This post contributes to our ongoing special series, “Working in the Archives.” Previously, our bloggers have explained the archival procedures in Morocco and in France. Today, I will discuss some strategies and tips to make a trip to the The Rijksarchief te Gent in Belgium a productive one.
The State Archives in Gent is one of the major depositories of medieval manuscripts in Belgium. I resided and researched in Gent for nine months and hope this blog will help scholars who are traveling to Gent, to the Rijksarchief, to complete research in a short amount of time and with limited knowledge of the city.
Below, I will discuss the practical knowledge needed to make an archive visit productive: how to get to the Rijksarchief from the train station (Station Gent-Sint-Pieters), what is needed to access the archive, how to search for material, how to request that material, and how long the material takes to arrive. Additionally, I will mention some quality of life information- a good place for lunch, for coffee, and for dinner and a drink after a long day in the archive.
How to Get There- Bagattenstraat 43, 9000 Gent
The train to Gent from Brussels Airport (BRU) takes either an hour or an hour and a half, depending on the available trains at the airport when you land. One can take any train going to Brussels Central and switch trains there to arrive faster. Train travel in Brussels is quite easy, with train times and destinations presented in Flemish, French, and English (most of the time, but not always). Upon arriving in Gent-Sint-Pieter’s, there are three easy ways to get to the Rijksarchief- tram, taxi, or by foot. Taking a taxi in Gent is a bit pricey, so if one is on a budget, taking the tram or walking is the better option.
There is a tram that runs regularly from the front of Sint-Pieter’s Station. It is on the Red Line (1) that goes straight into the city center. The stop on the Red Line next to the Rijksarchief is called Verlorenkost. The stop is one street before Bagattenstraat, the street on which the archive is located.
To walk from the train station, one will want to follow the same path as the tram: first, take Konigen Elisabethlaan away from the station; after about a quarter of a mile, bear to the left onto Kortrijkseestenweg; remain on this street through a major intersection. The street changes in name to Kortrijksepoortstraat; continue on this street until you reach Bagattenstraat on the right, and the archive is the third building on the left. It is a large white building.
What You Need to Access the Archive
To access the material in the archive, one needs a research card (Lezerskaart). One can spend 5 euros for a weeklong visitor’s research card, or one can spend 20 euros for a yearlong card. You must show your personal reader’s card at every visit. It can be purchased on-site: the annual card gives access to all the reading rooms of the State Archives of Belgium. If one has a student card from the University of Gent, the card is half price.
How to Search For Material
RA Gent K54, Grauwe Zusters bij Sint-JansRA Gent K52, Klooster van Arme Klaren
One can search the Rijksarchief online at arch.be/. However, many of the inventories of the collections held in the archive are not online, and can only be consulted in-person. The inventories are shelved on the second floor in the reading room.
To fully understand what the inventories and search tools say, one needs to have some grasp of Dutch. Most of the finding tools are only in Dutch, although one can ask the staff for clarifications and assistance. At minimum, bring a Dutch dictionary, as there is no Wi-Fi at the archive to look up words and phrases online.
How to Request Material and its Arrival Time
To request a manuscript, one can email the archive a day before to have the material ready in the morning. Otherwise, you must request them in person. The manuscripts are brought to the reading room on the top of every hour, so plan your time accordingly.
Quality of Life
In terms of walkability, Gent is a very manageable city. While it only takes about 15 minutes to walk to the city center from the Rijksarchief, there are nearby cafes and restaurants that are of excellent quality and affordable. My favorite spot near the archive is Vooruit- a restaurant at the other end of Bagattenstraat. It has good food at a good price, with a daily special every day. Vooruit also has excellent coffee. For an afterwork drink or game of pool, turn right out of the archive and go two buildings down to Kaptein Kravate.
Important Update 7/26/18: The Medieval Institute recently merged the Medieval Undergraduate Research website with this one. All posts from the old site have been transferred here, and the undergraduate content can now be found under the "Undergrad Wednesdays" category. The rest of the information in this post remains accurate and up-to-date.
