Month: December 2015

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.