Meet the Objects: Folio of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica

This is a folio (page) from an Arabic copy of an important ancient medical text by Dioscorides.  It features the verbascum plant, and can be viewed online at the Harvard Art Museum’s site, or as part of the Google Art Project.

Dioscorides (Pedanius Dioscorides) was born in the first century C.E. in Anazarba, near Adana in modern-day Turkey. He had the opportunity to study the plants of many different regions (including Anatolia, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Gallia, North Africa and Caucasia) while traveling with the Roman army as a military physician during the reigns of Emperors Caligula (37-41), Claudius (41-54) and Nero (54-68). He recorded this vast medical knowledge in Greek, but his monumental work Περί ύλης ιάτρικης (Peri hyles iatrikes) is more widely known by its Latin name, de Materia Medica (“On Medical Materials”). De Materia Medica describes more than 600 herbal drugs, about 35 drugs from animal sources, and about 90 drugs prepared with minerals, most of which are illustrated. The narrative descriptions provide specific information about those drugs, such as their places and methods of cultivation, botanical descriptions, medical effects, methods of use, side effects, dosages, veterinary usage and non-medical usage.

De Materia Medica was translated from Greek into Arabic and Syriac several times during the eighth century C.E. The first and most important of these translations was produced by a Greek and Arab scholar, Stephanos ibn Basilos and Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who worked together in Baghdad during the reign of the caliph al-Mutawakkil.  Because Dioscorides included local names of plants from across many regions, however, Arabic translators struggled to find proper equivalent names for the plants. Some translators did not translate all the drug names, but instead transliterated many into the Arabic alphabet. Moreover, since the botanical nomenclature in the Arabic language was not as extensive as that found in de Materia Medica, the Arabic translators had to develop new terminology. Improved versions of this monumental work were made available in the subsequent centuries, especially in the Western Caliphate, and its information was incorporated in other major pharmaceutical works– for example, the writings of Ibn Sina, al-Razi, and ibn Juljul.

The copy of de Materia Medica from which this folio was taken likely would have served as a handbook for doctors, students or others seeking to harvest or use medicinal plants as part of their trade.  As the text was copied and disseminated widely throughout Arabic-speaking world, refinements and small changes were made not only in the text but in the illustrations.  By comparing extant manuscripts, scholars are able to reconstruct aspects of the transmission process.

Our folio also may have served an ornamental purpose.  Wealthy elites in thirteenth-century Baghdad often commissioned illustrated manuscripts like this one, and an affluent patron could have paid a significant fee to have a personal copy of de Materia Medica as a status symbol. It is possible that a larger codex was split into individual folios and sold one by one. The light color of the paper (in the thirteenth century, light paper was relatively more expensive than darker grades), the scribe’s use of gold, and the fact that the folio has lasted centuries with little damage all point to its treatment as an object of admiration as much as (or more than) a tool of scientific inquiry.

Tech Talk: The Omeka Platform

Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is used by scholars, archivists, and librarians around the world to publish archival collections and research projects online, using a suite of tools that have been developed to extend Omeka’s capabilities to mapping, annotation, and beyond.

As an open source platform, Omeka is an ideal choice for a project that aims to make scholarly research accessible to the public, as MOL does. Omeka’s source code is not only free to use, but also readily available to be modified to fit the needs of a particular project. Open source software is also built to be expanded upon, so that the tools developed throughout the lifetime of a given project can be made available to other projects as well. Omeka is also built to be extensible, so there is an existing ecosystem of open source plugins that can be brought in, as well as an infrastructure that makes building new plugins much simpler.

One path to Omeka at Harvard began as early as 2012, with individual faculty members at Harvard using Omeka in their courses. These initial forays gave students a place to share their work online, and encouraged them to experiment with new approaches to creating and disseminating scholarship. However, none of these instances of Omeka were centrally supported, with each faculty member finding their own way to host their course’s content. Beginning in the fall of 2015, the History Department began managing installations of Omeka on a departmental cloud server, meaning that, instead of relying on external vendors for hosting and support, each installation is managed by the Digital Scholarship Facilitator in the History Department. This arrangement allows for more flexibility, features, and customization while reducing burdens on course instructors or project contributors, and so it is the infrastucture that MOL uses. You can browse the exhibits created by students in the Introduction to Digital History Course, taught at Harvard in the fall of 2015, as an example of what Omeka is capable of.

