SEAN CONNERY AS WILLIAM OF BASKERVILLE: I knew it. Adso, I knew it. Adso, do you realize we're in one of the greatest libraries in all of Christendom? [HOLLERS] [MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library, rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Alex McGee, Fred Rascoe. And Cody is back again. Are you going to get on the mic this time? You're not on it now. You can't answer. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "Let's Get Medieval."
Oh, like Pulp Fiction medieval?
No, no, nothing violent. I literally mean the historical period of the Middle Ages. FRED RASCOE: Specifically, we're going to be talking about libraries devoted to keeping medieval collections for modern scholars, as well as what libraries were like in medieval times.
Huh.
And that's medieval times as in the actual time frame, not as in the dinner theater.
So many layers of meaning to this show today.
Right. Alex and Marlee and I were joined in conversation by someone who is both a librarian and a scholar at a medieval research institute. CHARLIE BENNETT: I got to say, I'm delighted that those are still around. Don't let anybody tell you that we shouldn't be studying medieval stuff. And I can't wait to find out what happened during this interview.
Our songs today are about the written word, the people who wrote it. And we'll even throw in some songs influenced by folk music of the Middle Ages. To start a show about medieval libraries, we need to start with something medieval but fun. So this is "Medieval" by The Funs right here on Lost in the Stacks.
Does that count as a pun?
[THE FUNS, "MEDIEVAL"]
That was "Medieval" by The Funs. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Let's Get Medieval." The first step in getting medieval is meeting our guest. So let's do that now.
I am Dr. Julia Schneider. I am the Medieval Studies librarian at the University of Notre Dame. So that means that I am the subject specialist for Medieval Studies. I also currently handle a couple of other subjects, German Language and Literature, and I'm the interim Italian Studies librarian. And I do scholarly resource assessment for all of the humanities. So I have several different hats.
But in terms of medieval studies, my office is in the University of Notre Dame's medieval Institute library, and I get to be next to all of the books that I love all day long.
How did you end up in medieval studies at a medieval institute? How did that-- how did life take you down that path?
That's a very good question. I am a theologian by trade, so my academic background is religious studies and theology. And I did a master's degree at Saint Louis University with the intention of going on for a PhD. And my advisor left that university to become a Dominican priest. And so I was left without anyone to work with. And he had actually graduated from the Medieval institute at Notre Dame, so suggested that I might consider working here and doing a PhD here. So that's what I did.
I came here in the early 2000s and did a PhD. And I had always been wanting to do-- to be a librarian also. It was a fork in the road. So once I finished, I actually was able to combine the two things. So my dissertation is on a commentary on the Catholic mass by Albert the Great. So written in the 13th century. And I've always been fascinated with the Middle Ages in addition to medieval theology and what people were doing at the early universities and that kind of thing.
So this just really enabled me to look a little bit back, past our modern conceptions of things, to see what came first. And also, the Middle Ages are often either highly praised or denigrated. People either love the Middle Ages or what they think is the Middle Ages, or they really don't like it. And so I kind of wanted to see for myself. I had questions, and I wanted answers. So this is how I went about doing it.
How many medieval institutes are there? Like when you decided you wanted to study this and you wanted to do this as a career, what were the modern options for you? Are there a lot of places that do this kind of work?
That's also a really good question. So medieval studies by its nature, anything with the studies is an interdisciplinary-- an interdisciplinary group of disciplines. So there are many centers for medieval studies across North America and in Europe as well. And some are better than others. A lot of times, people will be embedded in a department if they've got a center for medieval studies, like at the University of California, Los Angeles. They have a big one there.
And so you can be in a department like, say, be a historian, and learn the contours of history, so not just the middle ages but focus on the Middle Ages. The difference between that and a place like the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame or the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, is that you're actually in that institute, and you are a medievalist.
You may have a disciplinary, and should have disciplinary focuses, but you are studying the Middle Ages as opposed to being like a historian or a literature person who has a concentration in medieval studies. So you're broad rather than-- in a discipline, you're broad. But in a medieval institute, you're deep in medieval studies, which can be a good thing and maybe not a good thing. I don't know. It depends on what you want to do with that degree.