The Medieval Institute recently launched a new website, Medieval Undergraduate Research, to provide a new community platform for undergraduates studying any area of the Middle Ages. Pedagogically, one of its purposes is to help instructors introduce a new kind of writing assignment in the classroom: the blog post. The recent rise of the digital humanities (DH) has placed particular pressure on medievalists to pursue new scholarly pathways, not only in their own scholarship, but also in the classroom as well. One simple way to increase students’ DH experience is to give them writing assignments based on digital genres. Translating foundational humanities skills–critical thinking, reading, and writing–into newer online platforms, prepares students for a job market that increasingly expects them to be able to communicate effectively in digital mediums.
On this site, posts, carefully revised and edited with help from instructors and myself, the site’s Webmaster, become mini-publications that students can add to their resumes as evidence of their ability to write professionally for a wide audience. Faculty can also use the blog post to encourage students to think about the course material they are learning in an alternative format, not with the intention of replacing the traditional academic essay, but rather as a supplement to it. In fact, many of the standard elements of a conventional assignment could be incorporated into these posts as in the sample assignment provided below. However, students should pay careful attention to audience as the platform encourages students to write “with a different voice and tone than they might use in a traditional essay” and to “explore the multimedia possibilities offered by” the genre.[1] Certain assignments, crafted with an eye towards interlinking and online research, could even focus on developing students’ digital literacy, finding, reading, and evaluating the quality of their online sources.
Contributions to this online forum can address any topic under the large umbrella of medieval studies, leaving the possibilities for assignment topics wide open. For example, a series of posts currently published under the course category “Chaucer’s Biggest Rivals” respond to a prompt written by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, worth quoting in full:
Translation Critique Project for Blog: You can write this blog post either on Pearl or Gawain. There are two parts to this: you will translate a passage of your choice and then comment on the various stylistic devices used by the poet in one of the passages given (e.g. word play, metre, rhyme, stanza structure, imagery). Then you will write a critique of Marie Boroff’s translation (she is considered the best American poetic translator of Middle English). A copy of Boroff’s translations can be purchased inexpensively and one will also be placed on Reserve in the Library; however, her Gawain can also be found in any edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. You may wish to look at Boroff’s introduction to her text, where she gives the rationale for her approach. You will want to consider the problems of literary style, accuracy, faithfulness to the medieval poet’s text, and the demands of modern English in your analysis, and you should have no fewer than five examples to illustrate your views. (The Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary are good resources for this type of research as well). The length of this assignment is about 1000 words, so not very long, and we are going to post the best of them online on the ND Medieval Institute’s blog website (Medieval Undergraduate Research), with the help of Dr. Nicole Eddy [the site’s former Webmaster]. And we will put the appropriate image from the Pearl or Gawain manuscript with your post, or perhaps other appropriate images. See: http://blogs.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/undergraduate-research/.
Many of the students tasked with these critiques found innovative ways to connect the material to modern culture in order to adapt their more traditional analyses to this newer genre and to address a wide audience. Examples include Karen Neis’ “An Ugly, Bad Witch” and Elizabeth Kennedy’s “Visceral Moments in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
Some reflections on a manuscript reproduction project completed for a “History of the Book” course at St. Mary’s College across the street are currently joining those translation critiques. These posts, written under the guidance of Sarah Noonan, reflect on the process of manuscript production from the materials (parchment, ink, etc.) to the artistic decisions that go into designing the mise-en-page. Next semester, I will require students in my Canterbury Tales course to write blog posts that close read a short passage in lieu of one of the shorter close reading essays I typically assign. Historians, theologians, and philosophers will likely approach the blog assignment differently, and we welcome disciplinary diversity. We hope to gain wide interdisciplinary coverage that represents the full breadth of Notre Dame’s medieval curriculum.
Instructors using this site as the basis for course assignments should feel free to experiment with a range of traditional and creative prompts. We are also open to accepting work performed for extra credit, so long as the submissions undergo revision based on feedback from an instructor or TA. Individual students are invited to send us individual submissions based on successful work they performed for their classes, such as a major research project, or an analytical essay, revised to match the length and tone of a blog entry.