Omeka has been a popular choice among teaching staff involved with Harvard’s Digital Teaching Fellows initiative, which pairs digitally literate teaching fellows and teaching assistants with a specific course in order to incorporate digital skills and projects within an existing syllabus. Because Omeka has a relatively short learning curve, instructors are able to dedicate class or section time to activities which emphasize digital literacy. For instance, students learn the vocabulary necessary to express themselves properly (such as “metadata”), discover how to build a database well (or not so well), and explore the intersection of visual form with content.

Although there are obvious technical benefits to using Omeka, other web publishing platforms that work in similar ways provide alternatives. What sets Omeka apart from its peers is that it applies a technical foundation to academically-minded information organization, comparable to the ways a library, archive, or museum approaches its information organization. The basis of any Omeka site is it collection of “Items”, those materials being described that form the building blocks of all of the other content in the site. Other parts of Omeka—exhibits, collections, and maps enabled by plugins—build on these items to put them in a more narrative context, one that makes it easy to incorporate multimedia and interactive elements. Please feel free to reach out to the MOL staff if you’re interested in discussing the “back end” of how MOL’s Omeka instance is constructed!

Meet the Objects: Pair of Angel Candle Holders

This pair of twin “angel” candle holders are among the most unique objects in MOL’s collection, not only because they come as a set which allows us to investigate the differences between the two, but because they seem to be repurposed from a decorative panel.

Together, these two pieces were made somewhere in Austria in the 1490s and consist of two sculpted angels each holding a column. Originally, they were most likely parts of a larger altarpiece, since the height of each piece’s head and candle-holding pillar are exactly the same (8 ¾ inches, or 22.2 cm). After they were removed from this original decorative panel, crude notches for candles were carved into their columns, and the statues were repurposed as candle holders. The contrast between the skilled workmanship of the overall statues, juxtaposed with the crudeness of the candle-holding notch, is what first suggested their repurposing to the MOL team when we viewed them at Harvard Art Museum’s storage facility in Somerville. Further investigation into the structural details of the piece—the unadorned, utilitarian back; the conspicuously matching heights of the angel heads and pillars—seem to corroborate this interpretation. While the suggested original altarpiece may have simply broken down over time, it seems more likely that it fell victim to the iconoclastic movement that raged in Central Europe during the Protestant Reformation.

Each of these repurposed candle holders is carved out of lindenwood (also called limewood). In the late Middle Ages, most lindenwood carvings came from the southern German regions (Upper Rhine, Swabia, Franconia, and Bavaria) because of the abundance of lindenwood found in the area. This material was exceptionally well suited for sculpting, especially for fine detail work, and was used very frequently by late medieval sculptors. To carve a sculpture like these two angels, a sculptor would commence his work with a large lindenwood block and carve it into a curved shape. He would cut out the center and the back and try not to let the wood deform too much while carving. After he carved the wood into a C-shape, the sculptor would chisel down the wood and focus on the more elaborate details. In the end, the carving would be either painted or, according to the practice gaining popularity in the 1490s, simply varnished and glossed.

We on the MOL team are especially intrigued by the broken left hand of the figure holding a pillar on its right (the statue to the left in the picture above). Although we cannot know how it occurred, this damage speaks to the likely utilitarian purpose of the piece. Moreover, the damage allows the material to express itself, since the striated densities of the lindenwood make for a distinctive pattern. Little is known about how these late Gothic candle holders made their way to the United States, but Harvard University acquired them as a gift from Jane Ransohoff in memory of her late husband Dr. J. Louis Ransohoff.

2016 CARA meeting

Last weekend, two members of the MOL team spoke about the project’s pedagogical vision, classroom implementation, and extra-collegiate engagement with members of the Medieval Academy of America’s (MAA) Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). CARA is the leading forum for American and Canadian medieval studies organizations, ranging from departments to centers to disciplinary and interdisciplinary consortia.