Are your collections at University of Notre Dame more religion focused, or are they broader? JULIA SCHNEIDER: That's a good question. There is a religion focus here. But they are broad. So, for example, the library itself was started in the 1930s. The actual Institute wasn't started until 1946. But the library began with a library endowment to purchase the source material for the study of Thomas Aquinas. So Thomas Aquinas is a 13th century theologian at the University of Paris.
And at the time, the 1930s, he was the preeminent Catholic theologian. This is what Catholic seminarians were supposed to be studying. So they wanted to know the source material he was working with. So, yes, that's very, very religious studies and theology heavy. But we also have a big history collection.
We have art and music and literature, so vernacular literatures, English literature, Italian studies is very big here at Notre Dame, as well as a lot of material on the Mediterranean, Mediterranean history, archaeology, Islam, of course, because that figures very prominently in the Middle Ages. So not just Christianity, but the interaction of cultures, Islam, Judaism and Christianity in particular.
So the source material is crucial. Is that-- I guess what I want to ask is in the collection of the Medieval Institute library, how much is, like, original source material versus how much is secondary, folks that have written about the medieval times, however, that may be defined? JULIA SCHNEIDER: Yeah, I would say it's probably at least a third primary source material. And we have-- the way that the institute library is set up, we have the whole seventh floor of the main library.
So when this library was built, Father Hessberg, who was the president of the university at the time, asked the director of The medieval Institute what floor he wanted. And he told him he wanted the seventh floor because seven is the number of perfection in the Middle Ages. And so we got the whole seventh floor.
So we have offices here, like my office and the office for the academic department that is the Medieval Institute and places for grad students, carrels, and that kind of thing, and a little kitchen. But we have classrooms. But we also have-- let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven reading rooms. So there's one big, and the rest of them are kind of small. They were originally meant to be offices or seminar rooms. And so we have subcollections in all of those rooms.
And by and large, those are where we have many of our primary source materials, so lots of series of texts in their original languages.
We'll be back with more from Dr. Julia Schneider, librarian and researcher with the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame library.
File this set under CB 353.M4247.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Books" by Please Ask for Paul, and before that "Scrolls of Doom" by Dear Nora, and before that, "Anywhere" by Tomorrow Tulips, songs about ways of preserving the written word.
[ROCK MUSIC]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And we are speaking with Dr. Julia Schneider, the scholarly resource assessment librarian at Notre Dame's Medieval Institute. I so want to say "Nochra Dahm" every time.
Yeah, but I don't think they say it that way.
They don't.
Maybe in France, but not in South Bend, Indiana.
There's French in South Bend. We're talking about medieval library collections and libraries in the Middle Ages.
So I want to ask about libraries as they would have existed-- as they would have existed long ago. Obviously, you've got these source materials now in the Medieval Institute, but when they were originally in their original location, they weren't about medieval studies. They were about whatever they were about, right, for that contemporary time, right? JULIA SCHNEIDER: Absolutely, yeah. So I want to learn a little bit more about how these libraries existed in those times.
And first, I think we need to start with when you're talking about a library that is in medieval times, what is a medieval time?
And that's a good question. So the Middle Ages are roughly construed to be from about the year-- it depends on who you talk to, first of all-- but from the year about like, let's say 450 in the Common Era, all the way up to about 1517 in the Common Era. You know, around the beginning of the 16th century.
1517 is a very precise date, it seems like.
Well, this is me speaking as the theologian. So if you know your religious history, 1517 is when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door. So that really-- the Protestant Reformation, in the West anyway, really provides a kind of line of demarcation. But culture was already changing, right? So when we talk about periodization of culture, this is something that we've done later on.
Like you were saying, in the Middle Ages, you know, people weren't sitting around thinking, I'm doing medieval things. They were just living their lives. Same thing for the modern era, generally speaking. Although I would say, from a personal perspective, that the modern era is a lot more self-conscious about being modern since the very beginning, pretty much. Even though the term modern was not coined in the modern era, it became a thing that people wanted to be.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, people didn't want to be current, necessarily. They valued older things and appreciated them in a way that kind of changed. So that's why the precise definition. So let me get back to the original question, which is about the period of the Middle Ages. So a lot of different things happened during that period, right? The Roman Empire that had once been in control of the Mediterranean was not really happening anymore. And there was a cultural shift in the West.
