of these documents retain their seals (or remnants of them) or seal-bags. A series of blogposts ensued.

Also:

“Seals, Matrices, and Signatories

There came a point when I thought it might be worthwhile to open the field, and I wished for help with transcribing and translating the documents. For prizes, I chose books on medieval land-related subjects, among which the winners could choose.

I opened the competition widely as a blogpost on the RGME website, with images of the charters and instructions. Submissions were received, an expert committee reviewed them, winners were selected, and awards were given. The book-awards were selected and sent. The winning translations+translations were published as a follow-up blogpost:

Preston Take 2

The Winner, in this case, Takes All, because one person won both competitions: William H. Campbell. Later he expertly organized a pair of Sessions about medieval book-bindings which the RGME co-sponsored with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies. Now he is one of our Honorary Invited Associates. (See our Officers, Associates, and Volunteers.)

Three Steps

1. Maxim: Life Gives You Lemons

2. Action: Make Lemonade (or similar)

3. Result: Send Your Favorite Recipe for our Competition

Extra Bonus: Prize Award

Our competition takes its inspiration from a predicament and its resourceful resolution. A brief history of the proverbial phrase in English, in several manifestations, covers the ground:

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.

The general idea appears to consider lemons, whether metaphorical or tangible, as being sour, therefore difficult, adverse, unfortunate, and so on. The advised response would work to make them palatable or better, by means of some additions and operations.

We could think of it, for our present purposes, as:

Challenge, Response, Prize.

Step 1. Find your Lemons

Note that the Competition does not require that the recipe for “Lemonade” have Lemon fruit itself. Substitutions are allowed, such as other Citrus fruits. Combinations of fruits (or flowers) are also allowed.

Customarily Lemonade, by virtue of its name, depends upon or implies Lemons as the main ingredient, with sweeteners of various kinds introduced to taste (and according to waistlines). Over the centuries, across cultures, and subject to availability or preference, sweeteners might range from dates or honey to sugar, maple syrup, stevia or other sugar substitutes / artificial sweeteners, and strawberries. These components are prepared in a variety of proportions, according to varieties, such as the sweeter hybrid Meyer Lemon, strictly #notalemon, which comprises a cross between a citrus and a mandarin orange / pomelo hybrid.

Some varieties are carbonated; some are alcoholic. The latter might, say, have bourbon, whiskey, tequila, gin, vodka, or sparkling wine. Straws might make an appearance, as might ice. Garnishes appear in many variations, such as mint or lemon slices. Presentation, vessels, and accessories for the beverage can range from rough-and-ready, at-hand, or improvised, to elaborate and/or exquisite. It can be served on its own or in the company of foodstuffs, such as cookies or other baked goods.

Over to You

Please Share Your Recipe

Do you have a favorite, or favorites, among the many varieties of lemonade or ‘lemonade’?

For example, do you favor your mother’s or grandmother’s recipe for Lemonade? Are there companion goodies that you think customarily should go with Lemonade?

Please let us know your favorite recipe. The instructions can be as detailed or general as you wish.

You see, we understand that some people prefer to measure ingredients precisely; others prefer the “Chuck It In” Method.

That is what I used to call my father’s approach to cooking, so it seemed to me as a young observer of his methods rarely to be seen in the kitchen. Roughly speaking, it looked somewhat like this:

Open the Cupboard / Refrigerator; Grab whatever is there or comes to hand; Chuck It In; Stir / Cook / Bake as Indicated or as Interest / Patience Allows; Dish It Out; Eat.

Despite his devotion to fruit and vegetable juices (all freshly made) in his later years, they never seemed to include Lemonade (although he was strong on fresh orange juice, industrial-grade juicer as producer included), so I must look to other families’ or cultures’ recipes. I’d be glad to learn about yours.

When it comes to judging the entries for our Competition, we would not have a bias ahead of time for precise measurements on the one hand or variable approximations or guesswork on the other, so please describe your recipe in the style to which you (or your source for it) are accustomed.

Do you have a name or title for your recipe?

If you like, please let us know its story. For example, is it handed down the family from one generation to the next (or the one after next), from mother, aunt, or grandmother to children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews, and so on? Did you invent or perfect it? Do you keep it, or did you find it, in some handwritten, typed, printed, or digital form?

Would you like to send pictures of the preparation and/or the product?

Competition for the Best Recipe(s)

Please send your entry for this Competition for the Friends of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence to:

Friends of the RGME

Depending upon responses, we might publish the winning recipe, or a selection of recipes, as a first installment of the Friends’ Favorite Recipes.

We would welcome your suggestions for other sorts of recipes for our next Competition.

Prizes

With the official launch of the Group of Friends and this competition in time for our Episode 17 on “RGME Retrospect and Prospects”, we announce the prizes. (All of them are donations for the purpose).

First Prize: Kitchen Apron with lemon pattern and lemon-shaped pockets.
Second Prize: Set of 12 linen cocktail napkins with lemon pattern and yellow border.
Third Prize: 2 packs of 8 dinner-sized paper plates with a lemon-sprig design.

Bonus prize for all: RGME Recipe booklet with our Favorite Recipes (Yours included!)

Mint Lemonade in New York City at a Friends’ Reunion. Photography by Mildred Budny.

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Update (6 November 2024):

A new blogpost reports some first entries for this competition, announces an expansion of the terms of the competition (i.e. lemonade and more), and lists more prizes which have been donated to the cause.

Favorite Recipes for Lemonade, Etc.

*****

Questions or Suggestions?

Please leave your comments or questions below, Contact Us, or visit

our FaceBook Page
our Facebook Group
our Twitter Feed (@rgme_mss)
our Bluesky nest @rgmesocial.bluesky.social)
our LinkedIn Group
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Donations and contributions , in funds or in kind, are welcome and easy to give. Given our low overheads, your donations have direct impact on our work and the furtherance of our mission. For our Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, your donations may be tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law. Thank you for your support!

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Update (22 August 2024)

The first entry has arrived. Simple as can be.

1. Our Layout and Font Designer describes the answer to “Live Gives You Lemons” succinctly:

Give Them Back

*****

Do you have a preferred recipe to share with us? We’d love to hear.

Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Jacob van Hulsdonck (1582-1647), Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Pomegranate. Oil on panel, about 1620–1630, within frame. Image Public Domain, via https://useum.org/artwork/Still-Life-with-Lemons-Oranges-and-a-Pomegranate-Jacob-van-Hulsdonck

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Tags: Favorite Recipes, Friends of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, Lemonade, Lemons, Recipe Competition, Recipes
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To Whom Do Manuscripts Belong?

May 26, 2024 in Manuscript Studies

To Whom Do Manuscripts Belong?

Georgi Parpulov
(independent scholar)

[A Guest Blogpost by our Associate, Georgi Parpulov]

Stray leaf from cod. A 13 of the Lavra on Mount Athos. Recto, detail. Formerly Bath (England), private collection. Present whereabouts uncertain. (Photo: Alexander Saminsky)

A short paper that I published two years ago about dispersed fragments from the library of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai prompted a colleague to ask me about ‘manuscripts like these’. ‘What are the ethical issues involved?’, her email went on. ‘Should a collection with fragments from a monastic library offer to return their leaves, for example? Is there any similarity in study of dispersed manuscripts to the study of looted antiquities?’ By way of suggesting possible answers to these questions, I will recount, as accurately and impartially as I can, six distinct series of events.

In March 1917, during World War One, a band of armed men robbed the Greek Eikosiphoinissa Monastery of its library.[1] Because this band was led by the Bulgarian adventurer Todor Panica (1879–1925) and accompanied by the Czech scholar Vladimír Sís (1889–1958), many of the monastery’s manuscripts ended up with public collections in Sofia or Prague. Some, however, remained at first in private hands, and through consecutive sales reached the United States. Two such codices are described, with full provenance information, in a catalogue that Prof. Kenneth Willis Clark (1898–1979) of Duke University published in 1937.[2] In December 2015, ‘the Greek Orthodox Church began sending letters to institutions that possessed the volumes and asked for their return’ (Chicago Tribune of 15 November 2016). The Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago responded by handing over to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America one of the manuscripts that Clark had catalogued. It was subsequently restituted to Eikosiphoinissa, which nowadays functions as a nunnery. Upon request from the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung, a liaison contacted the nuns in 2018 and ascertained the codex’s current shelfmark. High-quality photographs taken in 2010 remain on the website of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

On 20 June 1960, the abbot of the Dionysiou Monastery on Mount Athos wrote to the local civil authorities in Karyes that some three months earlier a twelfth-century manuscript had been stolen from his monastery.[3] On Good Friday, namely, about eighty German tourists had arrived at Dionysiou and taken turns, divided into two groups, at visiting its library under the supervision of a senior monk who was not feeling well that day.[4] The codex, the abbot wrote, would have been easy to conceal in the clothing or bag of one of them. Its absence was not immediately marked because it was normally shelved behind the frame of a glazed door.[5] A second letter from the same prelate to the same addressee, bearing date 13/26 June 1961, reported the thereto unnoticed absence of another codex (size 315 × 255 × 120 mm), possibly stolen together with the aforesaid one.[6] Two more codices went missing from the monastery’s library ca. 1960, but the circumstances of their disappearance have never been announced. No steps were taken at the time to identify and arrest the suspected thief or to trace the four stolen items. Detailed descriptions and photographs of one were published in 1979, when in was in private hands,[7] and again in 1987, when it had been purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum.[8] In January 2014, the 1960 theft report came to the attention of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, which asked the Getty to return the codex to Greece. The museum complied and proceeded to remove all photos of the manuscript from its website. The book remains accessible through a digitized microfilm made in 1953,[9] where all figural miniatures are covered up with cloth.