Sean and Allyssa gave the third of three presentations at Sunday morning’s annual CARA meeting. Collectively, the participants discussed various responses by medievalists to the challenges and opportunities posed by increased attention on the STEM disciplines by university and college administrators, legislators, and the public at large, as well as the criticism of the humanities and liberal arts that often accompanies the valorization of STEM. The session, organized by Anne Lester, current chair of CARA, was designed to put forward different strategies and ideas to help programs and associations respond to the pressures on humanities departments, including enrollments and curricular emphases, while simultaneously creating more space for medieval studies.

First, Cecilia Gaposchkin passionately defended the importance of all of the liberal arts (meaning humanities and STEM disciplines combined), but especially their complementarity. Specifically, she argued that the conflation in popular media (most of it conservative) of “liberal arts” with “humanities”– as well as the tendency to pit “liberal arts” against STEM– is both historically inaccurate and intellectually dangerous. Her opinions can be found here, here, and here; supporting and complementary arguments can be found here, here, and here.

After the flurry of enthusiastic head-nodding and live-tweeting of Cecilia’s talk subsided, Thomas Burman expounded on the important concept that extra-collegiate engagement can move beyond traditional outreach models by more actively working with communities to determine how academics can organize effective programs and participate meaningfully in their surrounding communities. By means of illustration, he presented the ongoing work of the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Marco Institute to engage local high school faculty and students, especially through its new “Marco Madness” spring program. Tom’s nuanced observations and wealth of experience left many listeners clearly contemplating how they might implement similar programs at their home institutions.

Sean and Allyssa’s “unveiling” of MOL’s Proof of Concept Collection rounded out this conversation. They first argued that recent curricular and policy attention to digital literacy (represented in our neck of the woods by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards, a draft of which was released in December 2015 to replace the 2008 Technology Literacy Standards and Expectations) implicitly and inaccurately assumes that digital training belongs in the domain of STEM. They then discussed MOL’s value for the collegiate classroom (most notably in Harvard’s General Education course CB 51, “Making the Middle Ages”), and outlined its potential role in K-12 education more broadly. We will be discussing these themes at greater length in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!

Meet the Objects: Fusoris Astrolabe

Even though we’re not supposed to have “favorites,” the Fusoris astrolabe is one of the MOL team’s favorite objects. Currently housed in Harvard History of Science’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, it is one of very few medieval items in CHSI’s collection. It is on public display in the permanent Putnam Gallery in Harvard’s Science Center.

Visually, the astrolabe is attention-grabbing mainly because of how complicated it appears. The main body of a typical astrolabe would consist of a disk about six inches (15 cm) in diameter and ¼ inch (6 mm) thick, the mater, which was carved to hold interchangeable plates, or tympans, but still show calculatory information on the ring at the edge of the mater. The interchangeable plates set into the mater were calibrated to a given latitude, and were engraved with circles of altitude and azimuth for that latitude. Over the tympan was fitted another disk, called the rete (meaning “net” in Latin), which was heavily carved out so astronomers could easily see the plate under it. Pointers on the rete represented a number of fixed stars, which could be rotated over the tympan to show the passage of the stars relative to the astronomer’s latitude. On top of the rete was a clock-type hand called the rule, which could also be rotated in order to make calculations.

The reverse sides of most maters were engraved with a wide variety of scales. While the number and organization of these depended on where and when the astrolabe was made, all astrolabes included scales for measuring angles and scales for determining the Sun’s longitude for any date, as well as an alidade for measuring the altitude of celestial objects. All the interlocking parts were “fixed” by a bolt through the middle of each disc, rule, and alidade (so that they could rotate on top of each other), and fastened with a washer and decorative nut called a horse. The entire instrument was suspended by a string connected to a ring located at the top of the astrolabe. The Fusoris astrolabe’s rete and mater are constructed of gilt brass, but its single tympan, bolt, washer, horse, and suspension ring are of silver; the bolt head is further engraved with an 8 pointed star and the washer with a 16-point wind rose.

exploded image of astrolabe

Although astrolabes were invented centuries earlier in the Arabic-speaking lands under Islamic rule, this particular astrolabe was made in the Parisian workshop of Jean Fusoris in 1400. Other astrolabes from this workshop contain four or five brass tympans with projections for four to eight European latitudes within the range of 40° to 56°. The Harvard example, however, has a single, silver tympan inscribed for 34°—the latitude of Fez and Rabat (Morocco), Sultanabad (Iran), Herat (Afghanistan), and within half a degree of Damascus and Baghdad. So, we can surmise that this astrolabe was likely expressly constructed for a client who needed a low-latitude instrument for use in the Arabic-speaking world.