Medieval Institute, Hesburgh Library. Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame
Moreover, in the coming months, we plan to roll out a supplementary classroom visit program for which I, or one of my regular contributors, will give quest lectures. Our presentations will consist of a twenty-minute talk about how to set up and write a successful blog post in WordPress. This program will provide an additional resource for faculty who want some extra support implementing their technology-based assignments.
We are, of course, far from the first ones to suggest blog posts as course assignments (see what others have said, here, here, and here). However, as opposed to some of the more informal models in common use (weekly reading responses, daily prompts, etc.), all of which serve valuable purposes, the posts for this site are meant to be more formal and involved. As a centralized hub for undergraduate bloggers at Notre Dame, these carefully revised and polished contributions are meant to function more like mini, peer-reviewed publications. With this goal in mind, we encourage faculty and undergraduates to participate in this project and are eager to work with you at any stage of the process.
Sample Assignments:
Update 4/27/18: Here is a sample assignment that aims to improve students’ proficiency in digital genres.
Karrie Fuller, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame/St. Mary’s College
[1] Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).
A few additional resources for DH teaching at the undergraduate level:
Hacking the Academy, May 21-28, 2010 (http://hackingtheacademy.org). (There’s also a book version of this project published by the University of Michigan Press, 2013.)
Brett, Hirsch, ed., Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012).
This Halloween, I’d like to talk about werewolves, one of the classic monsters whose image helps to characterize this—my favorite—holiday.
Werewolves, while sometimes overshadowed by the more frequent and high-profile appearance of other monsters such as vampires and zombies in popular literature, have a mythology that has endured for millennia and still finds a way to haunt our cultural imagination. Unsurprisingly, werewolves feature in Victorian Gothic literature, including works such as Hugues, the Wer-Wolf by Sutherland Menzies (1838),Wagner the Wehr-Wolf(1847) by G. W. M. Reynolds, “The Man-Wolf” (1831) by Leitch Ritchie, “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” (1846) by Catherine Crowe and The Wolf Leader(1857) by Alexandre Dumas.
Werewolf from Stephen Sommers’ ‘Van Helsing’ (2004).
When werewolves have appeared in more recent popular literature, they often do so in the context of a prescribed, age-old struggle between their kind and vampires. Werewolf-vampire racial animosity is dramatized in the film series Underworld(2003), which injects an unlikely love story into the ancient war between these monstrous groups. This conflict has since become a regular feature of modern vampire films, such as in Van Helsing (2004) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), and in TV series such as Twilight (2008)and True Blood (2008). Penny Dreadful (2014), a show which delights in Victorian monstrosities, also nods to this tradition when two werewolf characters (Ethan and Kaetenay) are forced to battle a gang of vampires, while Hemlock Grove (2013) alternatively features both a werewolf named Peter and a vampyric upir named Roman who share mutual respect and admiration.
Vampire lord, Viktor, battles against a werewolf in Len Wiseman’s ‘Underworld’ (2003).
Generally whenever we see werewolves in modern popular literature, it is in this shared context, which is also true of the the TV series Being Human (2011); however, werewolves have (in a few cases) been given center stage. The classic and most obvious examples are the films An American Werewolf in London (1981) and An American Werewolf in Paris (1997).
More recently, in Harry Potter and the of Azkaban (2004), Remus Lupin, who is one of the wizard professors at Hogwarts and also a werewolf, is a main protagonists in the film, despite that vampires feature nowhere in the series and are rarely mentioned even in J. K. Rowling’s novels. For Teen Wolf (2011), a TV series focused on a teenage boy’s struggle with lycanthropy, the absence of vampires is a point of pride. Often werewolves have been gendered male, but the TV series Bitten (2014) challenges this stereotype by centering the plot on a female werewolf protagonist and her struggles within a werewolf patriarchy. Unfortunately, and counterproductively, the series is plagued by a consistent hyper-sexualization of her character in a manner all too familiar from the modern vampire craze. I’d like to believe this inconsistent and contradictory messaging might have contributed to the show’s discontinuation in 2016, but somehow I doubt it.
