The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is a four-year initiative funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources and culminating in November 2024. By digitizing and cataloging hundreds of medieval manuscripts held in twenty-two partner collections across the Midwest, this collaborative project aims to bring attention to and celebrate the medieval manuscripts in the region, as well as the communities that study and care for them. This talk focuses on those communities as they shift throughout history. Beginning with the ways the project strives to foster community with and among our partners, our attention will then move backward in time, considering contemporary and past communities of researchers and donors and their connections with manuscript-holding institutions; rare book dealers, biblioclasts, and networks of national sales and exhibitions; and finally, the medieval communities that project items originated in or moved through. While weaving together these examples of manuscripts that suggest patterns of circulation and traces of past communities, this talk also reflects on the way the Peripheral Manuscripts Project has allowed the project team to do medieval studies in their own backyard, within their own communities.
Liz Hebbard is Assistant Professor of French/Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University, and founding co-director with Patricia Ingham of the Indiana University Book Lab. She is a specialist of the music and literatures of medieval France, particularly French and Occitan song, and a paleographer and codicologist specializing in medieval manuscripts, with particular interest in pre-modern book production and book crafts, material culture, and the reuse of parchment manuscripts as binding material. She has published on troubadour and trouvère song and its reception, medieval manuscripts in Midwestern collections, manuscripts as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars, and on the early 20th century American biblioclast Otto Ege. She has just finished her first book, Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadours. Hebbard is the Primary Principal Investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, which will be the focus of her talk.
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