While the repatriations of 2016 and 2014 were widely reported, a slightly earlier and somewhat similar case remains, to my knowledge, completely unpublicized. In 2012, an Orthodox Christian in England presented to his local church an illuminated leaf from a Byzantine manuscript, expecting the parish priest to sell it. Once a colleague of mine had emailed me two photographs, it did not take long to identify the manuscript from which the leaf had been detached. Even without information about the date and circumstances of this removal, the priest was determined to do the right thing: he contacted the Greek embassy in London and handed the leaf to their cultural attaché. Presumably it has been reunited with its parent-volume on Mount Athos, but no public announcements to that effect were ever made.

Stray leaf from Cod. A 13 of the Monastery of the Lavra on Mount Athos. Greek New Testament with Psalter and Nine Odes, 11th century: Verso with LXX Psalm 77: 4-23 (Psalm 78: 4-23 in the English Bible). Formerly Bath (England), private collection. Present whereabouts uncertain. (Photo: Alexander Saminsky).

Those smooth restitutions can be contrasted with the recent history of the ‘Archimedes Palimpsest’.[10] From at least 1846 till ca. 1920, the now-famous codex belonged to a metochion (dependency) of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It then somehow passed into private hands and was sold at auction to its current owner, an American, in October 1998. A year later the Patriarchate sued for its return. The case was brought before the court of the Southern District of New York and dismissed. ‘Before it filed this lawsuit, the Patriarchate had never asserted claims over other Metochion manuscripts in private hands or announced the disappearance, loss, or theft of any Metochion manuscripts…. In sum, the Patriarchate waited almost seventy years after the Palimpsest was transferred to Mr. Sirieix to bring suit against his heirs [who sold the manuscript in 1998]. The passage of time renders trial of this matter virtually impossible; the Court would be confronted with the Patriarchate’s claim that it clearly possessed the Palimpsest at the beginning of this century against defendants’ claim that they clearly possess it at the end, with little or no evidence of what happened in between.’[11] Since 1999, the palimpsest’s owner has invested generously in its conservation treatment and study. A full set of high-quality digital images has been available for some fifteen years under a Creative Commons license.

My last two stories involve other codices kept in the United States. First we go to Florida. Before The Holy Land Experience, a biblical theme park, closed down in March 2020, all Greek manuscripts of the Van Kampen Collection were housed there. A few of them were on view inside a building called the Scriptorium. When I travelled to Orlando in order to study one that interested me, it was not taken out of its glass case, so I could only see two facing pages. To my joy, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts had that same book fully photographed in 2008 and made its photographs viewable on the CSNTM website. They remained online till 2020, when a formal letter from a representative of the Van Kampens asked for their removal.

We finally come to Pennsylvania. The library of Bryn Mawr College houses a Greek Psalter from the second half of the twelfth century, Gordan MS 9. It was first offered for sale in 1906 by Karl Wilhelm Hiersemann, whose catalogue description Vladimir Beneševič reprinted in 1911. Its last known owners are the scholar Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (1913–1994) and her spouse John Dozier Gordon Jr. (1907–1968). They had four children. I examined the codex first-hand in 2003, and more recently, on 4 January 2021, wrote to the college’s Curator for Rare Books and Manuscripts to request digital images of it. I was promptly informed that ‘the manuscript in question does not belong to the library, but is on deposit here. We are not able to provide imaging except with the permission of the owner. . . . I will ask our institutional contact with the owner to forward the request. I am not able to guess whether the owner will agree or refuse – or agree with restrictions.’ I am happy to report that I did obtain photographs, in March 2023. I am prohibited from sharing any of them.

By way of conclusion, I must add to the dry facts some general reflections ‘about the state of the field’. Needless to say, from this point on I can only speak for myself. I am not a tenured academic, so I do not absolutely have to study manuscripts for a living. Even so, I am a scholar of sorts, the kind of scholar who is interested in books as objects (rather than just in the texts that they transmit): I want to examine the handwriting, the decoration, the physical structure of a volume. And there has never been a better time than now to study codices from this angle. Various institutions have placed millions of digital images online. Many a library will permit readers to photograph a manuscript they are studying. Collectors want to have their possessions accessed and catalogued.

Thinking of this, I just do not see how property law can be applied to manuscripts without due reflection. The owner of any physical object has the legal right to limit other persons’ access to it: a monastery’s abbot and librarian are not obliged to let me see a book in their custody, photographs once publicly visible may be hidden from view, and so on. Some codices happen to be very expensive: the Archimedes Palimpsest once fetched over $2,000,000 at auction and would almost certainly fetch more nowadays. But these are not just ordinary valuables, they are significant remnants from our common past. Why should a manuscript restituted become a manuscript hidden? Monks or nuns who have managed to reclaim the nineteenth-century content of their libraries ought to remember the gospel: ‘no one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed’. It is bizarre that things as simple as the shelfmark or even the current whereabouts of a leaf sent back to Greece cannot be easily ascertained. It is equally weird to see American owners struggle to keep their manuscripts out of sight for fear of possible restitution claims.

On 23 June 1964, Pope Paul VI told his college of cardinals: ‘Accepting the request of Constantine, Orthodox Metropolitan of Patras, St Peter’s Basilica will return to his see a priceless relic: that of the sacred head of St Andrew the Apostle. This precious relic was entrusted to Our predecessor Pope Pius II, the famous Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who received it under peculiar historical circumstances on 12 April 1462 in order that it be worthily kept next to the tomb of Andrew’s brother the Apostle Peter with the intention that it might one day, God willing, be sent back.’ The head was duly returned to Greece three months later. Countless Christians ceaselessly venerate it, and if I ever visit Patras, I shall not be stopped from doing the same. So should a collection with fragments from a monastic library offer to return their leaves? I might as well directly address the possessors or custodians of such relics: If you believe that manuscripts fall in the same class of objects as human remains, then yes, go ahead and return them to those whom you deem to be their rightful heirs. Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

————————————

[1] An eyewitness account by the monastery’s abbot Neophytus is printed in K. E. Tsiakas, Ἱστορία τῆς Ἱερᾶς Μονῆς Εἰκοσιφοινίσσης Παγγαίου (Drama 1958) 40–41.

[2] K. W. Clark, A Descriptive Catalogue of Greek New Testament Manuscripts in America (Chicago 1937) 51–53, 104–106.

[3] Διὰ τοῦ παρόντος καὶ μετὰ πολλῆς τῆς λύπης μας ἀναφέρομεν Ὑμῖν, ὅτι ἐκ τῆς Βιβλιοθήκης τῆς Μονῆς μας ἐκλάπη πρὸ τριμήνου περίπου, ὡς συμπεραίνομεν, ὁ ὑπ᾽ ἀριθ. 8 περγαμηνὸς χειρόγραφος Κώδιξ (sic) τοῦ 12ου αἰῶνος . . .

[4] Τὴν Μ. Πέμπτην προσήγγισεν εἰς τὴν Μονήν μας τὸ ἀτμόπλοιον “ΑΔΡΙΑΤΙΚΗ” μὲ Γερμανοὺς περιηγητάς, ἐξ ὧν περὶ τοὺς 80 ἀνῆλθον εἰς τὴν Μονήν. Περὶ τῆς ἐλεύσεώς των εἶχομεν προειδοποιηθῆ ἐκ Καριῶν καὶ Δάφνης καὶ ἐπειδὴ ἦλθον περὶ ὥραν 12ην μεσημβρινήν, ὅτε ἐτελεῖτο ἡ θεία λειτουργία, ἐπεσκέφτησαν μόνον τὴν Τράπεζαν τοῦ φαγητοῦ καὶ τὴν Βιβλιοθήκην εἰς δύο ὁμάδας, λόγω στενότητος χώρου. Κατὰ τὴν ἐπίσκεψίν των εἰς τὴν Βιβλιοθήκην περιευρίσκετο καὶ ὁ Ἐπίτροπος Γ. Θεόκλητος, καίτοι ἀσθενής, πρὸς ἀσφάλειαν. Διστυχῶς ἡ εἴσοδος 40 περίπου ἀτόμων εἰς τὸν περιωρισμένον χῶρον τῆς Βιβλιοθήκης καὶ ὁ ὡς ἐκ τούτου συνωστισμὸς διηυκόλησε τοὺς κλέπτας . . .