Professor Lupin (David Thewlis) transforming into a werewolf in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004).
Today, we will discuss skin-changing and werewolfism in the medieval literary traditions of Northern Europe, primarily as contained in the context of the Old Norse fornaldarsǫgur. We will also consider how lycanthropy in the Old Norse Hrólfs saga krakaand Vǫlsunga saga inform certain instances of skin-changers in modern literature, especially in the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin.
Numerous academic blogs have explored the topic of lycanthropy, usually—and unsurprisingly—around this same time of year. In fact, the website Sententiae Antiquae has, in years passed, written a blog series on werewolves in the classical tradition, including blogs on Petronius’ werewolf story from Satyricon (62), Pliny the Elder’s emphasis on clothing and description of werewolf superstitions in his Natural History (8.80-4), and an overview of classical lycanthropy producing a list of sources including, Herodotus’ Histories, Plato’s Republic, Pausanias’ Geography of Greece, anonymous Greek Medical Treatises on the Treatment of Lycanthropy, St. Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, and the 11th century medieval Latin poem, Poemata 9.841, by a monk named Michael Psellus (which is notably influenced by Greek medical treatises). These blogs have tended to focus especially on classical superstitions, such as nakedness being a prerequisite for transformation and the belief that a wolf’s gaze could paralyze humans.
Miniature of wolves and (below) the man paralyzed by their gaze from the ‘Rochester Bestiary’ in BL, Royal MS 12 F. xiii, f. 29r.
The British Library has also composed a blog on lycanthropy in the context of the influence of classical werewolf mythology on later medieval literature. This blog references classical werewolf stereotypes primarily derived from Pliny’s description of versipelles ‘skin-changers’ (his term for werewolves) in Natural History, and then moves to consider especially Bisclavret, the famous Breton lay by Marie de France, and Gerald of Wales’ description of an Irish folktale concerning lycanthropy in his Topographica Hibernica, both of which present a very positive image of a werewolf, complete with the capacity for human understanding and compassion.
Two werewolves and the priest from Gerald of Wales’ ‘Topographica Hibernica’ in BL Royal MS 13 B. viii, f. 18r.
However, as mentioned earlier, werewolves appear also in the vernacular traditions of medieval Scandinavia, and this blog aims to expand the web-conversation surrounding versipelles ‘skin-changers’in medieval literature to include examples from Old Norse saga prose literature, which contain numerous references to humans transforming into various beasts, usually wolves or bears.
This Old Norse tradition of skin-changers contributes directly to Tolkien’s character of Beorn, the werebear from The Hobbit (1937). Gandalf describes Beorn in chapter VII “Queer Lodgings” when Thorin and his company are traveling through the Misty Mountains:
“He [Beorn] is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard. I cannot tell you much more, though that ought to be enough. Some say that he is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came. Other say that he is a man descended from the first men who lived before Smaug or the other dragons came into this part of the world, and before the goblins came into the hills out of the North. I cannot say, though I fancy the last is the true tale. He is not the sort of person to ask questions of. At any rate he is under no enchantment but his own.”
Gandalf (Ian Mckellen) speaks with Beorn in bear-form in Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ (2013).
Beorn, like his namesake Bjǫrn (a hero from Hrólfs saga kraka), transforms physically from man to bear—though Bjǫrn’s transformations are the product of a curse by his evil stepmother, Queen Hvít, as opposed to Beorn who seems in full control of his metamorphoses in The Hobbit. Jesse Byock’s The Saga of the King Hrolf Kraki reads:
“She [Hvít] then struck him [Bjǫrn] with her wolfskin gloves, telling him to become a cave bear, grim and savage: ‘You will eat no food other than your own father’s livestock and, in feeding yourself, you will kill more than has ever been observed before. You will never be released from the spell, and your awareness of this disgrace will be more dreadful to you than no remembrance at all.’ Then Bjorn disappeared, and no one knew what had become of him…. Next to be told is that the king’s cattle were being killed in large numbers by a grey bear, large and fierce. One evening it happened that Bera, the freeman’s daughter, saw the savage bear. It approached her unthreateningly. She thought she recognized in the bear the eyes of Bjorn, the king’s son, and so she did not run away. The beast then moved away from her, but she followed it all the way until it came to a cave. When she entered the cave, a man was standing there” (37).
