Book Graffiti for the Renaissance

Some call it “doodling;” librarians might even brand it “defacing.”

But to historians, it’s “marginalia.”

On Nov. 12, reading historian Bill Sherman, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of York, delivered the fall Southwell Lecture on visual responses to texts, as expressed in the margins of more renowned Medieval and Renaissance publications.

Erasmus

He framed his talk through the words and works of Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, Renaissance philosopher, and Catholic priest, to illustrate the shifting relationship between reading and seeing in the 16th century, during the advent of printing. 

While Erasmus, it turned out, was a lousy doodler himself (and warned against profane use of religious imagery,) ironically his own image was widely reproduced in his time—through book drawings and doodles, on a coin, and most famously, in a painting (depicted here) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Some of Holbein's earliest surviving work, in fact, is itself marginalia--a set of some 80 drawings (one pictured above) in the margins of one of Erasmus's most famous books, In Praise of Folly.

Erasmus believed that the visual was part of the imagination, and that skillful illustration was a part of storytelling in print. While teaching at Oxford he was also said to have encouraged his students to mark, within the books they read, brilliant passages or maxims.

Manicules (Bembo)

Currently, said Sherman, generalizations about Renaissance marginalia are hard to come by, as “there are a lot out there still to be seen or discovered.” He shared his own enthusiasm for an early printed book, housed at Stanford University, of Pliny the Younger’s Letters in which Italian humanist Bernardo Bembo has added ostentatious pointing fingers (“manicules”) and staring eyeballs (“opticules”) to the margins to accentuate certain passages. He also showed slides from a 1481 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy with 19 printed illustrations, but which also contained hundreds of visual marginalia by artists—including an “extraordinary map of hell.”

Marginalia, Sherman concluded, do not often compete with the beauty and craftsmanship of great medieval scribes and illuminators. However, they offer a sense of the new mode of interaction during the time, which draws on medieval models but which is also part of an emerging culture of print, as well as the rise of humanism and “commerce with the classics.”

“Even the crudest ones give us a sharper image of  the period eye,” he said. “Like great art, good marginalia have a peculiar power to deliver intimate glimpses of the Renaissance world. And this sense of intimacy is, in the end, the most striking feature in these visual modes of reading.

“[We’re being] allowed to look over the shoulders at the hands of long-dead people, and, with this material, it is beginning to feel as if we might be able to see through their eyes.”

The St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Lecture, given once in the spring and once in the fall, is administered by Susan Wabuda, Ph.D., associate professor of history (wabuda@fordham.edu.)

--Janet Sassi

Fordham Students Earn Spots in Prestigious Summer Program in Athens

Facade of the Gennadius Library
(Photo via www.ascsa.edu)

Two Fordham doctoral students have earned full scholarships to a distinguished summer program at the Gennadios Library, which is part of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students Matt Briel and Jon Stanfill were the only two students who received scholarships for the entire program, said Nancy Busch, Ph.D., dean of GSAS and Chief Research Officer/Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs for Fordham.

“It is the most prestigious opportunity to study Medieval Greek,” Busch said.

In the month-long Medieval Greek Summer Session, Briele and Stanfill will partake in daily analysis and translation of Byzantine texts; paleography; introduction to the bibliography of Byzantine philology and collections of the Gennadius Library; visits to area museums, libraries, sites, museums and monuments outside Athens. The pair will also get individual tutorials and assignments determined by their specific needs and field of study.

The objective the summer session program is to familiarize students who have a sound foundation in Classical Greek with Medieval Greek language and philology by exposing them to primary sources, different kinds of literary genres and electronic tools, drawing on the resources of the Gennadios Library. The library houses 117,000 volumes and archives and is devoted to post-classical Hellenic civilization.

—Gina Vergel

Husband and Wife Team Up to Run Medieval Academy of America

Eileen Gardiner, TMC ’69, GSAS ’80, and Ronald Musto, FCRH ’69, met as pre-med students in a science lab on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s.

“I was pulling Ds,” Musto said. “She was pulling Cs. I asked to borrow her [burners] and flasks. Hers were always clean. Mine were not.”

Musto and Gardiner’s interest in medicine didn’t stick. She found her calling in English—medieval literature, in particular—and he rediscovered his love of history.

“I was always reading history as a kid,” said Musto, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in medieval history at Columbia University. “It constantly raises questions that fascinate me.”

Meanwhile, Gardiner went on to earn her doctorate at Fordham. She was “drawn to the amazing imagination that one could find in [medieval] literature, which combined religion and nature and a sort of way of life that was so different from our own,” she said. “There was just something that naturally attracted me to it.”

As Gardiner and Musto found their academic calling, they also fell in love.

“We tried to get married [at Fordham] one night by a Jesuit friend,” Gardiner said. “He told us to go home and sleep it off!”

They did, but eventually married in 1970, a year after graduation, and they’ve been together—personally and professionally—ever since.

Recently, Gardiner and Musto were named executive director and editor, respectively, of the Medieval Academy of America and its journal, Speculum, following a successful 10- year stint as co-directors of the American Council of Learned Societies’ humanities e-book division.

“We’ve always done things together. We were business partners from so early on,” said Gardiner.

“It makes for an interesting breakfast conversation,” Musto said. “It makes for obsessiveness,” Gardiner added.

In the first of their many projects together, Gardiner and Musto started the Co-Op Bookstore at Fordham with a $10,000 investment from the University’s United Student Government. They ran the store, located at 613 Fordham Road, during their junior and senior years.

Later, after earning their doctoral degrees, Gardiner and Musto worked in book publishing. Eventually, they decided to start a publishing house.

In 1985, they founded Italica Press, publishing six titles in their first year, mostly out-of-print books. Though they still publish roughly the same number of titles today, Gardiner and Musto have expanded their list to include original academic titles.

They also publish electronic books, something they did earlier than most houses.

In 1999, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) tapped them to publish an electronic collection of monographs in history.

Together, Gardiner and Musto created the ACLS Humanities E-Book Division, a fully searchable online collection of nearly 3,000 titles. With more than 640 institutional subscribers, in 33 different countries, it is widely considered one of the best online resources for research and scholarship.

At the Medieval Academy of America, Gardiner and Musto will help bring the academy into the digital realm, while maintaining the quality of the academy’s journal.

It is, in a sense, their dream job.

“The opportunity to work for the Medieval Academy really combines everything that we could imagine to be able to work on,” Gardiner said, “and to do it for the premier society in the world is an honor.”

“We’ve always been outsiders,” Musto said. “We’ve never held academic positions. I think it’s delightful and in a certain sense ironic that we’ve ended up in a position that is central to this world.”

—Miles Doyle, FCRH ’01

A Mania for Killing Geese and Chickens

Monday, 20 April 2009

Medieval Studies Lecture: "A Mania for Killing Geese and Chickens:" The Life of the Cardinal Ippolito of Este

Speaker: Enrica Guerra, Medieval Fellow and University of Ferrara

1 p.m. | Faculty Lounge, McGinley Center, Rose Hill campus

Contact: Medieval Studies: medievals@fordham.edu