“Scattered Leaves: Digitally Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal” by Lisa Fagin Davis

When:
Thursday, Nov 17, 2016 5:00p -
6:30p

Where:
McMullen Museum of Art
2101 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02135

EventScheduled OfflineEventAttendanceMode

Admission:
FREE

Categories:
Art, Lectures & Conferences, University

Event website:
http://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/about/events.html

The beautifully illuminated Beauvais Missal—created in the thirteenth century and dismembered in the twentieth—is one of the best-known victims of mid-twentieth-century American “biblioclasm,” serving as a perfect example of just how great a loss is incurred when a codex is dismembered and its leaves scattered. It also serves as a hopeful case study of the possibilities offered by recent developments in imaging and metadata standards, platforms, and interoperability. The manuscript was written and illuminated in or near Beauvais, France, in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and was used early on at the cathedral there, as evidenced by an inscription on a lost leaf, transcribed in a 1926 Sotheby’s auction catalogue. The manuscript was purchased from Sotheby’s by American industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who owned it until 1942 when he sold it through Gimbel Brothers to New York dealer Philip Duschnes, who cut it up and began selling leaves less than one month later. He passed the remnants on to his friend and associate Otto Ege, who scattered it through his usual means, by gift or sale. This lecture will introduce the incipient digital reconstruction of the one hundred known leaves of the Beauvais Missal—spread across 27 states and five countries—and present initial findings based on an analysis of the extant portion of the manuscript.


For those who cannot make it to Lisa Fagin Davis’s lecture in person, the McMullen Museum invites you to view this event live online at 5:00 p.m. at http://bit.ly/2aZaXkw. Virtual attendees may ask questions during the Q&A segment via Twitter at #McMullenLive.


Lisa Fagin Davis, who is one of the curators for "Beyond Words," has catalogued medieval manuscript collections at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Walters Art Museum, Wellesley College, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Boston Public Library. Recent publications include "La Chronique Anonyme Universelle: Reading and Writing History in Fifteenth-Century France" (2014), the Directory of Collections in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings (2015, with Melissa Conway), and the ongoing digital reconstruction of the Beauvais Missal (brokenbooks2.omeka.net). She has served as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America since 2013 and regularly teaches an introduction to manuscript studies at the Simmons School of Library and Information Science.

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11/17/2016 17:00:00 11/17/2016 18:30:00 America/New_York “Scattered Leaves: Digitally Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal” by Lisa Fagin Davis The beautifully illuminated Beauvais Missal—created in the thirteenth century and dismembered in the twentieth—is one of the best-known victims of mid-twentieth-century American “biblioclasm,” serv...

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