This passage describes the power of the queen’s curse to physically transform Bjǫrn, which leads ultimately to his death at the hands of his own father and his warriors. However, it also emphasizes that, while Bjǫrn is dangerous to the livestock, he retains his humanity and at night transforms back into a man.
Beorn in bear-form in ‘The Battle of the Five Armies’ by Justin Gerard (2009).
The character of Bǫðvar Bjarki, son of Bjǫrn (who too shares characteristics and some parallel achievements with Beorn from The Hobbit), also from Hrólfs saga kraka, trances and in doing so is able to inhabit the mind of a bear and control its actions. This is particularly crucial during the saga’s climactic battle between the monstrous army of Hjǫvard and Skuld and the forces of King Hrólf.
The ability to enter into and take over an animal’s consciousness, as a form of shape-shifting through meditation, appears also in George R. R. Martin’s ASong of Ice and Fire (1991)—and corresponding HBO series Game of Thrones (2011)—in the contexts of characters called ‘wargs’ who possess this distinct ability. This group includes a number of those in the Stark family (whose family sigil is appropriately a direwolf). In Martin’s series, characters described as wargs are always from the wintry North, and regularly use their possessed animals to battle their enemies, as in Hrólfs saga kraka.
Robb Stark and his direwolf Grey Wind confront a captured Jaime Lannister in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ (2011).
The Old Norse Vǫlsunga saga, more famous for its dragon and dwarf (namely, Fáfnir and Regin) than its werewolves, does nevertheless have a section in which Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli specifically wear wolf-pelts in order to transform themselves into wolves and roam the wilderness together in wolf-form. Jesse Byock’s The Saga of the Volsungs reads:
“One time, they went again to the forest to get themselves some riches, and they found a house. Inside it were two sleeping men, with thick gold rings. A spell had been cast upon them: wolfskins hung over them in the house and only every tenth day could they shed the skins. They were the sons of kings. Sigmund and Sinfjotli put the skins on and could not get them off. And the weird power was there as before; they howled like wolves, both understanding the sounds” (44).
This passage describes the ability to “skin-change” into a wolf by literally wearing a wolf’s skin. This version of ‘skin-changing’ is picked up and adapted in two of Martin’s fictional works: his short story “In the Lost Lands” (1982) and his novella The Skin-Trade (1988).
Illustration of Grey Alys from George R. R. Martin’s ‘In the Lost Lands’ (1982).
In Martin’s short story, a character named Boyce travels into the formidable ‘Lost Lands’ to the north, which constitute an endless frozen wilderness, with a witch named Grey Alys (who borrows heavily from mythology of Freya, especially with regard to her cloak of feathers).
I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t yet and might be interested in reading this text, except to say that lycanthropy appears initially as a physical transformation, but by the end we learn that wearing the skin of a werewolf can produce the same metamorphosis for those whom the transformation isn’t biological.
George R. R. Martin, ‘Skin Trade,’ cover of graphic novel adapted by Daniel Abraham and illustrated by Mike Wolfer (2014).
Similarly, in his later novella, The Skin-Trade, Martin establishes a world in which both biology and werewolf skin-wearing can result in lycanthropy. Werewolf fans may be happy to learn that The Skin-Trade is currently ‘in development’ by Cinemax under the direction of scriptwriter Kalinda Vazquez, who has written for other TV series such as Prison Break (2005) and Once Upon a Time(2011). However, particularly because there is currently no clear sense as to when Cinemax and Vazquez will have their version of The Skin-Trade ready for the silver screen, it may still be a while before there is a werewolf series to rival HBO’s True Blood or AMC’s The Walking Dead.
Richard Fahey
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