There was also the beginning of a cultural shift in the Mediterranean. It wasn't too long after that Islam was founded and began to spread. And so a lot of different things were happening. But in the West-- so when I say West, I mean Western Europe, because this is really before-- medieval culture is really a thing of Europe and the Mediterranean and maybe North Africa.
We talk about the global Middle Ages, which is something that people are studying now, which is great because that integrates the other cultures and the rest of the world. But the developments I'm talking about are primarily focused on the West. So, you know, people are going from living in one way to living in another. Monasteries are the center of education, whereas in Rome, schools were less religiously centered, shall we say.
And so monasteries become the place of learning, so that's where libraries are. And libraries are attached to scriptoria, which are the places where people are writing, because this is handwritten culture, right? Print doesn't happen until the 1400s. So you have to have books. You have to have materials to write with and people to produce them. So you see a lot of what we would consider libraries, community libraries anyway, happening in monasteries.
People still had personal libraries like we do now, but the greater book production was for these communal libraries. So they could be centers of study and have a variety of books. Yes, many of them religious, probably most of them, but also classical Latin literature and Greek literature survived during this time, as well as philosophy in addition to religious studies and history.
Would these sort of community libraries with religious material during this time period-- when you say community, would it really be open to anyone in the community? JULIA SCHNEIDER: Well, I mean, no. [LAUGHS] This is the short answer, because many people could not read then. And I guess it depends on how you define open. So could people come in and take books out like we do in our public and, in the end, academic libraries?
No. Certainly members of the community in which the library exists did have access to those, but it was almost always mediated. And some of that had to do with the fact that, by and large, people couldn't read. So we still had oral transmission. In monastic settings, you have like, for example, the readings at liturgy. So at mass or at the hours, the prayer hours, and then at meals at chapter, et cetera. Someone was always reading aloud.
So people had access to it, but it was not unmediated in the way that we have generally unmediated access now. MARLEE GIVENS: There's a, I guess, kind of a stereotype of a medieval library, for people who have read or seen the film Name of the Rose, that they're-- they contain all these rare and forbidden texts that are hidden from the public. To what extent would that be true?
Well, I mean, you know, the public really, again, many people in the public weren't reading. So that wasn't necessarily a priority for them. Certainly, I would say The Name of the Rose, having read it myself and seen the movie, is not inaccurate, but it's also a little bit distorted. So certainly the librarians did have control over the libraries, but I think that they were really too busy to be hiding things from people. And it was more about what's useful and what's appropriate.
So certainly that could be the case. And I know that particular book and movie are talking about Aristotle coming into the West, which is happening during that time, and a lot of the theological controversies that are coming up. So it certainly is possible. I don't think it was as sexy as the movie made it sound, if that makes sense. I don't know if that really answered the question. Yeah.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks. And what could sound sexier than medieval libraries? We'll be back with more from Dr. Julia Schneider on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hello. I am Aziza Chaouni, a Moroccan architect, associate professor at the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Design at the University of Toronto and an architect activist, active mainly in my home country of Morocco. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Let's Get Medieval," about medieval libraries. There's been a scholarly fascination with all things medieval since the invention of the term. Many of our societal institutions were taking shape in the Middle Ages, and libraries were no exception. A Cambridge University professor gave a lecture on medieval libraries in 1894 that's still known to library historians. Here's a quote expressing appreciation for those-- excuse me.
Here's a quote expressing appreciation for these medieval librarians. "I am sure that only in this way can we realize that they, ancient scribes and scholars, were real, living people, not mere names. The more we study what they did, the more we shall realize how laborious, how artistic, how conscientious they were. And amid all the developments of the 19th century, we shall gratefully confess that the Middle Ages rocked the cradle of our knowledge and that we see but their hope become reality."
That's from a public lecture by John Willis Clark, registrar of Cambridge University, delivered June 13, 1894, as I said, nearly 130 years ago. Interesting to note that back in 1894, academic historians could give a public lecture about medieval libraries that was both well attended and reviewed in the Times of London newspaper. I'm not sure that would happen here in this year of 2024.
And what's more, I'm also not sure that the monks of the 13th century would look at the world of 2024 and think to themselves, gosh, we sure rocked the cradle of knowledge and our hope became reality. I'm sorry, monks. We did our best, and our best was just not quite enough. File this set under Z7 23.T47.