[5] Ὁ Κῶδιξ εἶναι 30 πόντων ὕφους, 20 πλάτους καὶ 4–5 πάχους καὶ ὡς ἐκ τούτου εὐκόλως ἀπεκρύβη εἰς τὸν κόλπον ἢ τὴν τσάνταν τοῦ κλέψαντος. Ἡ θέσις του ἦτο εἰς τὸ ἄκρον τῆς θυρίδος καὶ σχεδὸν ἐκαλύπτετο ἀπὸ τὸ σανίμα (sic) αὐτῆς, ἐξ οὗ καὶ δὲν ὑπέπεσεν ἐγκαίρως εἰς τὴν ἀντίληψιν τοῦ Βιβλιοθηκαρίου ἡ ἀπουσία του.

[6] Ἀπαντῶντες εἰς Ὑμέτερον ἔγγραφον ἀπὸ 10.7.61 καὶ ὑπ᾽ ἀριθ. 1222.Γ´, ἔχομεν τὴν τιμὴν νὰ ληροφορήσωμεν Ὑμᾶς, ὅτι ὁ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀναφερόμενος περγαμηνὸς Κῶδιξ τῆς Βιβλιοθήκης μας ὑπ᾽ ἀριθ. 49, . . . ἔχει ἐξαφανισθεῖ ἐκ τῆς Βιβλιοθήκης μας, καὶ ἡ ἐξαφάνισίς του ἐγένετο ἀντιληπτὴ ἀπὸ ἔτους. Τὸν χρόνον τῆς ἐξαφανίσεώς του δὲν δυνάμεθα νὰ προσδιορίσωμεν. Ὑποθέτομεν ὅμως, ὅτι δὲν ἀπέχει τῆς διετίας καὶ ἴσως νὰ ἐκλάπη συγχρόνως μὲ τὸν ἄλλον, τὸν ὑπ᾽ ἀριθ. 54, περὶ τοῦ ὁποίου Σᾶς ἀνεφέρομεν τότε ἀμέσως.

[7] A. von Euw, J. M. Plotzek, Die Handschriften der Sammlung Ludwig, I (Cologne 1979) 159–163 with figs 56–63.

[8] R. S. Nelson, ‘Theoktistos and Associates in Twelfth-Century Constantinople: An Illustrated New Testament of A.D. 1133’, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 15 (1987) 53–78.

[9] E. W. Sanders, ‘Operation Microfilm at Mt. Athos’, Biblical Archaeologist 18 (1955) 21–41, at 22 and 30.

[10] K. J. Carver, ‘The Legal Implications and Mysteries Surrounding the Archimedes Palimpsest’, American Journal of Legal History 47 (2005) 119–160.

[11] The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem vs. Christie’s Inc., No. 98 Civ. 7664 (KMW), 1999 WL 673347 (S.D.N.Y. 30 August 1999).

*****

Tags: Access to Manuscripts, Archimedes Palimpsest, Cod. A 13 of the Lavra on Mount Athos, Dionysiou Monastery Mont Athos, Eikosiphoinissa Monastery, History of Collections, Manuscript studies, Manuscript Thefts, Metochion manuscripts, Relic of Saint Andrew the Apostle, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Van Kampen Collection
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Recollections for the 2024 RGME Anniversary, Part 1: Giles Constable

May 20, 2024 in Anniversary, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Episodes for The Research Group Speaks, RGME Recollections

2024 RGME Anniversary Recollections
Part 1

Giles Constable

[Posted on 20 May 2024, with updates]

During this 2024 Anniversary Year for the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence (RGME), with our year’s theme of Bridges, we gather recollections and tributes for people who have contributed to our formation, history, progress, legacy, and the pursuit of our mission across the years. This year, we celebrate

25 years as a nonprofit educational organization incorporated in Princeton, New Jersey, and
35 years as an international scholarly organization founded as part of a major research project on “Anglo-Saxon and Related Manuscripts” at The Parker Library of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

As part of our anniversary celebrations, the RGME prepares an Episode in our online series “The Research Group Speaks” to consider

Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”

To register:

Episode 17. Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections
Saturday 21 September 2024, 1:00–2:30 EDT (GMT-4) online via Zoom

We begin a series of Anniversary Reflections in our blog on Manuscript Studies by focusing upon a RGME Associate, Honorary Trustee, Mentor, and Friend whose advice and encouragement loomed larger than life in the course of our organization and its journey across time. Mildred Budny contributes this set of reflections, illustrated with some photographs.

Anniversary Reflections, Part 1:
Giles Constable, Honorary Trustee and Mentor

With admiration, I describe some recollections of Giles Constable (1 June 1929 — 17 January 2021), our long-time Associate, Honorary Trustee, colleague, mentor, and friend.

Giles Reading at the Window in his Office at the IAS. Spring 2014. Photography Mildred Budny.

Achievements

Giles’s achievements are many. Institutions to which he belonged, and to which he contributed, record the structure and components of his scholarly and administrative activities. For example, in these accounts:

With the A. B. (1950) and Ph. D. (1957) from Harvard University, Giles taught at the University of Iowa (1955 to 1958) and at Harvard (1958 to 1984), for which he served as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D. C. At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he was Medieval History Professor in the School of Historical Studies (1985 to 2003) and then Professor Emeritus until his death.

His participation in the life of his family, as brother, husband, in-law, father, and grandfather belongs among his merits. He enriched the lives of many colleagues, students, and friends by words, advice, encouragement, and example.

Some of his former students are Research Group Trustees and Associates, and their descriptions of him over the years have been moving and inspiring.

Here we begin to gather some of these recollections. Their gathering began with our report of Giles’s passing on the day itself, in a posting on our Research Group Facebook Page.

Colleague, Mentor, and Friend

Some photographs from our RGME Archive record moments in our collaboration. Above, we see Giles still at work, reading, in his post-retirement office at the Institute for Advanced Study. The photograph made its debut in public on our Facebook Page, on 17 January 2021.

About that photograph, our Associate Karl F. Morrison observed:

Thank you very much for capturing this image of Giles, no doubt in the act of reading something for somebody else. It reminded me that, for Giles, the center always held, and his gifts of mind and heart for encouraging companions on the way were the same as the definition of infinity: the center was everywhere and the borders nowhere.

We offer some other images, from other occasions.

As Honorary Trustee of the Research Group

Regularly, Giles hosted annual meetings of the Princeton Trustees of the RGME, after the first such meeting hosted by James Marrow, Honorary Trustee.

Giles Constable and James Marrow at the Meeting of the Honorary Trustees of the Research Group on 13 December 2013. Photography Mildred Budny.

These meetings gathered Trustees and Honorary Trustees resident in Princeton, including Giles, James, Mildred Budny, and Adelaide Bennett.

Giles Constable and Adelaide Bennett at the 2016 RGME Symposium. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

As Contributor to our Symposia, Colloquia, Seminars, and Workshops

At the 2002 British Museum Colloquium

Coffee Break at our 2002 British Museum Colloquium. Our Director, Dáibhí Ó Cróinin, and Giles Constable. Photograph by our Associate, Geoffrey R. Russom.

At the 2002 ‘Investiture’ of our Associate, James P. Heidere

The ‘Investiture’ of our Research Group Associate, James P. Heidere, by Roger Reynolds and Giles Constable.

See also, among others, the 2014 Seminar on Manuscripts and Photography.

As Mentor, Colleague, and Friend

In his IAS office, with Alison Beach (2014)

Giles Constable with Alison Beach at his office in Spring 2014. Photography Mildred Budny.

About this photograph, Alison — who had been Postdoctoral Research Assistant to Professor Giles Constable during the period 1998—2000 — commented:

[The photograph shows me] With Giles at the Institute for Advanced Study consulting about the translation of the Chronicle of Petershausen in 2014. Giles encouraged Sam [Sutherland], Shannon [Li], and me to push on with and publish the translation. What a privilege it was. . . . he seemed immortal to me.

Mildred Budny, author of this post, offered remarks about Giles’s mentorship for her and the RGME over years after the RGME moved its principal base to Princeton and became incorporated as a nonprofit educational organization, in her contribution to a Roundtable co-sponsored by the RGME at the 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies. (See 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report.)

More recollections will form part of the program for Episode 17 of “The Research Group Speaks” on 21 September 2024. Please let us know if you wish to participate.

Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”

To register:

Episode 17. Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections
Saturday 21 September 2024, 1:00–2:30 EDT (GMT-4) online via Zoom

*****

In Giles’s Honor

A fund for the Research Group has been established to honor Giles Constable: The Constable Fund. See

Do you have recollections, souvenirs, and photographs of Giles Constable that you would like to share?

Please, if you wish,

add your Comments here,
send us a message (Contact Us),
visit our Facebook Page, and
join our Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”
To register:
Episode 17. Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections
Saturday 21 September 2024, 1:00–2:30 EDT (GMT-4) online via Zoom

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Update (12 August 2024): Now see Part 2.

Patrick Wormald (1947-2004): A Memoir by David Ganz

Introduced by a blogpost, this Memoir appears as an 8-page Booklet published by the RGME.