Meet the Objects: Russian Deesis

Among the first items chosen for the MOL library was this Russian Deesis plaque, made by an unknown artist between 1460 and 1470. The plaque was carefully made from a board (doska) of high-quality pine or fir, covered with white plaster (levkas), illustrated with tempera paint, and sealed with an oil-based varnish (olifa) before a layer of metallic facing (oklad) was added to increase the object’s brilliant appearance.

The term Deesis (from the Greek verb deomai, “to plead”) refers to a type of icon featuring the figure of Christ flanked by saintly intercessors—often (as here) Mary and John the Baptist—and often accompanied by angels. In medieval Russian homes, such icons were housed in the “red corner,” the nicest part of the house. There, members of the family would kneel before the icon and offer petitions as well as prayers of thanksgiving, prayers directed not to the icon itself but to the holy figures depicted on it, to whose presence the icon was believed to offer special access.

We have no direct evidence about the original home of this Deesis icon, or its early movements. By the first half of the twentieth century it had made its way to Turkey, where it was acquired by the scholar Thomas Whittemore, founder of the Byzantine Institute of America and Keeper of Byzantine seals and coins at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. For a number of decades, it was part of a large collection of Russian icons held by Juniata College in Huntington, Pennsylvania, before moving to the Fogg Musuem in 1992. Currently, it is in storage at the Harvard Art Museums‘ Somerville Research Center.

—Sama Mammadova, Assistant Project Manager

Meet the MOL Team: Jeremy Guillette (technical consultant)

My name is Jeremy Guillette, and I’m currently working with the Medieval Object Lessons project as a technical consultant. I keep my head in the nuts and bolts of the project, helping to set up the tools that we need. I’ve worked on other digital scholarship projects at Harvard in the Davis Center and at the Harvard Map Collection, and I’m currently working in the History Department at Harvard as a Digital Scholarship Facilitator, helping to bring digital projects into the classroom around the department.

My work in academic technology has been dependent on open source technologies, and contributing to those technologies continues to be a rewarding part of my work. Working with MOL, I continue to use open source software, and in doing so, I know that our work is not just ours. Just as I’m using tools that others have made, I can make the tools I create available to others.

What excites me about this project, and digital scholarship generally, is how much it can broaden horizons for everyone involved. It makes public outreach much easier, builds openness into the research process, and can broaden the skill sets of researchers and students involved. In MOL, we’re coming up with creative ways to use technology to give students and educators across the country and around the world access to these pieces of history for the first time.

Meet the MOL Team: Lane Baker (research assistant)

I’m a senior undergraduate at Harvard, concentrating in History with a secondary in Linguistics. I currently work as a Research Assistant for MOL, investigating objects and writing their biographies. In my freshman year, I studied medieval material culture under Professor Daniel Smail, which gave me my first exposure to the wonderful medieval objects in Harvard’s collections. I studied a 15th-century Russian icon as well as medieval world maps.

Since then, I have continued to study medieval history, with a focus on geography and cartography. I am very interested in the borders of medieval Europe, particularly in the far north and the Near East. What did medieval people think of their outsiders and frontiers? What was the relationship between texts, oral traditions, maps, and practice? And perhaps most importantly, what can medieval frontier legends tell us about modern notions of difference? I’m currently writing my senior thesis on the often forgotten Renaissance debate on the Riphean Mountains, an ancient frontier legend about the far north that came under scrutiny in the fifteenth century. This is a journey that I have been on since my first semester at Harvard, and it’s been extremely rewarding to dig into this subject so deeply.

