CARMEN is a worldwide network of medievalists, its name being an acronym for the “Co-operative for the Advancement of Research through a Medieval European Network”. It links a number of research institutions, universities, interest groups and individuals with common scholarly interest in the study of the Middle Ages. While based in Europe, it reaches out to all continents to create an open and truly international platform of co-operation in the field of medieval research and teaching. We bring together scholars from universities and academic organisations who are actively involved in research on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 AD/CE). We access half of the global body of about 20,000 researchers, with important contributions from Europe, North America, East Asia, Australasia and Latin America. CARMEN successfully promotes the construction of major scholarly collaborative projects. Its Executive Group directs strategies, disseminates information, reports to national associations and major conferences, and organises an annual meeting. It assists nascent projects to reach critical mass and tries to pro-actively shape research agendas.

Between 11 and 14 September 2014 CARMEN is holding its Annual General Meeting in Scotland, the first time it has visited this country. The meeting is being hosted by Dr Alasdair Ross (University of Stirling) and CARMEN is grateful to acknowledge financial support from the School of Arts and Humanities and the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies (both University of Stirling). A dedicated CARMEN 2014 web page has been provided by the host where practical information about the meeting is currently available and where information about the programme will be posted in the coming weeks:

CARMEN 2014 practical information

To find out more information about the Annual Meeting or to register your attendance please contact Claire McIlroy (CARMEN Congress Manager). Registration closes on 31 July 2014.

And please also click on the link for more information about CARMEN.

“With its religious iconography and ornate throne, the 15th century painting Madonna della Vittoria seems a typical Italian Renaissance work – apart, that is, from the appearance of an Australasian cockatoo in the background.

The discovery of an animal more closely associated with suburban Sydney than Venice is leading historians into a rethink of early trading networks into Europe.

The painting, completed by Andrea Mantegna in 1496 and now hanging in the Louvre, clearly shows what appears to be a sulphur-crested cockatoo perched above Mary, mother of Jesus.”

Read more here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/cockatoo-perched-in-renaissance-painting-forces-rethink-of-history

On March 4, 1714, Bernard Lintot published Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock in five cantos. Associate Professor Allison Muri (Department of English, University of Saskatchewan) is the editor of this new online edition in honour of this anniversary: http://grubstreetproject.net/works/T5728.

Dr. Muri will be adding notes over the next few months, and hopes her online edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock may be of use to some in teaching the poem and studying its plates in the near future. The images (provided by McMaster’s William Ready Division of Archives & Research Collections) are slow to load because they’re very high resolution.

Facsimile Finder is a free database of illuminated manuscript facsimiles. Search, compare and find the best facsimiles. Purchase them at the best price. The database contains Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, rare books, fine art facsimiles.

For more visit the Facsimile Finder website: http://www.facsimilefinder.com

Dear members, Dr Helen Young (DECRA Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English University of Sydney), is conducting a survey about teaching and researching in medievalism, and is in search of volunteers. Please see the details below.

I write to ask for your participation in a short survey exploring medievalism in Australian and New Zealand universities. If you currently either teach or research medievalism, have done in the past, or plan to do so in the future, I would be very grateful for 10-15 minutes of your time to answer some questions online.

For the purposes of the survey I have defined medievalism as any research or teaching which examines a post-medieval work – literature, artwork, film, tv, architecture etc – which engages with the Middle Ages as long as the research and/or teaching is focused in some way on that engagement. For example, The Lord of the Rings – novels or films – could be considered a medievalist work, and is relevant to this survey if that medievalism is a topic for discussion in the course, but not if the focus is on, say, the films as adaptations of the novels.

I aim to gain some insights into how, where and why medievalism is researched and taught: in which disciplines, what kinds of courses, at what levels? My hope is to form a broad overview of the field as it exists at present, with an eye to where it may head in future. I will be talking about the results in a roundtable – ‘Medievalism and the Academy Today’ – sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Medievalism at the Kalamazoo ICMS in 2014, and also hope to write an article exploring current and possible future trends.

You can find the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TeachingMedievalism If the link doesn’t work, please copy and paste into the address bar on your browser window. You can give as much or as little information as you choose. If you don’t have time to complete the survey but would like to contribute to the research, you could email me any relevant course outlines on Helen.young@sydney.edu.au. If you do so, please let me know if you are happy to be identified by name, institution, or both, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous when the results of the study are made public.

Many thanks,
Helen

The new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, has been launched.

Produced by a team of 30 scholars and available partly on an open-access basis, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online presents the texts of all his plays, masques, poems, letters and criticism in an interactive digital format, along with hundreds of supporting documents and musical scores and a bibliography.

There is also a database of some 1,300 stage and screen productions, from the 1598 staging of Jonson’s play “Every Man in His Humor” at the Curtain Theater in London to the 2012 (currently in-production) film version of “The Devil is an Ass”.

The Wellcome Library in London has recently announced that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images: http://wellcomeimages.org
 

“Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.”

For more on this announcement, please visit: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-culture-made-free-through-wellcome-images

“A tiny drawing of a kangaroo curled in the letters of a 16th-century Portuguese manuscript could rewrite Australian history.

The document, acquired by Les Enluminures Gallery in New York, shows a sketch of an apparent kangaroo (”canguru” in Portuguese) nestled in its text and is dated between 1580 and 1620. It has led researchers to believe images of the marsupial were already being circulated by the time the Dutch ship Duyfken – long thought to have been the first European vessel to visit Australia – landed in 1606.”

To read more about this discovery, click here

A new website Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps (DMMmaps), a “roadmap” to thousands of digitized medieval books, has been launched:

From the creators:

“There is something genuinely thrilling in browsing the maps, clicking on a semi-unknown digitized library, looking at a random manuscript, and suddenly discovering a miniature, a detail, and illumination that no one has looked at for years and sharing it with your followers. We want to make to make as many people as possible experience this thrill; and that’s why we created the DMMmaps.

These maps were designed to help scholars and enthusiasts explore and discover digitized medieval manuscripts made available all over the world.”

For more information, please visit DMMmaps website: http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org

The British Library is following Getty Museum’s lead in releasing images into the public domain.

The British Library has released 1 million images onto Flickr Commons (view the album here) for “anyone to use, remix, and repurpose,” while the Getty Museum released 4,600 images back in August.

The images shared by the British Library come from 17th, 18th and 19th century books.