Category: Uncategorized

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 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.

Welcome!

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!