In the thick of the semester, it’s easy to get blinders on. Assignments to write, assignments to grade, deadlines to meet. It’s easy to loose sight of the privilege of our semester’s work: studying unique, beautiful, handmade books that are hundreds of years old. This has been a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that most university students don’t get, so I’ve treasured this semester’s partnership with Young Harris College and the chance to let students beyond UGA experience these books.
On Fall Break weekend, I had the joy of showing the MITC manuscripts to the community at Young Harris College. Daniel Helbert — who brought some of his students to UGA to see them a few weeks earlier — invited me, Jason Hasty as the manuscript’s escort, and five of the MITC manuscripts to the top floor of the lovely Zell and Shirley Miller Library in YHC’s Rollins Campus Center. We spent a delightful afternoon showing students, faculty, and library staff these books, thinking about the way that each was carefully designed for its particular form of worship or study.
The students were energetic and engaged throughout. The Office of the Dead, with its blinged-out cover and heavily worn pages, was an immediate hit.
Some students had studied medieval illumination recently in an art history class, so we had a grand time decoding the saints and their attributes in the Book of Hours and the Psalter.
They had such smart questions about the books’ materiality as well as their contents and the lives they’d lived after their original construction.
It was a beautiful weekend to visit North Georgia, and the Young Harris campus was gorgeous. Many thanks to Daniel Helbert and the librarians and archivists who welcomed us so warmly to their campus, to the YHC Arts and Assemblies fund for supporting the visit, and to Kat Stein for approving the road trip. Let’s do it again soon!
photographs courtesy of Jason Hasty and Nathan Camp