[ROCK MUSIC]
That was "The Ancient Cause" by Fievel is Glauque. Before that, "Saint Peter Writes His Book" by the Sic Alps. And we started with "Monk Time" by the Monks, songs about ancient and religious works and the people who wrote them.
[ROCK MUSIC]
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're speaking with Dr. Julia Schneider, medieval scholar and librarian at the University of Notre Dame library. We're talking about libraries in the Middle Ages and materials from medieval libraries that have survived to the present day.
So are new texts from that era still coming to light now? Obviously, we're dispelling the myth that there were forbidden texts hidden away in libraries a la Name of the Rose. But are discoveries still being made, things that we thought were lost are coming to light?
So, like still being made today?
Yeah, are there still collections from that period 400 up to 1517, I think you said, where we're adding to the literature that we know existed at that time? We weren't aware that there were extant copies. Maybe we're discovering that things still exist that we thought were lost or things that we never knew existed.
I think probably more the latter. So things we never knew existed are coming to light. One of the difficulties that we have is that, again, this is all handwritten. It's written in script that's sometimes difficult to read. A lot of times authorship is misattributed. So I might be reading a text that's ascribed to Saint Augustine, say, but I already know he did not write this.
So one of the things that scholars are focused on today is finding out who wrote particular texts or trying to figure out when they were written. Certainly there are texts that are being discovered or new aspects of texts that are being discovered that we didn't know about. Sometimes texts come down in one manuscript, and they're not complete, but then we can compare them to other manuscripts that might be complete.
And that is, again, not particularly History Channel worthy but very exciting work for medievalists.
As part of your work, seeking out new texts to add to your own collection?
You mean seeking out-- MARLEE GIVENS: Well, seeking out-- I guess seeking out texts from the Middle Ages to add to your collection. So we have a couple of different levels of that going on. I work heavily with Dr. David Gura, who is our curator of medieval manuscripts to acquire manuscripts and manuscript fragments of medieval texts. And there's a lot of work to be done in that area, for sure.
We have a lot of medieval manuscripts and not a lot as compared with, say, somewhere like Harvard or Yale or one of the European libraries but a considerable amount. And we're encouraging students to actually want to work on those texts. And we're also, obviously, always acquiring new printed versions of texts with preference for critical editions because those are what scholars consider to be the best versions of texts.
Do you know, just off the top of your head, what's the oldest thing you have in your collections? That's the archivists' competition, who has the oldest thing? So.
Yeah. I mean, I would imagine-- I don't know, off the top of my head. But my guess on a par is going to be something from the early Middle Ages. We also-- and it also depends if we're talking about-- you're talking about the oldest actual artifact, right, as opposed to the oldest text? Because the oldest text would be in printed form. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So I would argue Early Middle Ages, which means, maybe if we're talking about Latin, maybe 800-ish, 600-ish, in that vicinity. I'm sure that we have a few things that are older-- in fact, I know we do-- that are maybe biblical fragments or fragments. So this would have been maybe fourth century. So around 300, 400. And again, please do not-- well, of course you're going to quote me on this, but this is all off the top of my head and subject to correction.
Do you have a favorite artifact, in your own collection, I mean?
Yeah. So I have a favorite artifact that I really love, which is a manuscript fragment of some scholastic questions by the scholar Giles of Rome. So this is 14th century, so 1300s. And the reason it's my favorite artifact is because we purchased that the day I signed my contract. And it also represent the way that schoolbooks were transmitted during this time. So in the early time that I was talking about before, the monastery had a scriptorium.
There were people copying texts and handing things off. They had a whole factory system. One person did the decoration and initials. One person would do certain parts of the text, and then they'd put it all together at the end. And as education became more broadly available and schools joined to turn into universities, they developed an actual business of producing texts. And this is an example of that. So someone in the lecture would write down the lecture notes, run it to this business.
It's like the old copy centers that they used to have on campus where you could buy the notes. Anybody who's younger than like say, 40 will not ever remember any of this. But anyway, so you guys might not remember, but--
I remember.
Oh, yeah. JULIA SCHNEIDER: They'd run it to this. They'd run it to the scriptorium, and they had people who were employed just to make multiple copies of these things. So they were like little notebooks in like little gatherings of parchment. And this manuscript fragment that we bought survives this way and attests to that tradition. So that's why it's my favorite.