See also the varied series of recollections and memoirs in various formats, digital and printed:

Memoirs.

*****

Tags: Alison Beach, Giles Constable, James Marrow, Patrick Wormald, RGME Anniversary, RGME Associates, RGME Honorary Trustees, RGME Mentors, RGME Recollections, RGME Retrospect and Prospects, The Constable Fund
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2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report

May 15, 2024 in Abstracts of Conference Papers, Anniversary, Announcements, Conference, Conference Announcement, Events, ICMS, Illustrated Handlist, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, POMONA, Postal History at Kalamazoo, Societas Magica

2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report

59th ICMS (9–11 May 2024)

Held in a transitional ‘hybrid’ form
with RGME Co-Sponsored Sessions,
an Open Business Meeting,
and Co-Sponsored Reception

In a Nutshell:
Mission Accomplished!

With Thanks to our Participants,
Co-Sponsors, Audience, and Friends

[Posted on 14 May 2024]

Western Michigan University, Valley III from the side. Photograph: David W. Sorenson.

After the successful completion of all our activities at the 59th Annual 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS), we report our accomplishments and give updates about changes to the Program which we announced (with updates as appropriate) for its items. See the full ICMS Program issued by its organizing Committee:

2024 Congress Program, with Corrigenda.

The Journey

Already from our first preparations toward the 2024 Congress,

starting with the 2023 Congress and our Open Business Meeting there to invite proposals,
moving on to our proposals for Sessions for 2024 submitted to the Congress Committee by 1 June 2023,
progressing with the approved Call for Papers for the 2024 ICMS,
reaching the firm conclusion of that Call on 15 September 2024, and
selecting the Program for our Sessions according to responses to that Call and related developments,

we have made revisions and provided updates for our plan.

They gave rise to our announcement for our own (and co-sponsored) Program (including the details of Sessions, their speakers, titles of papers, order of presentation, and so on; as well as ancillary events such as the Anniversary Reception), its updates throughout the months from October to May and the start of the Congress. Now we follow up with the Report.

The proposals received not only yielded Programs for which the order of Papers and the follow-up invitation to Presiders and Panelists, but also encouraged us to combine resources within the Research Group, with our frequent co-sponsor, the Societas Magica, and with others. Thus we collaboratively created a strong program of activities for the 2024 Congress.

Along the way, between

the submission of our selected Program to the Congress Committee by 15 October 2023,
its acceptance,
the assignment of dates, times, and venues for the individual activities for the 2024 Congress Program as officially published (with a series of Corrigenda, not affecting us, as the date of the Congress approached), and
the start of the Congress itself on Thursday 9 May 2024, with events variously in online and/or in-person formats,

our own 2024 Congress Program has had a few minor revisions, as people and technological arrangements permitted.

These changes did not interfere with the overall success of our activities. Our 2024 Congress Program reported various changes up to the Congress; this Report describes those effected at or around the Congress.

Access Included

As in 2023, the RGME responded to the partly ‘hybrid’ conditions of the Congress by providing its Zoom Meetings for two scheduled solely ‘In Person’ Sessions, as well as for our In-Person catered lunchtime Open Business Meeting, and by reserving an onsite Remote Participation Room on campus for those participants for a scheduled ‘Virtual’ Session who were present at the Congress to be able to gather to sign on to the online Session hosted by the Congress Confex Portal. The RGME managed all these extra Zoom provisions and reservations, as part of its contribution to sponsoring or co-sponsoring Sessions at the ICMS over the years.

It can be worth noting that those donations — at the cost of the RGME, are made possible by donations to enable its Zoom Subscription, by our own provisions for technical backup, and principally by the many pro-bono donations by its Director as overall organizer and co-ordinator of the RGME activities at the Congress and elsewhere — are not covered within the costs to produce the Congress, which registration fees by attendees online and in-person work to subsidize. The extra efforts by the RGME to provide features or facilities for the contributors, participants, and attendees of its activities at the Congress, whether online or onsite, correspond with our approach to our activities of many kinds.

In this spirit, the RGME has consistently stepped up to the plate in response to changes in the facilities for the ICMS before and after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Congress was successively

1) cancelled outright (2020),
2) rescheduled in online format only (2021), and
3) re-introduced in a partly in-person, partly virtual, ‘hybrid’ format (2022, 2o23, 2024, and more).

Throughout these developments, responding to their changing requirements, the RGME has continued to seek, insofar as possible with our own limited resources, to provide access to our sponsored and co-sponsored Congress activities to as wide an audience as possible, including those with disablilities, health issues, and difficulties in finding resources to travel and cover expenses to attend the Congress in person.

These ‘extras’ which we provide stand alongside the RGME tradition for many years of promoting our authors and the contributions of their work to our Congress Programs (see our Congress Activities) by the series of RGME promotional notices for the year’s Congress (with updates):

on our official Website (You are Here),
on our Social Media (listed Below),
in the Posters for each of our Congress activities, and
in the Congress Abstracts which we publish for the Authors’ presentations.

The Posters normally are displayed in printed form at the Congress — where permitted, such as on cork boards in the different buildings and in the rooms where our events take place — and on the RGME website, with printed copies also sent to presenters as souvenirs to display in their offices or studies and to give to their mothers. For example for the 2015 Congress:

Derek Shank stands beside the RGME Poster Display for the 2025 ICMS. Photography by Mildred Budny.

The Abstracts appear in their own individual webpages — which can 1) extend for a longer span than the assigned limit (100 words) for the submission of a proposal for a Congress Paper; 2) add notes, links, and bibliography; and 3) include images — as publications in their own right.

Moreover, we take care to index all the Authors’ Abstracts for a given Congress to grant wider access both:

Alphabetically by Author’s Surname and
Chronologically by Year of Author’s Presentation.

The Arrival

After the Journey to arrive, there remained some bumps in the road at the destination. The RGME Director was unable to travel for health reasons, and so had to attend online.

Program

One person on the Program for one Session decided not to attend. Technical issues with one Speaker’s PowerPoint Presentation and its Zoom projection interrupted a short span of the flow of slides in an expertly crafted presentation in another Session, but this interruption could smoothly be kept to a brief minimum through co-ordination prepared ahead of time between the Speaker and the RGME Zoom Host, together with the Session Organizer. The prepared co-ordination ahead of time for hybrid access dropped the ball between one scheduled in-person Session and the RGME-hosted Zoom online facility, required, it turned out, not as an extra, but as an essential, so as to enable the Presider and two of the Speakers unable to travel to the Congress to participate in the Session.

Audience Participation

At the last minute, an audience member generously offered to lend his computer so that the Organizer / Second Speaker could connect the Zoom Meeting for the Session and the In-Person Room. We give thanks to collegiality and generous resourcefulness.

Posters

Another surprise came for the RGME Posters for our Congress Activities when the eve of the Congress arrived and participants came on site. We suddenly discovered that the 2024 Congress prohibited the display of posters anywhere in a printed form, apart from selected tables requiring horizontal piles, rather than enabling vertical display for which our Posters are designed.

This change meant that the extra efforts by our Trustee and Co-Organizer David Porreca in the days before the Congress to produced printed Posters for display and distribution there — while our Director could not travel to the Congress to bring them as usual — were thwarted. Henceforth, we will plan accordingly and distribute our Posters outside the Congress walls, both in digital and printed formats.

By fortunate choice, without knowing about the Congress’s redirections, the Director had posted the newly-designed Posters in a Web Gallery of their own on our website just a couple of days before the Congress, in a new departure for our tradition of sponsorship and co-sponsorship. Customarily, she would post them in the RGME webpost for the year’s Congress shortly after it had been accomplished, as part of its Report. (See 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report.)

Now, see the special Pop-Up Exhibition!

RGME Pop-Up Poster Exhibition for the 2024 ICMS

2024 ICMS Alchemical Session Poster 2

The Program as Accomplished

Our Program comprised:

three Co-sponsored Sessions
our Open Business Meeting and
a co-sponsored Anniversary Reception.

In stages, first (in November 2023) we announced the Sessions, and reported the sequence of papers for them. Next (January 2024), with information from the ICMS, we could report their assigned times, days, and locations on campus in cases of the in-person events, along with our other activities at the Congress. Then we began to publish the abstracts for them; that process is now completed. Soon we will complete the Indexes for them.

For the In-Person Sessions and the Open Business Meeting, the RGME provided an online option for Congress Registrants through our Zoom Subscription and our Eventbrite Registration Portal:

Eventbrite: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

‘Hybrid’ Facilities

Like last year (see 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report), the RGME offered Registration (without charge) for Online access through our Zoom Subscription to some of our In-Person events this year. Likewise we offered registration for our two In-Person events to help us to learn how many to expect to attend for our planning and the catering for our Open Business Meeting and Co-Sponsored Reception.

For one Online Session, a remote-participation conference room was reserved so that participants and attendees on campus for the Congress might gather to join the online format while in company.

