History – Page 33 – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

September 29, 2017September 25, 2018

Working in the Archives – Comments on Les Archives départementales du Nord

*This post contributes to the ongoing efforts of the medieval graduate students to offer insight and advice regarding the archives in which they have conducted research. For the first post, see Andrea Castonguay’s post on the Royal Archive in Morocco: http://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2017/02/24/research-at-the-bibliotheque-nationale-du-royaume-du-maroc/.

Les Archives Départmentales du Nord

Les Archives Déprtmentales du Nord (ADN) is one of the major state archives of France. The archive is located in Lille, in the northeastern part of France, right next to the Belgian border. ADN houses many of the most important administrative and economic documents of late medieval Burgundy.

Below, I will elaborate on my experience working in the ADN, offering some practical knowledge needed to make an archival visit productive. I will briefly discuss how to get to the Archives du Nord from Paris and Brussels, and then how to get to the archive proper using the metro system in Lille itself. Additionally, I will explain 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.

How to Get There

There are two ways to get to Lille from the major travel hubs in France and Belgium, Paris and Brussels. In France, there is a direct train from the Paris Nord station to station Lille Europe. A one way ticket costs around 30 euro depending on the time of year in which you choose to travel. In Belgium, there is an indirect train from Brussels Central to Gare de Lille Flandres, with a switch in Tournai. If you are commuting from the Flemish part of Belgium, you will need to switch trains in Kortrijk/Courtrai. There are bus options for both, but if you are commuting daily to Lille from one of these centralized locations, they are prohibitively long in duration to be worth the euros saved.

Once arriving in Lille, your train will take you to either Lille Europe or Gare de Lille Flandres. Both train stations have metro stops on red line below the stations themselves. Lille Flandres also has a stop on the yellow line, which is a slightly faster trip to the archive. If you are going on the red line, go from Lille Europe or Lille Flandres to the stop Porte des Postes or Montebello. At either stop, the archive is less than a ten minute walk from the station. If you take the yellow line from Lille Flandres, get off at the Porte des Postes stop. At any metro stop in Lille, you can purchase a one-way metro card with two charges for 3.60 euro, or an all-day metro card for 5 euro. For your first few trips, I would suggest going with the all-day pass so that you can return to the city center for a nice lunch. The archive resides on the Rue Saint-Bernard.

How to access the archive, Requesting Manuscripts

As with many other archives in Europe, you must present your passport at your first visit to the archive so that you can get a Carte de Lecteur. The important part of the archival research card is the Reading Number- it is this number that is required to request manuscripts to view.

You can request manuscripts by emailing the archive at archive@lenord.fr, or going in person. In my experience, Les Archives du Nord are a very prompt archive in bringing requested material. They do not fill manuscript requests once per hour as many archives do in Belgium. It takes around fifteen to twenty minutes for the requested manuscripts to arrive. If you email them beforehand, they will have already pulled all of your manuscripts for the day. In terms of manuscript limits, you may only access twelve manuscripts per day. However, you can put in requests for larger amounts of manuscripts for each day of the week and they will oblige you, as long as your desired documents are not requested by another patron.

To search for manuscripts, you can use the online search engine on the Archives’ website, or the printed inventories at the archive. In my experience, the printed inventories are quicker to use, but it is of course dependent upon personal preference or particular material. If you are planning to look at Burgundian economic sources, looking first at the Les sources de l’histoire économique et sociale du Moyen Age. 2 : Les états de la Maison de Bourgogne edited by Robert-Henri Bautier, Janine Sornay, and Francoise Muret is a must. While Les sources includes economic sources from multiple archives, its regional and chronological listings of sources included in the ADN are immensely helpful.

As an important aside, the archive does not have Wi-Fi. The only internet access allowed in the archive is through their computers on the second floor. Furthermore, these computers can only access the archive’s online database, so you will be without internet while there unless you have data on your phone.

Quality of Life

Unfortunately, there are not many cafes near the ADN- many of the nicer cafes and restaurants are on the north side of the city, near the train stations of Lille Europe and Lille Flandres. You can get a nice lunch and drink at one of the breweries outside of Lille Flandres, or walk about half a mile to the town square to enjoy some of the nicest views in Lille.

What I have found to be the most effective is to bring a lunch to the archive- they have a coffee machine and a vending machine, but nothing more. If you finish your work early for the day, I recommend going early to catch your train and grabbing a bite to eat around the stations.

Sean Sapp
University of Notre Dame

September 8, 2017October 13, 2017

The Role of Researchers in Public Protest

The fiscal year ends in a few weeks, and researchers of all stripes are worried about how Trump’s threats to cut funding will pan out. The presidential administration has proposed to slash support for a spectrum of federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institutes of Health. As the March for Science that took place in major cities around the world last April showed, there is a way for academics to work with the public to peacefully and effectively promote intellectual pursuits.

March for Science on April 22, 2017 in Washington, D.C.
“March for Science” by Molly Adams is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The violence that erupted last month outside the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, on the other hand, showed the new danger that humanities scholars face as their work and causes are coopted by white nationalists and white supremacists. From the defense of bigotry in terms of “respect for American history” to the misappropriation of medieval imagery to construct an imagined past of racial purity, false pretenses of scholarship pose a serious threat to contemporary arts and letters. As we seek out new ways to promote the humanities in an increasingly volatile public arena, we should consider what lessons can be learned from the gruesome history of town-gown clashes.

