Welcome to Doing Words With Things, the blog of Harvard University’s Medieval Object Lessons project!
Medieval Object Lessons: The Harvard Digital Library of the Middle Ages (MOL) is a new initiative in the digital humanities, sponsored by the Harvard University Committee on Medieval Studies and made possible with the support of a Lasky-Barajas Digital Humanities Grant from the Division of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University and the Department of History.
Currently in development, MOL will offer its users over 100 objects from medieval Europe and the Middle East in interactive three-dimensional formats, accompanied by full descriptions, links to related online materials, bibliographies, and suggested classroom and curricular uses. Loosely inspired by Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, MOL is not intended to be canonical or comprehensive, but instead representative and metonymic: that is, it will present a matrix of time and space in which each place and period can be encountered and explored through the medium of discrete objects and the stories and uses surrounding them.
The library will be available to educators at all levels, ranging from elementary school to high school to college. Each object lesson will be linked to state, national, and AP curricular standards and themes, allowing K-12 teachers to incorporate the Middle Ages easily and concretely in their lectures and lesson plans. As such, MOL is aimed not only at medieval specialists but also at non-medievalists, providing them with distinct, striking, and appealing ports of entry into an historical and cultural territory often treated cursorily (if at all) in textbooks and standard lesson plans.
The core of “Medieval Object Lessons” is made up of materials held in Harvard University collections. The design, management, and implementation of the collection is a collaborative effort involving a technical and curatorial team of Harvard faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. These team members are responsible for overseeing the digital imaging of the library’s objects, researching and writing library page descriptions and curricular “avenues for exploration”, identifying web-based supporting documentation and sites, compiling supporting bibliographies, and creating the library entries on the Omeka platform. In coming years, however, we hope MOL will offer opportunities for collaboration and cooperation beyond Harvard, including the participation of outside colleagues as “guest curators” for particular entries, and the inclusion of materials from non-Harvard sources within the library’s virtual walls.
We invite you to visit Doing Words With Things over the coming months, and learn more about the MOL team, our objects, how medieval “object lessons” are made, and what we have in store!