At ICMS for the RGME Anniversary Year

In 2024, the RGME celebrates its Anniversary Year to mark 25 years as a nonprofit educational corporation based in Princeton, New Jersey, and 25 years as an international scholarly society founded out of a major research project at Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge.

For our Anniversary Year, the theme is “Bridges”.

“Bridges” for our 2024 Anniversary Year

Ada Bridge pylon, Belgrade, Serbia. Photograph Petar Milošević (1 August 2021). Image via Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Abstracts of Congress Papers, Bridges, Early Printed Books, History of Alchemy, ICMS, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Manuscript studies, P.-O.M.o.N.A., Postal History at Kalamazoo, RGME Anniversary, RGME Anniversary Reception, RGME Business Meeting, RGME Posters, Societas Magica
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More Fonts for Bembino: Devanāgarī (Hindi) and Tibetan (High-Uchen Script)

May 6, 2024 in Announcements, Bembino, Manuscript Studies

Fonts for Tibetan
(High Uchen-Style)
and Hindi
(Devanāgarī)
for our
Multi-Lingual Font Bembino

[Posted on 5 May 2024, with updates]

By request, work continues on improvements for our copyright multi-lingual font Bembino. Step by step, fonts for more languages are added. Now we turn to Devanāgarī (Hindi) and Tibetan (High-Uchen Script).

By September 2023, specimens of these fonts in Bembino were ready to show for comment. Now, after some RGME online and hybrid activities have been accomplished (October 2023 and January, February, and April 2024, with more in May and June), we show the specimens for your review. Please let us know what you think!

[P.S. Meanwhile, another request, by our RGME Associate Reid Byers, has led also to work on Elvish for J.R.R. Tolkin‘s creation Tengwar. Coming soon!]

Multi-Lingual Bembino

Poster Announcing Bembino Version 1.5

Our copyright font is freely available for download and use for non-commercial and commercial use alike. You might download the font, and its companion Booklet, here:

Bembino Version 1.5 (2018).

That booklet and the font itself (now in Version 1.5) are freely available via Bembino. The “Bembino” Booklet describes and illustrates the font.

Another Booklet showing “Examples of Our Font in Multiple Languages” appeared in March 2018, with an updated Version 1.1 (June 2018).

Multi-Lingual Bembino (2018)

This booklet contains examples of some of the wide range of languages that can be typeset using the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence ‘Bembino’ font.

The Specimen Text

Cover page for 'Multi-Lingual Bembino' demonstrating specimens from a wide range of languages typeset in Bembino

Multi-Lingual Bembino Booklet Cover

The chosen text is the same for all examples in the booklet for Multi-Lingual Bembino.

The Specimen Text comes from: Exodus chapter 20 verses 1–17, one of the sets of the ‘Ten Commandments’ in the Old Testament.

The languages are listed in alphabetical order by their English name (so ‘Welsh’ rather than ‘Cymraeg’). The set of languages presented is not exhaustive. Many of the languages that use basic Latin are omitted, as are the languages for some of the former Russian Federation countries that use Cyrillic.

*****

The new, on-going, work provides fonts for more cases.

After creating fonts for Japanese, Ethiopic, and Arabic, the direction to South Asia seemed worth pursuing. Requests arrived, and work began.

Hindi: Devanāgarī

Devanāgarī is a left-to-right writing system used in the Indian subcontinent. “The Devanāgarī script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for more than 120 languages.” (See Devanāgarī.)

Our Bembino Specimen is set for Hindi, “the fourth most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English”.

The background for the work to produce such a font for Bembino extended across several years. We owe the quest to comments offered by Harry Blair, responding to Bembino as a multi-lingual digital font in use for a variety of purposes.

For example (6 February 2019):

I was thinking that if Leslie had done Japanese and Ethiopic and Arabic (much harder than Devanāgarī, it seemed to me), then South Asia might be an interesting direction to take. Simpler than Western languages in that there’s only one case (no upper and lower), but more complex with all the conjuncts. Plus the vowels sometimes shift around consonants, sometimes preceding them in writing while following them in speaking.”

1. Most of the conjuncts in common use are like ligatures in Western scripts: 2 letters joined in such a way that it’s easy to grasp what the separate letters are. This Wikibooks table shows them (<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi/Consonant_combinations>). BTW the small diagonal appendage to each letter in the first column just indicates that the letter is by itself with no following vowel.

2. There’s a much smaller set of conjuncts commonly used that yield an entirely different form, listed at the bottom of the WikiBooks table as “special cases”.

Taking up the case, our Font Designer reported (5 February 2019):

I checked the latest version (11.0) of Unicode and they haven’t done anything to address the issues with Devanāgarī.

Here is my understanding of the issue, ignoring all the vehement rhetoric.

Basically, similar to Arabic, Devanagari has a ‘core’ of about 50 letter shapes (consonants and vowels) but when they co-occur there are combined forms that must be used. It’s as though the fi, ffi, fl etc. ligatures were *mandatory* to set English. There are about 1,000+ of these ‘ligatures’ needed correctly to set Devanagari. Unicode contains only 128 glyphs for Devanagari, including punctuation and numerals! Now, it is true that some of the ‘missing’ glyphs can be formed from the basic letters + overprints. Think of European accents, and the core ‘a’ used to form á, ä, à etc., but without having separate codepoints for â, ä and so on. But there are still some combinations that need different shapes (like ffi) not just overprints.

There is no space in Unicode to add those different shapes. They could be added through special font tables (like I did for the joined-up Ethiopic numerals), and there are specific tables in OpenType (the format I use for Bembino) to support them. But building those tables requires an expert knowledge of Devanagari typesetting. There are some sites on the Web that can help, but if I made a mistake I would never know.

Having said that, I’m willing to take on the challenge if I can get some help checking what I produce, similar to that Augustine [Dickinson] did with the Ethiopic [by asking for diacritics for Ge’ez among the languages of Ethiopia].

[Note: Our Associate Augustine Dickinson is now the Acting RGME WebMaster, as of 1 July 2023.]

With some suggestions for the specimen forms (such as more contrast between thick and thin strokes), a revised version of Devanāgarī for Bembino is now available upon request, before the next version of Bembino as a whole appears.

Bembino for Hindi and Tibetan

Now, a poster-style page shows the Bembino fonts so far for Hindi and Tibetan.

The Specimen Text

The chosen text is the same for all examples in the booklet for Multi-Lingual Bembino. As described above, the Specimen Text comes from: Exodus chapter 20 verses 1–17, one of the sets of the ‘Ten Commandments’ in the Old Testament.

Fonts for Hindi and Tibetan for Multi-Lingual Bembino in Specimen Text.

Tibetan

Tibetan script is a segmental writing system, written from left to right. The alphabet has thirty basic letters for consonants. Syllables are separated by a tsek (་), and spaces are not used to divide words. Because many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, the mark can function as if a space between words. (See, for example, The Tibetan Writing System.)

When I [Mildred Budny, Editor-in-Chief of RGME Publications] asked our Font Designer about the choice of script for Tibetan, High-Uchen Style, he said: “I think it is beautiful”.

Here is a specimen of the script in manuscript form. I show the specimen, and add parts of the companion description (metadata) which comes with the image in its digital facsimile available freely online.

Photograph: Ms. Sarah Walsh.

Notes on the Image

Image via Wikimedia Commons under CC 4.0 license, via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isha_Upanishad_Verses_1_to_3,_Shukla_Yajurveda,_Sanskrit,_Devanagari.jpg

Information given at that source:

“Language: Sanskrit

“Script: Devanagari

“Script style: pre-14th century (Northern / Western)

“Isha Upanishad, verses 1–2, partially 3

“The thick text is the Upanishad scripture, the small text in the margins and edges are an unknown scholar’s notes and comments in the typical Hindu style of a minor bhasya.

“The photo above is of a 2D artwork of a text that is over 2,000 years old, from a manuscript that was produced decades before 1923. Therefore Wikimedia Commons PD-Art licensing guidelines apply. Any rights I have as a photographer is herewith donated to wikimedia commons under CC 4.0 license.

“The early Upanishads (Upanisad, Upanisat) are scriptures of Hinduism. Variously dated by scholars to have been composed between 900 BCE to about 200 BCE, these texts are in Sanskrit language and embedded within a layer of the Vedas. They contain a mixture of philosophy and mystical speculations, many set in the form of dialogues or pedagogic style. Their central teachings include the concepts of Atman (soul, self) and Brahman (metaphysical reality).

“These manuscripts are preserved at the Lalchand Research Library, Ancient Indian Manuscript Collection, DAV College Digital Library Initiative, Chandigarh India, in association with SP Lohia and Indorama Charitable Trust. The texts are over 2000 years old, the re-copying into this particular manuscript is dated to a pre-1867 reproduction (exact date unknown). The manuscript shows significant stain marks, decay and damage on the sides and its edges.”

*****

Suggestion Box

Do you have suggestions, questions, or requests for Bembino?

