Medieval Scripts and Scraps

  • Body Count

    While it’s sometimes chancy to cast back to medieval literature to draw connections between the past and the present, I do wonder how significant works on virginity affected modern discourses on gender.

    Lindsay Gill

  • Entering Rome: Vatican Archives Post, Part I

    Last year, I had the opportunity to visit the Vatican Archives in Rome, Italy, through the Sangalli Institute.  I attended the “The Archives of the Holy See and the Roman Catholicism: instructions for use and new research perspectives” winter seminar for a week in January 2024. I had intended to post a blog post about…

    Lindsay Gill

  • Women Know How to Write About Themselves––Finding a Canon of Women’s Literature

    On some level, Margery quite literally tosses out the idea of virginity, which the Church had used by that time to control the bodies of women and their activities for more than a millennia.

    Lindsay Gill

  • Undead Manuscripts

    Spooky season is upon us, and it is time to break out the scary skeletons! Never to disappoint, medieval manuscripts certainly bring their A-game for the creepy and crawlies. If you, dear reader, want a scare, look no further than a medieval tome! Medieval manuscripts were composed of once-living materials, such as animals and plants.…

    Lindsay Gill

  • A Medieval Book of Hours: A Tale in Calendar and Painted Miniatures

    A large, deliberate scratch has been dug into the vellum on the first page of the calendar….

    Lindsay Gill

  • St Wilfrid and How Rome Came to Britain: Structure, Contention, and Conflict

    However, Catholicism, as a system of belief, was not always universally Roman. The system of faith slowly became institutionalized from early antiquity into the medieval period until it took the form that we recognize as “Roman Catholicism” today.

    Lindsay Gill

  • On the Synod on Synodality: Part I

    Though I am not a Catholic, I am a scholar of Catholicism by way of medieval literature, liturgy, and hagiography. I have haunted a fair number of cathedrals in my day and generally like to keep up with the modern dance of vestments. Thus, I have been watching the coverage surrounding Germany’s Synodal Way (2019-2022)…

    Lindsay Gill

  • The Doom (or Fear?): The Difficulties of Translation

    The benefits of reading a translated text with the original language beside it is hard to explain, but I suppose it can best be summed up here. The Blickling Homilies, “Dominica Pasca (Easter Day),” includes the line: “Ond seo openung ∂aes dæges is swi∂e egesfull eallum gesceaftum.” The translators, who always have a hard job…

    Lindsay Gill

  • Revising the “Doctrine of Discovery”

    I saw this news article on the Pope’s recent visit to Canada while reading through the news and thought that it was too important to be understated. In brief, Pope Francis is on tour through Canada to apologize for the residential schools, which forced assimilation upon Indigenous Peoples. As you may see in the article,…

    Lindsay Gill