I first realized my interests in this subject through the physical objects of medieval world maps. Many of the medieval objects in Harvard’s collection attest to the vibrant cultural exchanges that occurred at the edges of Europe. Physical objects often have fascinating stories, having traveled across borders and moved through different contexts throughout their long life. I am excited to help bring these objects to life and get students up close and personal with medieval material culture.

Meet the MOL Team: Sama Mammadova (assistant project manager)

My name is Sama Mammadova, and I was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and moved to Brooklyn, NY in 2010. I am a junior at Harvard pursuing a joint concentration in History and History of Art and Architecture. I am interested in economic, intellectual, and art history of the High Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. During my time at Harvard, I have been involved in student publications as an editor-in-chief of a history magazine, as well as an editor in medieval studies, Germanic studies, and international relations magazines. Along with publishing, I have done research with the Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and Villa I Tatti: The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Though I have had extensive experience with secondary sources, I have only had the opportunity to physically engage with a primary source in the last academic year. In the spring of 2014, I took Professor Daniel Smail’s sophomore tutorial on material history, which aimed at exploring aspects of material culture such as consumption habits, cultural meanings and economic values assigned to objects, and people’s increasing dependence on commodities. As a final assignment for that class, I wrote a biography of four scattered leaves of an early printed Bible, and getting to closely examine the leaves in Houghton Library was an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience. There was a drastic difference between reading a secondary source on the history of printing and being able to engage directly with a tangible fragment of that history to try discovering where, how, why, and through whose diligent efforts this object was created. It became so much easier for me to visualize historical events and to form personal connections to them since I started viewing history through material objects, and I hope that Medieval Objects Lessons will spark similar interests in other students as well.

Meet the MOL Team: Allyssa Metzger (project manager)

As my career transitions from graduate study within the academy towards public engagement, I’m exploring what it means to be a young academic in today’s digital world.  What does it mean to stay relevant in both research and teaching, and how do I do that in ways that are (hopefully) personally fulfilling as well?  The humanities’ “digital turn” is a development that my generation ignores at its own risk, but one that is particularly empowering of medievalists, should they chose to embrace it.  Digitizing valuable materials like books and museum objects has the potential to reinvigorate curiosity—among learners at all levels—in the premodern period through more easily accessible and more interactive engagement.  For me, learning the digital tools to realize that potential for MOL’s Objects—and helping to make the curatorial decisions necessitated by using those tools—continues to be immensely rewarding.

My past research has focused on the transmission of ideas—mostly mathematical, astronomical, and cosmological knowledge—but I have found it difficult to represent that transmission in a way that would be easily understandable to a nonspecialist audience.  At the same time, I have maintained an interest in food history and commodities networks, fields where scholars readily discuss not just the spread of, say, nutmeg or oranges, but also the types of cooking which accompany those ingredients—that is, they look at the cultural-intellectual baggage an object carries with it as it travels.  Working with the MOL team encourages me to think even more creatively about the ways objects (especially everyday objects) represent the transmission of ideas, and, perhaps more importantly, to represent the transmission process in a format which is easy to intuit.  The questions I have confronted in my time on the MOL team have forced me to confront questions of (non)narrative in my own research, to familiarize myself with innovative methods to analyze “knowledge,” and introduced me to tools with which I can present my findings to a wider audience than I would otherwise be able to.

But what I enjoy most about MOL is that it is pedagogical at heart, and transmits our collective passion into learning environments in ways that are stimulating for students.  At various points in the past 16 years I have been a classroom teacher, small-group instructor, and one-on-one tutor—and the effects of a “good” lesson never ceases to amaze me.  “History” is too often perceived as tantamount to certain, comprehensive knowledge about a time, place, or topic, which can make learning (and teaching) history… well, boring.  But professional historians don’t have all the answers, and research is driven by a tension between our best guesses and information we stumble upon while following our own curiosity.  In presenting Object Biographies as a series of questions, MOL aims to transmit some of that excitement—the thrill of discovery, the exhilaration of suggesting a new interpretation—into the classroom, or wherever else you happen to be learning.