Please leave your comments here, Contact Us, or visit

our FaceBook Page
our Facebook Group
our Twitter Feed (@rgme_mss)
our Bluesky nest @rgmesocial.bluesky.social)
our LinkedIn Group
our Blog on Manuscript Studies and its Contents List

Donations and contributions, in funds or in kind, are welcome and easy to give. Given our low overheads, your donations have direct impact on our work and the furtherance of our mission. For our Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, your donations may be tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law. Thank you for your support!

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Tags: Bembino Digital Font, Book of Exodus, Devanāgarī, Elvish, Ethiopic Script, Exodus 20:1-17, Ge'ez diacritics, Hindi, Isha Upanishad, Lalchand Research Library, Multi-Lingual Bembino, RGME Font Design, Sanskrit, Specimen Text, Tengwar, Tibetan, Tibetan High-Uchan Script
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Episode 18. “Women as Makers of Books”

May 5, 2024 in Anniversary, Book, Design, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Episodes for The Research Group Speaks, Research Group Speaks (The Series)

“The Research Group Speaks”
Episode 18
“Women as Makers of Books”

Saturday 14 December 2024
1:00–2:30 pm EST (GMT-5) by Zoom

Jaclyn Reed, Hannah Goeselt, Linda Civitello,
Mildred Budny, and Others

[Posted on 3 May 2024, with updates]

London, British Library, Harley MS 4431, fol. 4r.Christine de Pisan sits at work writing in an interior accompanied by a dog. France (Paris), c. 1410 – c. 1414. Image via https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/06/christine-de-pizan-and-the-book-of-the-queen.html.

By its focus upon the agency of women in and for books, this Episode offers a pendant at the end of our 2024 Anniversary Year for the Episode which opened the year.

See Episode 15. Women Writers from the Medieval to Post-Modern Periods

Then, in January, scholars, teachers, and writers spoke about their interests, long-term work , and current projects concerned with the writings of women authors across a long span of time. Reflecting women’s roles, opportunities, constraints, and resourcefulness, the writings cover a wide range of spheres, subjects, approaches, and styles. The works range from literary creations to recipes for cookery.

Now, in December, the same speakers from that Episode return to offer reflections, presentations, or responses on the subject of women who contributed in one or more ways to the production of books in various forms during a range of periods across history. Other speakers and respondents join them, along with our audience engaging in the discussion with questions, comments, and observations.

For the January Episode, Mildred Budny was the presider. For the December Episode, Justin Hastings will preside.

We thank all our contributors, presiders, and attendees.

Lewistown, Pennsylvania, Old Stone Arch Bridge spanning Jack’s Creek. Built by Philip Diehl in 1815. Photograph by KAATMAAN (August 2011) via Wikimedia Commons via CC BY-SA 3.0 License.

A Bridge for, or across,
Our 2024 Anniversary Year

In keeping with the Theme of our Anniversary Year, Bridges, this Episode brings the opportunity to round out the year by means of a bridge across the RGME’s year with a return or expansion upon the theme of women responsible for contributions to the making of books. Now, we think of them not only as writers of texts, as at the beginning of the year in Episode 15, but also, or instead, as makers of the images, scripts, bindings, and/or other materials which make up books themselves as carriers of knowledge, art, expressions, explorations, and manifestations of human aspirations.

Genres and Styles

Womens’ contributions to the “making of books” also extend to manuscripts or other forms of presenting the written word in material form. These makers chose to work in spheres ranging from calligraphy to illustrations and the designs which governed the layout or production of the works themselves.

Periods under consideration might range widely across centuries and cultures. Examples include the Arts and Crafts Movement which flourished in Europe and North America circa 1880–1920, the Art Nouveau Movement of circa 1890–1910, and the Art Deco Style of the 1910s to 1930s.

Update:
Since we began to plan this Episode, more of our events in our 2024 Anniversary Year address the subject.

For example, in October, online by Zoom:

the co-sponsored set of webinars on Medieval Women’s Networks” on Thursday and Friday 17–18 October by Zoom
and the Autumn Symposium 2024 Autumn Symposium “At the Helm: Spotlight on Special Collections as Teaching Events”
on Friday and Saturday 25–26 October by Zoom; its first session showcases contributions to book-production in the Victorian period Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Ali Smith, Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts Movement, Calligraphers, Cheap Repository Tracts, Cookbooks, Élisabeth Sonrel, Hannah More, History of Book Production, Illustrators, Lucy Maynard Salmon, Mary Mape Dodge, Muriel Spark, Recipes, RGME Publications, Saint Nicholas Magazine, Seasons Personnified as Women, The Little Red Hen, Women as Makers, Women in Books, Women Printers, Women Writers
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RGME Pop-UP Poster Exhibition for the 2024 ICMS

May 4, 2024 in Bembino, Business Meeting, Conference, Conference Announcement, Events, Exhibition, ICMS, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, POMONA, Postal History at Kalamazoo, Reception

RGME Posters on Display
for the
2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS)

9–11 May in hybrid format

[Posted on 3 May 2024]

Our Pop-Up Poster Display for the 2024 ICMS

As the 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies approaches (9–11 May in partly hybrid format), we unveil our Posters for all our events at this Congress. Our Congress activities form part of our Anniversary Year, celebrating 25 years as a nonprofit educational corporation and 35 years as an international scholarly society. For this year, our Theme is Bridges. Besides considering the nature of bridges, both natural and man-made, and exploring their challenges and opportunities, we take the liberty of creating some new ones — as with this Pop-Up Poster Session or Exhibition for the 2024 Congress.

Natural Owachomo Bridge, Natural Bridges Natural Monument, San Juan County, Utah. Image via Laban712 on en, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This Virtual Exhibition marks a new development for our evolving tradition of Posters for our different Events, comprising Conference Sessions, Symposia, Colloquia, Seminars, Workshops, Receptions, and more. Here, by bringing the set of Posters into an exhibition of their own, we offer a bridge between our webpost for the Congress; our printed Posters for the in-person event and for souvenirs afterward; and for download in digital form from our website.

Our website Home Page for our 2024 ICMS Activities describes each of these events in turn, with descriptions about their scope and aims, instructions for directions to them, and information about the programs of the individual sessions, also with the speakers’ abstracts for their presentations.

The directions include options to register for online access to scheduled in-person events — some Sessions and our Open Business Meeting — through our RGME Eventbrite Collection (at no charge), so as to provide a fully hybrid approach to the Congress. Similarly, for a scheduled online Session, we have arranged for an in-person approach by reserving a room on campus for in-person attendees of the Congress.

See:

2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Program

In a Nutshell

Now, the Posters present, in a nutshell, information about each session of papers or meeting, including updated details which did not emerge in time for the published Congress Program, but which our 2024 RGME @ ICMS HomePage has been able to report through revisions as the news reached us.

The RGME tradition for its sessions and other events at the ICMS has been to prepare Posters announcing, promoting, and celebrating the people participating in creating them; providing evocative illustrations encapsulating or, as it were, commenting upon them; and given concise information about the event and its logistics of time, place, and modes of arrival.

Over the years, the RGME Director, Mildred Budny (also Editor-in-Chief of Publications), has prepared the Posters for our ICMS activities (as for other Events), with the inspiration of images generously provided by our Associates and others, notably including David W. Sorenson, and with the help of the RGME Font and Layout Designer, using the RGME copyright digital font Bembino and RGME principles for our Publications, set out according to our Style Manifesto and our specifications for Designing Academic Posters.

Usually, the Director would bring the Posters to the ICMS for unveiling at the Congress, in printed copies displayed in various places (as a group upon general poster boards or individually at the door or on the wall of the session or meeting itself.

2014 ICMS

Adelaide Bennett stands beside the RGME Posters on display for the 2014 ICMS. Photography by Mildred Budny.

2015 ICMS

Derek Shank stands beside the RGME Poster Display for the 2025 ICMS. Photography by Mildred Budny.

Fit to Print, Free to Keep

Each year, we bring printed copies to display on walls, doors, and boards, where permitted, and also to give to speakers, contributors, and others wishing souvenirs. We offer them also in digital form, to be downloaded free of charge on our website. The links for these downloads are indicated in the HomePage for the event (or in other locations on our website).

Online Exhibition

Until now, our habit has been to place the Posters, once they are ready, within the HomePage for the event. Thus usually occurs at a late stage in the preparations for the year’s Congress, once the final details have settled into place and most of our other tasks of preparation have taken precedence.

This year, in order to allow the Posters to stand alongside each other to tell their stories in unison, we present a curated Gallery or Pop-Up Poster Exhibition for your enjoyment.

The Posters tell in a nutshell the information you might need and wish to know about the event itself, how and where to find it, who is featured in its presentation, and what feature image or images might evoke its essence.

The information includes updated information which the Congress Program does not have, as some logistics evolved after the publication of the Congress Program, and as some details do not have a place in its structure.

Two-By-Two as Pairs or Diptychs

Paris, Louvre Museum, Ivory consular diptych of Areobindus, Byzantium, 506 AD. Image Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.s

Note that, in recent years, we design the posters for individual Sessions as Pairs, to be viewed as Diptychs, in matching sets similar to the facing pages of an opened book.