“Unite the Right” Rally on August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, VA
“Charlottesville_UniteTheRightRally-0293.jpg” by Rodney Dunning is licensed under CC BY-ND-ND 2.0.

In 1355, a bar brawl between two scholars and a wine merchant in an Oxford tavern led to a free-for-all between members of the university and citizens of the town that spanned several days. It began when the two beneficed clerks, Walter de Springheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, insulted the vintner John de Croydon’s wares and, apparently, launched the wine jug at his head. Townsmen rallied to Croydon’s defense, ringing the bell at the church of St. Martin and opening fire bows and arrows on the clerks. The chancellor attempted to intervene, at which point he was attacked and forced to retreat. He returned with an army of his own and ordered the bell at St. Mary’s to be rung.

The next day, forty townspeople invaded a convent of Austin friars and ambushed a group of clerks at Beaumont Fields. As the students attempted to close the town gates, 2,000 countrymen came to the aid of the townspeople waving a black flag. The slaughter that followed was grisly: halls were sacked and clerks were imprisoned and murdered, their tonsured heads scalped in disdain. One scholar was taken down at the feet of a band of friars who were processing in protest. Severely outnumbered, the clerks were forced to flee and the university shut down.

These days of conflict, known as the St. Scholastica Day Riots, were the culmination of a century of angst between town and gown. Throughout the thirteenth century and well into the fourteenth, as Gordon Leff explains, “royal favor had given the university authorities a stranglehold on the life of the city, juridically, economically, and psychologically.” Oxford was neither the first nor the last place to see this kind of dispute. The struggle between town and gown had generated the “Great Dispersion” of 1229 in Paris, for instance, which had displaced many great minds from France to Oxford and Cambridge in the first place. During the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, a less bloody but similarly angst-charged riot broke out at Cambridge, where the mayor, bailiffs and burgesses attacked the scholars, pillaged the halls, and confiscated the university’s and colleges’ charters of privileges and other documents, to which they then set fire in the marketplace.

Until recently, what is often called the “crisis in the humanities” felt, to me, like a hyperbole when considered alongside the all-out bloodshed of the St. Scholastica Day Riots, and the deep-seated tensions between scholars and the public that they laid bare. In light of recent events, however, it is becoming ever clearer that researchers are entering the public arena whether we choose to or not, and the stakes of that discourse are escalating.

Erica Machulak, PhD
University of Notre Dame

Arabic’s Gutenberg: Defining an Era Through the Lens of Print

As thousands of scholars make our pilgrimage to the 52nd annual meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (known to many affectionately as “the ‘Zoo”) we look forward to the largest gathering of medievalists in North America. Over the course of yesterday (Thursday) through this Sunday, many scholars have and will make contributions to the field that amplify our knowledge and transform our critical understanding of our craft. Since I am privileged with the mic during this auspicious time, I will take this opportunity to address a fundamental question that was raised at one of yesterday’s roundtables: where and when do we locate the “Middle Ages” in a global context? In other words, how can we reevaluate our Eurocentric biases and take into account cultures around the world that don’t fit traditional definitions of medievalism?

The organizers of the Kalamazoo roundtable, the University of Virginia’s DeVan Ard and Justin Greenlee, created a forum to discuss the fraught term “medieval” from various perspectives, including Buddhist art in China (Dorothy Wong), the pre-Islamic Jahiliyyah period (Aman Nadhiri) and the challenges of accurately representing the Middle Ages in the classroom (Christina Normore). The speakers and moderator Zach Stone strove to challenge the artificial boundaries that are often used to constrict the idea of the medieval and to consider, in the words of Nadhiri, “the Middle Ages as a period without the parameters of time.” I offer here an adapted version of my own presentation, which considers the limits of the term “medieval” through the history of the printing press in the Muslim world.

Of all the metrics that various disciplines use to demarcate the end of the Middle Ages—shifts in military tactics, game-changing historical figures, scientific discoveries, etc.—the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in Germany is often seen as the critical moment when Western culture was ‘reborn’ into a new era. Medievalists know well that the effects of this new technology were not as immediate or as clear cut as many outside the field sometimes think, but the ability to disseminate materials more efficiently and more widely led to changes in the economy, literacy, and writing practices rivaled only by the recent progress of the digital age.

The first printed edition of the Qur’an, printed in Venice by Paganino & Alessandro Paganini between 1537-38.

The history of movable type in Arabic provides a point of departure for wider discussions of how to bookend a historical era in the Middle East and North Africa as well as other predominantly Muslim populations. Although the printing press made its way to the Ottoman Empire not long after its introduction in Europe, it was almost immediately forbidden to print in Arabic. Among the various political, social, and theological reasons for this legislation, I argue that the sanctity of the Arabic language itself created resistance to movable type. According to Islam, Arabic is the direct language of God communicated through the angel Gabriel. Many believe that translations of the Qur’an are no longer the holy book, and throughout the early centuries of Islam there were meticulously-enforced rules for the style of writing that could be used for certain texts.

The clumsy attempts of early printers to negotiate the connectors, diacritics, and shape-changing letters of Arabic writing could not hope to represent the word with the accuracy and beauty that it required. Continuing attempts to this day to create functional Arabic fonts and Turkey’s twentieth-century switch from Arabic to Roman script demonstrate that these challenges are still being negotiated. This narrative of technical and literary development, so vastly different from that of Western Europe, offers a lens through which we can consider other intellectual and cultural differences that complicate comparisons between Western Europe and the Arab world.

Erica Machulak
PhD in English
University of Notre Dame
Founder of Hikma Strategies