“The Research Group Speaks”
Episode 19
“At the Gate:
RGME Activities for 2025”
A Roundtable
Saturday 18 January 2025
1:00–2:30 pm EST (GMT-5) by Zoom
[Posted on 28 December 2025, with updates]
London, British Museum. Door-sill carved as a carpet. From Room I, door c, the North Palace of Ashurbanipal II at Nineveh, Iraq. 645-640 BCE. Photograph (2014) Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
To open our events for 2025, our first Episode of the year in the online series wherein “The Research Group Speaks” positions us “At the Gate” as we embark on a year with a Theme dedicated to “Thresholds and Communities“.
Here we discuss the aims and structures of our series of activities and projects for 2025, as their organizers, co-organizers, advisors, and participants join an informal roundtable.
We invite you to join us to learn about the plans as they develop, and contribute feedback as we start the year’s program.
Following Episode 18 in December 2024 on “Women as Makers of Books” at the close of our Anniversary Year, this next Episode introduces the Theme for the New Year, as it launches the suite of our multiple activities for 2025.
We introduce our Theme for the Year and present the plan for our events and publications.
Our Theme for 2025:
“Thresholds and Communities”
Our activities will address a wide variety of subjects, fields of study, and genres of materials as we focus especially upon original sources, representing witnesses to writing in multiple forms. They include manuscripts, printed books, maps, music, works of art, epigraphy, and other forms, in keeping with our interests in a rich variety of sources from the past and recent past.
Some activities continue strands and momentum from 2024 activities. For example, the 2025 Spring and Autumn Symposia build upon the accomplishments of the highly successful series in 2024 by focusing upon Special Collections and original materials and their uses for study, teaching, and more.
London, British Library, Harley MS 4431, fol. 4r. Christine de Pisan sits at work writing. 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.
Similarly we build upon the inspiration of two Episodes for “The Research Group Speaks” which formed bookends or pendants for our Anniversary Year in January and December. The former considered the roles of Women Writers from the Medieval to Post-Modern Periods. The latter addressed Women as Makers of Books, by considering not only functions as authors but also activities as authorial book-designers or as calligraphers, illustrators, compilers, and editors, such as for successful serial publications.
The pair of Episodes focused upon the agency of women in and for books.
In 2025, we propose to examine, among other subjects, the multiple types and forms of agents and agencies in the making, producing, disseminating, collecting, reading, using, abusing, re-creating, and transmitting of books across time and place. Our programs shape accordingly.
Watch this space, and come to our Episode 19 to hear about the plans. We welcome your feedback and participation.
Panelists and Subjects
Panelists for our Roundtable include:
Phillip Bernhardt–House, Mildred Budny, Hannah Goeselt, Justin Hastings, and others.
Topics to consider include the processes of choosing the subjects, approaches, and structures of the events in their interconnected series. Our Speakers may describe the thought-processes, explorations, research, and consultations which underpin this creativity.
Plans for the year work to shape individual events or their series, and to integrate them into the full suite of events and publications of the RGME for the year round. Attendees are invited to offer suggestions and volunteer to participate in the events and their organization as well as their follow-up.
Rome, Capitoline Museums, Front panel of a sarcophagus representing the four seasons. Marble, Roman artwork, middle of the 3rd century CE. Photograph by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT. Image via Capitoline Museums, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via
Reflections on the Theme
In this living context, our Speakers may address the Year’s Theme of Thresholds in wider ramifications.
1) Liminal Deities
Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Museo Chiaramonti, section XIV, no.17. Janus-type Double Herm. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original. Image via Wikimedia via Creative Commons 3.0 Unported.
For example, Phillip Bernhardt–House might survey some rituals and divinities or beings whose charge or domain occupies, or relates to, thresholds of various kinds from antiquity onward. Among them are numbered
- Janus, the Roman “God of all beginnings, gates, transitions, time, choices, duality, doorways, passages, and endings” (Janus)
- Hecate, the Greek goddess of boundaries, crossroads, doorways, and city walls
- Cardea, the Roman goddess of health, thresholds, and door hinges and handles
- Heimdall, the Norse god associated with boundaries, borders, and liminal spaces
- Hermes, Greek god of roads, merchants, travelers, trade, thievery/thieves, cunning, and animal husbandry; messenger of Zeus and psychopomp (“guide of souls). In particular, Hermes is associated with particular types of oracles (the Astragalomanteia and the Kledones; see also Cledonism and Cleromancy), as well as with words, language, and magic — comprising some of the most liminal but connective and ‘commercial’ activities of all.
- Mercury, Roman messenger god and psychopomp; equivalent to the Greek Hermes, sharing some of his functions, such as being a god of commerce, travelers, merchants, and thieves.
London, British Museum, Drawing of a Hekate Triformis, perhaps as a Hekation or shrine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
2) Thresholds as Emblems
Our Director would briefly describe characteristics of Thresholds/Portals/Gateways, as exemplified or embodied in language, literature, art, architecture, religion, ritual, and imagination. Such reflections have sometimes guided RGME and related activities, as with the Symposium held at Princeton University for our 2009 Anniversary Year.
As motto, she proposes a quotation from the introduction to the first issue of a short-lived periodical by the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) under the name Propylaen (July 1798–1801). Regarding that enterprise, it can be observed that:
Through its German name, “Propyläen” (from the Greek προπύλαιον, propylaion, pl. προπύλαια, propulaia, an entryway to a building), which can be translated to English as “Propylaea“, the periodical, including its various themes, was to represent a uniquely cultural “entryway”; and thus, it symbolized the building that is life into which the artist is required to enter.
— Propyläen
Goethe’s Birthplace: Goethe-Haus, Grosser Hirschgraben, Frankfurt-am-Main, Innenstadt. Image: Dontworry, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Selected as a motto at the start of her own Ph.D. Dissertation (London, 1985), Goethe’s classic “Introduction” (Einleitung) to his serial publication states a sobering observation from eloquent and perhaps prescient experience.
THE YOUTH (Jüngling), when Nature and Art attract him, thinks that with a vigorous effort he can soon penetrate into the innermost sanctuary; the Man, after long wanderings, finds himself still in the outer court.
Such an observation has suggested our title. It is only on the step, in the gateway, the entrance, the vestibule, the space between the outside and the inner chamber, between the sacred and the common, that we may ordinarily tarry with our friends.
In German:
Der Jüngling, wenn Naur und Kunst ihn anziehen, glaubt mit einer lebhaften Streben bald in das innerste Heiligtum zu dringen; der Mann bemerkt, nach langem Umherwandeln, daβ er sich noch immer in den Vorhõfen befinde.
Eine solche Betrachtung hat unsern Titel veranlaβt: Stufe, Tor, Eingang, Vorhalle, der Raum zwischen dem Innern und Ausern, zwischen den Heiligen und Gemeinem kann nur die Stelle sein, auf der wir uns mit unsern Freunden gewönlich aud halten werden.
—— Preface to Propyläen
Sesterce of Nero, 54-68 AD, Reverse: Temple of Janus with Closed Doors. Patrick H. C. Tan Collection. Image: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons
Registration
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After you register, the Zoom Link will be sent to you before the event.
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Paris, Porte Saint-Denis, from the South. Image: Photograph (10 September 2011) by Coyau / Wikimedia Commons/ via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Porte_Saint-Denis_01.jpg.
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