In a given Pair, one Poster displays the names of the people responsible for the Session or Roundtable. The other exhibits a feature image or two.

While they share identifying elements, each poster in the pair reports information unique to it, so that the two posters provide more information than can one alone. Together they report a concise comprehensive indication of the ensemble which the event represents, encompassing people, a place, a time, and a focus for consideration.

Meetings

Anniversary Reception

2024 Anniversary Reception at the ICMS: Poster.

Open Business Meeting

2024 RGME Business Meeting Poster

Sessions and a Roundtable

“Alchemical Manuscripts, Printed Books, and Materials”

Poster 1

2024 ICMS Alchemical Session Poster 1

Poster 2

2024 ICMS Alchemical Session Poster 2

2. “Retrospect and Prospect”

Poster 1

2024 ICMS “Retrospect and Prospects” Session: Poster 1

Poster 2

2024 ICMS “Retrospect and Prospects” Session: Poster 2

3. “Letters, Couriers, and Post Offices:
Mail in the Medieval World”

Poster 1

2024 ICMS Postal Session: Poster 1

Poster 2

2024 ICMS Postal Session: Poster 2

*****

Suggestion Box

Do you like this Pop-Up Exhibition? Would you like to see more of them?

Please Contact Us or visit

our FaceBook Page
our Facebook Group
our Twitter Feed (@rgme_mss)
our Bluesky nest @rgmesocial.bluesky.social)
our LinkedIn Group
our Blog on Manuscript Studies and its Contents List

Donations and contributions, in funds or in kind, are welcome and easy to give. Given our low overheads, your donations have direct impact on our work and the furtherance of our mission. For our Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, your donations may be tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law. Thank you for your support!

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Tags: 2024 ICMS, 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Anniversary Reception, Bembino, Bembino Digital Font, Business Meeting, Designing Academic Posters, POMONA, Pop-Up Exhibition, Postal History at Kalamazoo, Poster Exhibition, RGME Posters, RGME Publications, Societas Magica, Style Manifesto
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Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”

April 30, 2024 in Interviews, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Episodes for The Research Group Speaks, Research Group Speaks (The Series)

Episode 17 (Saturday 21 September 2024)
“RGME Retrospect and Prospects:
Anniversary Reflections”

[Posted on 30 April 2024, with updates]

This Episode in our online series The Research Group Speaks” offers Anniversary Reflections for the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, as we draw on highlights of our history, reflect on memories and people, and bring forth observations from living memory.

Florence, Italy, Ponte Vecchio from Ponte alle Grazie. Photo: Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Florence, Italy, Ponte Vecchio from Ponte alle Grazie. Photo: Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In keeping with the Theme of our Anniversary Year, Bridges, this Episode gives the opportunity to share recollections, with series of comments in a roundtable conversation.

Subjects include recollections of people, events, and landmarks in the history and legacy of the RGME as we celebrate our heritage and achievements during the 2024 Anniversary Year and beyond. For example, we wish to bring forth the memories preserved in Oral Tradition, with their stories to tell and people’s memories to preserve and share.

James Marrow and Giles Constable at the Meeting of the Honorary Trustees of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, 13 December 2013 Photography by Mildred Budny

In Memoriam

People to remember include

our Trustee Vivien Law
our Honorary Trustee Giles Constable
our Associates
C. Patrick Wormald
Roger E. Reynolds
Elizabeth (“Peggy”) A.E. Brown
and others.

Would you like to suggest more names as memorials?

Survey Questions as Recollections, Souvenirs, and Records

In preparation, we would circulate a survey asking people if they would like

to propose ideas beforehand for an open discussion, such as recollections of particular events and/or people in our history;
to share some reflections or comments in the roundtable; and
to make suggestions.

Also, might you have some souvenirs or photographs from RGME events that you would like to share with the audience of the Episode and/or with the RGME Library & Archives? We would be glad to see them.

We encourage you to join the conversation and celebrations.

Awards

Would you like to propose someone for an Award for contributions to the RGME? Please let us know your nominations, with a description of the reasons for them.

A delightful pair of Awards, both earnest and lighthearted, with an Award Ceremony, can be seen in the Certificates or ‘Diplomas’ which our late Associate, James P. Heidere, displayed by turns on the walls of his dental office and his kitchen at home.

James Heidere with his RGME Associate’s ‘Diploma’

See Heidere: Diplomas and Investiture (2002).

Information about our Episode 17:

Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”.

For this event, we celebrate RGME history, impact, and potential.

Register for the Episode:

Episode 17. Eventbrite Tickets

*****

Suggestion Box

Please Contact Us or visit

our FaceBook Page
our Facebook Group
our Twitter Feed (@rgme_mss)
our Bluesky nest @rgmesocial.bluesky.social)
our Blog on Manuscript Studies and its Contents List

Donations and contributions , in funds or in kind, are welcome and easy to give.

See Contributions and Donations.

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Tags: Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Giles Constable, In Memoriam, Living Memory, Memorials, Oral Tradition, Patrick Wormald, Ponte Vecchio, RGME Anniversary, RGME History, RGME Origins, RGME Surveys, Roger E. Reynolds, Vivien A. Law
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RGME Fundraising and Donor Relations: SOP

April 30, 2024 in Uncategorized

RGME
Fundraising and Donor Relations:
Statement of Operating Procedures (SOP)

Version 1.2

(Posted on 29 April 2024)

Purpose

Scope

Fundraising

Annual Appeal Letter

Facebook Birthday Fundraiser

MightyCause “Giving Tuesday” and Other Fundraisers

Eventbrite

Grants

Estate Gifts

Fundraising Expenses

Endowment

Constable Fund

Donor Relations

Thank-You Notes

Tax-Deductible Receipts

Privacy Policy

Donor Promise

Donor Tiers

Donor Contact Information

Purpose

This document sets out the processes and procedures by which the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence (RGME) performs fundraising and donor relations activities.

Scope

This document applies to all fundraising and donor relations activities undertaken by the RGME or those acting on the behalf of the RGME, including but not limited to our Director, Trustees, Associates, Volunteers, Friends, Contractors, and Vendors.

Fundraising

RGME Website

The official RGME website describes our fundraising goals, offers portals for online donations in funds, and provides a downloadable donation form for other methods such as by cash or check. (See Donations and Donations and Contributions.)

The RGME also welcomes donations in kind, in non-cash contributions and pro-bono contributions.

Annual Appeal Letter

Every year, the Director or designate shall form an ad hoc group of trustees or also others to draft an appeal letter. The Research Group will draft an appeal letter and the Director, in consultation, will approve the final draft. The Director or designate will form a list of donors and potential donors and mail or email a copy of the appeal letter to each donor address on file. The timing will aim for mid-November for annual appeals, whilst other occasions, purposes, or donors’ habits could call for similar approaches, as required. (See the 2024 Anniversary Appeal and 2024 Anniversary Endowment Appeal.)

The appeal letter contains information about what the Group does and what the Group is requesting money for. A supplement may provide details for donors wishing further information.

The appeal letter and the donation form/portal will provide donors the option to set up a regular/recurring donation (e.g. annually, quarterly, or monthly), and for gifts or bequests of funds or other instruments.

Facebook Birthday Fundraiser

The Director or designate will run annually a Facebook Birthday Fundraiser, as prompted by Facebook.

MightyCause “Giving Tuesday” and other Fundraisers

The Director or designate will run a MightyCause fundraiser annually for Giving Tuesday Fundraisers, as prompted by MightyCause, or other fundraisers through MightyCause as occasions arise.

Anniversary or other Appeals

For some occasions or purposes, such as RGME Anniversaries or Anniversary Years, specific needs, or Designated Funds (Endowment, Constable Fund, or others as they are created), the Director or designate will run fundraisers in their aid. The letter will be prepared by the Director or designate in consultation with donors, relevant RGME committees, or others. The timing would co-ordinate with the specific need or fund.

Eventbrite

Online events will include a fundraising link using the Eventbrite donation feature.

Grants

On an ad hoc basis, no less than one per calendar year, the Director or designate will determine which grants the RGME ought to apply for, and will prepare and submit grant applications, or direct others to do so, in collaboration and/or consultation.

Estate Gifts

For donors of X tier and above, the Director or designate will have a conversation no less than annually about whether the donor wishes to include a charitable gift to the RGME in their will (unless the donor has expressed a desire not to have this conversation).

For donors who have indicated their intention to leave a charitable gift, the Director or designate will touch base with them every five years to gather info to update our records about what is planned for the charitable gift.

Fundraising Expenses

Customarily the RGME spends no more than $850 per year on fundraising.

The RGME will not hire fundraisers. The work of fundraising will proceed by volunteers.

Endowment

The Endowment Fund at present is kept in a savings account. As it grows, the RGME will revise its management appropriately.

Constable Fund

The Constable Fund is gathered in a bank account awaiting a sufficient amount for specific purposes respecting the interests and wishes expressed for the RGME by its honoree, Giles Constable (1929–2021), Honorary Trustee, regarding its management, maintenance, research projects, and activities. Depending upon the available amount, the purposes are to be identified in consultation with the donors and others among his students, colleagues, and friends in the RGME.