We're coming up to the end of our conversation, but I want to get your thoughts on the importance of medieval studies to us now, both as scholars and as librarians.
So I think medieval studies is important because it provides us with a model of approaching things. Interdisciplinarily, if that's a word-- with interdisciplinarity, I guess, is a better way to say it, although I'm not sure that's any more of a word-- and to be open to New things and new evidence from other disciplines. It's also a teaching moment because it's gotten bad press from the modern era as being dark and closed off. And it was really none of those things.
There were times that were darker just because the governments were closed off and that sort of thing. But the spread of knowledge was not. And I think that that's a really important thing for librarians to know about, because we always try to be open and try to give access to knowledge to a lot of different people.
And the Middle Ages gives us a different model, different ways of doing that and different ways of thinking about it than the ways that we've been educated into doing as people in the modern era.
Julia, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, it was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.
You've been listening to Lost in the Stacks. Our guest was Dr. Julia Schneider, the subject specialist for Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame. "Noter dahm," "Noter dame."
"Nochra dahm."
Notre Dame library as well as the scholarly resources and assessment librarian for arts, humanities, and architecture.
At least you could say scholarly without any pause. File this set under ML 457.M42.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Fotheringay" by Fairport Convention. Before that, "Gaudete" by Steeleye Span. And we started with-- you know, I asked Fred over and over again to say this for me. And now I realize I should just have him say it. What's the name of this song that we started with.
What was that word? Scholarly? No, no. This was "Kyrie Eleison."
By the Electric Prunes. Songs, incorporating music, words, scholarship, and styles from the Middle Ages.
[ROCK MUSIC]
Today's show was called "Let's Get Medieval," all about libraries in the Middle Ages. And we used the terms "medieval" and "Middle Ages" a lot in our talk with Julia. And after our interview was over, I realized that I forgot to ask an important clarifying question. So let me play a snippet of that now, and I'll put some music under it too.
[ROCK MUSIC]
I remembered one thing that I meant to ask. What is the difference or similarity Between the term "Middle Ages" and "medieval"?
Well, Middle Ages is a noun, and medieval is an adjective.
Oh, so it's grammar. JULIA SCHNEIDER: So, yeah, that's it. So it's just a different way of saying "in the middle." So I love the slogan that we have for the Medieval Institute here. I did not-- I did not invent it. The slogan is "meet us in the middle at the crossroads of everything." So this is the crossroads of time and space. It's in the middle. So that's-- if you think of medieval, it's just a thing in the middle, like medieval versus primeval. So it's just a different adjective.
[CREAM, "CROSSROADS"]
(SINGING) I went down to the crossroad Fell down on my knees
So it all comes together at the crossroads. (SINGING) Down to the crossroad It's time to roll the credits. But before we start, Fred, do you have any medieval music, Middle Ages music that we can play?
Oh, for sure. By special request from Julia, how about some 14th century Florentine street music?
Hit it.
[FLORENTINE STREET MUSIC]
What do you think?
That goes a lot harder than I would expect. Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech library, written and produced by Alex McGee and Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel, and a copy of Aristotle's Second Book of Poetics-- hmm, sounds dangerous--
A librarian will not laugh.
--were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to Julia for being on the show, to everyone studying medieval history. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Next week, we're launching a new occasional series called Stories That Archives Tell. And we're starting close to home.
Well, it's time for our last song today. The Middle Ages weren't just a time in history that was considered the crossroads. They were that. Today, we also call folks who are at this midpoint in life middle aged, folks like me.
Hey, I am right here in the room with you, Fred.
Yeah, and folks like you, Charlie.
Thanks. So does this mean that human society has gone through its midlife crisis, like in the Middle Ages back in the 1500s and now we're in our declining years, our elderly twilight of civilization?
Could definitely make that argument.
You could definitely make the argument.
Maybe we'll be lucky and civilization will pass away peacefully in its sleep. CHARLIE BENNETT: This got dark fast. So let's close with a song about hitting middle age. This is "Middle Ages" by the Wimps right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
Just go to sleep, Fred.
Forever.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Back hurts Feet too Don't know What to do Getting old You're screwed