Donor Relations

Besides those forms set out in other parts of this document, Donor Relations for the RGME will take several ‘tailored’ forms of approach and times or routines for them.

Thank-You Notes

Templates for thank-you notes will be prepared as guides or prompts for their issue.

Donations of greater than $2,000 are considered unusual gifts and warrant prompt thank you notes. The Director or designate will mail thank you notes to the donor’s address no later than 10 calendar days after the receipt of each unusual gift.

All other donations of $250 or greater warrant a thank-you note, which the Director or designate will post no later than the end of the calendar year after the donation has been received.

Donations less than $250 warrant thank-you e-mails, which the Director or designate will send no later than the end of the calendar year after the donation has been received.

Tax-Deductible Receipts

In keeping with our Recognition as a Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Director or designate will issue donors annual tax-deductible receipts for funds or non-cash charitable donations, in adherence with all applicable laws and regulations.

Privacy Policy

The RGME will maintain and adhere to a privacy policy, written in plain language, which demonstrates the utmost respect for our donors’ personal information. It is published on the RGME website (RGME Privacy Policy Statement).

Donor Promise

The RGME will maintain a “Donor Promise” document, the purpose of which is to communicate to donors clearly and succinctly how we intend be a good steward of the donations they have entrusted us with. It will include information about how donors might request changes.

Donor Tiers

The RGME will segment its donors appropriately, with the following objectives:

Demonstrate appreciation and recognition of our donors.
Increase revenue.

Donor Contact Information

The Director or designate will maintain donor information in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will be backed up on storage that resides in a separate physical location from the primary copy (e.g., on a hard drive in a safety deposit box, and/or in a secure cloud environment). The back-up will not be a synced copy — it will be maintained in such as manner that accidental deletions, edits, and/or corruption of the primary copy will not affect the back-up.

The Director or designate will back up donor contact information at least monthly. Old backup copies will continue to be stored, rather than deleted or overwritten. In the event that a donor requests that all their personal information be removed/deleted, all back up copies containing that info will need to be modified in order to comply with the request.

Donors may request updates to their contact information, by various means as appropriate, including mail or email. The Director or designate will update the donor contact information upon request.

Donor Acknowledgment and Appreciation

The RGME will maintain lists of Donors and Contributors on its website, if they allow, to honor their donations in funds and/or contributions in kind. These lists will distinguish the two classes, funds and contributions respectively, for which some persons would appear in both lists. In each case, permission will be sought to allow the publication on the list.

The lists would not solely be year-dependent, as they gather the names of individuals or entities that have given funds or contributions over longer time-periods, and might include annual groupings for more recent donations. For the list of Donors, the new Tiers of donation would appear, as the donors might permit.

These lists will appear on the RGME website. They will be updated regularly by the Director or designate.

Friends of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

The RGME will form a group of “Friends of the RGME” which gathers both Donors and Contributors, as well as others as requested, for special communications, activities, workshops, commemorative items, or other forms of recognition, so as to cultivate participation in the RGME community in ways other than, or alongside, the official events open more widely.

*****

Update:

Now see

Friends of the RGME.

We welcome you to join us.

The Friends of the RGME welcomes Donors, Contributors, Associates, Volunteers, and newcomers wishing to participate in our activities and belong to our community.

*****

Questions or Suggestions?

Please Contact Us or visit

our FaceBook Page
our Facebook Group
our Twitter Feed (@rgme_mss)
our Bluesky nest @rgmesocial.bluesky.social)
our LinkedIn Group
our Blog on Manuscript Studies and its Contents List

We invite you to join:

Friends of the RGME.

Donations and contributions, in funds or in kind, are welcome and easy to give. Given our low overheads, your donations have direct impact on our work and the furtherance of our mission. For our Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, your donations may be tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law. Thank you for your support!

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at our events.

*****

Tags: Anniversary Appeal, Annual Appeal, Donations and Contributions, Endowment, Estate Gifts, Eventbrite, Fund-Raisers, RGME Endowment, RGME Fund-Raising, Tax-Deduction, The Constable Fund
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2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Call for Papers

60th ICMS Thursday through Saturday, 8–10 May 2025 (with Sessions variously in Person, Online, or Hybrid)

Process and Timetable for Proposals

Then What?

RGME @ 2025 ICMS

Our 2025 Sessions

I. Sessions Sponsored by the RGME

1. “Deviant Images: Text/Image Relationships in Medieval Manuscripts” (ID: 5977)

In-Person Session

Aim

Proposals

2. “Rending the Veil: The Rupture of Image and Text in Medieval Apocalypse Commentaries” (ID: 6459)

In-Person Session

Aim

Methodologies

Proposals

3. “Women and Manuscripts: Questions of Authorship” (ID 6310)

Hybrid Session

Aim

Proposals

II. Sessions Co-Sponsored by the RGME

4. Moving the Mail: Letters, Couriers, and Post Offices in the Medieval World (ID: 6312)

In-person Session

Aim

5. “Grimoires of the Greater West (2): Multicultural Solomonic Magic: The Case of the Almandal” (ID 6392)

In-person Session

Aim

6. “Sendalphon, Send Me a Dream: Dream Books, Spells, Divination, Incubation, and Interpretation” (ID #6171)

Online Session

Aim

Questions? Suggestions?

Favorite Recipes for Lemonade

Entries Invited

A Recipe Competition for the Friends of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

A Three-Step Program

On the Subject of Lemons

History as Background

Three Steps

1. Maxim: Life Gives You Lemons

2. Action: Make Lemonade (or similar)

3. Result: Send Your Favorite Recipe for our Competition

Step 1. Find your Lemons

Over to You

Please Share Your Recipe

Competition for the Best Recipe(s)

Prizes

Questions or Suggestions?

To Whom Do Manuscripts Belong?

Georgi Parpulov (independent scholar)

2024 RGME Anniversary Recollections Part 1

Giles Constable

Anniversary Reflections, Part 1: Giles Constable, Honorary Trustee and Mentor

Achievements

Colleague, Mentor, and Friend

As Honorary Trustee of the Research Group

As Contributor to our Symposia, Colloquia, Seminars, and Workshops

As Mentor, Colleague, and Friend

In Giles’s Honor

2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Report

59th ICMS (9–11 May 2024)

Held in a transitional ‘hybrid’ form with RGME Co-Sponsored Sessions, an Open Business Meeting, and Co-Sponsored Reception

In a Nutshell: Mission Accomplished!

With Thanks to our Participants, Co-Sponsors, Audience, and Friends

The Journey

Access Included

The Arrival

Program

Audience Participation

Posters

The Program as Accomplished

‘Hybrid’ Facilities

At ICMS for the RGME Anniversary Year

Fonts for Tibetan (High Uchen-Style) and Hindi (Devanāgarī) for our Multi-Lingual Font Bembino

Multi-Lingual Bembino

The Specimen Text

Hindi: Devanāgarī

Bembino for Hindi and Tibetan

The Specimen Text

2025 International Congress
on Medieval Studies:
Call for Papers

60th ICMS
Thursday through Saturday, 8–10 May 2025
(with Sessions variously
in Person, Online, or Hybrid)

2. “Rending the Veil:
The Rupture of Image and Text
in Medieval Apocalypse Commentaries” (ID: 6459)

3. “Women and Manuscripts:
Questions of Authorship” (ID 6310)

5. “Grimoires of the Greater West (2): Multicultural Solomonic Magic:
The Case of the Almandal” (ID 6392)

6. “Sendalphon, Send Me a Dream:
Dream Books, Spells, Divination, Incubation, and Interpretation” (ID #6171)

A Recipe Competition
for the Friends
of the
Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Georgi Parpulov
(independent scholar)

2024 RGME Anniversary Recollections
Part 1

Anniversary Reflections, Part 1:
Giles Constable, Honorary Trustee and Mentor

Held in a transitional ‘hybrid’ form
with RGME Co-Sponsored Sessions,
an Open Business Meeting,
and Co-Sponsored Reception

In a Nutshell:
Mission Accomplished!

With Thanks to our Participants,
Co-Sponsors, Audience, and Friends

Fonts for Tibetan
(High Uchen-Style)
and Hindi
(Devanāgarī)
for our
Multi-Lingual Font Bembino

“The Research Group Speaks”
Episode 18
“Women as Makers of Books”

Saturday 14 December 2024
1:00–2:30 pm EST (GMT-5) by Zoom

Jaclyn Reed, Hannah Goeselt, Linda Civitello,
Mildred Budny, and Others

A Bridge for, or across,
Our 2024 Anniversary Year

RGME Posters on Display
for the
2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS)

3. “Letters, Couriers, and Post Offices:
Mail in the Medieval World”

Episode 17 (Saturday 21 September 2024)
“RGME Retrospect and Prospects:
Anniversary Reflections”

RGME
Fundraising and Donor Relations:
Statement of Operating Procedures (SOP)