Talking about the Middle Ages - some thoughts on The Day of Research In Odense

This Saturday I attended a public outreach event at the University of Southern Denmark, called "Forskningens døgn", the day of research. This is an annual festival overseen by the ministry of education and research, and carried out at various institutions across Denmark in the course of seven days, each institution participating on one day only. The festival consists of various talks, lectures, demonstrations and stations where the general public can try their hands at various activities and talk with various researchers. Several of these activities are aimed at kids, and there were a lot of families exploring the various venues.

This year, I was invited by a senior colleague at the Centre for Medieval Literature at University of Southern Denmark where I earned my PhD, and we put together a station whose theme was medieval literature. We had three focal points: 1) how texts travelled in the Middle Ages; 2) multilingualism in the Middle Ages; and medieval writing. For the first point we had a poster showing how the story of Barlaam and Iosaphat travelled to the west and how the content of the Danish medieval chronicle Annales Colbazenses can be traced from the Cistercian monastery of Colbaz and back to the writings of Isidore and Bede. The second point was illustrated by the example of Sicily and the translations that were carried out there in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The third point was demonstrated through some images of text and book production from medieval manuscripts, and a writing desk where people could try their hands at transcribing a text from a medieval liturgical fragment. This fragment comes from the university library's special collection and I have myself researched it extensively since 2017.

I selected this particular fragment, Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4, because I knew it well and because I had used it before in teaching palaeography to students. The fragment in question contains, among other texts, the first lesson from the feast of Saint Matthew the Evangelist (September 21) and recounts the apocryphal legend of how he travelled to Ethiopia and spread Christianity. I thought this story might appeal to a wider audience, both because of the familiarity of the figure of Saint Matthew, but also because of his two main antagonists, the magicians Zaroes and Arfaxat.  

Our station at Forskningens døgn

My colleague and I stood at the station for six hours, and in that time we met a wide variety of people, all of whom were interested in different things, or were interested in the same things but for different reasons, and together these people demonstrated as clearly as could be that there is a deep and wide-reaching interest in the Middle Ages, something that was not at all surprising but immensely gratifying to witness.

I am always happy to talk about the Middle Ages to a general public, and I am particularly interested in seeing what details the different individuals latch on to and what details make them light up, either in surprise or in some kind of recognition. In many cases, my encounter with a particular family would begin with asking the children whether they wanted to learn how to transcribe, and while they were trying to identify the various letters I would talk about the text and the fragment, which often caught the attention of the parents and moved the conversation to topics such as the evolution of letters, the technical aspect of writing, the handling of manuscripts, and so on. I always told them where the fragment came from and that it was kept in the library. This latter detail sometimes sparked what seemed like a feeling of ownership, or at least closeness, and for some there was something pleasing about having a vestige of the Middle Ages of this kind in close proximity. I also made sure to emphasise that in the handling of this fragment we did not use gloves, and this detail never failed to surprise them, but when they were told the reason it all made sense to them.  

Another detail that caught people's attention was the fact that the story of the text was set in Ethiopia, as they had not expected Ethiopia to be part of the geographical knowledge of medieval Europe. One mother in particular, while her son was writing his name in letters from the script of the fragment, positively beamed with fascination as I told about the apocryphal legend and the knowledge - or perhaps rather ideas - about Ethiopia, other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean that was available in medieval Western Europe. She was also fascinated to note how widespread this knowledge was, especially when I pointed out that this episode of Ethiopian history would be read aloud to monks and nuns and other latinate audiences every year on the feast of Saint Matthew, which demonstrated that a significant number of people would be able to pick up these details about Ethiopian geography and history, however apocryphal and legendary and inaccurate the story.

We had also provided a key with some of the abbreviations and contractions explained

I was also interested to note how various children approached the task of transcribing the text. Here, too, there was a significant variety in interest and focus. Some children wanted to write their names in the letters of the script, while others were eagerly trying to decipher the letters themselves. In some cases, the child began reading the letters right away, while in other cases the child had to be guided along in the beginning but then began to pick up the pace remarkably soon. One boy in particular was completely absorbed by the task, and I sat beside him while he was quickly working his way through the sentences, stopping only when the letters were written in an unfamiliar way, illegible or contracted and abbreviated, and also sometimes to let me recap the story so he wouldn't lose this thread. His eyes were beaming as he solved letter after letter and advanced remarkably quickly through the text, and I noted with great happiness the pride in his father's face as he noted his son's fascination. The gratitude of the various children was one of the most beautiful aspects of the entire exercise, with faces lighting up in happiness and anticipation as they were told that they were allowed to bring the text and the answer key with them home to practice further. One kid even high-fived me as he had finished writing his name in the script of the fragment, and the sheer sense of achievement was a wonder to behold.

First lesson for the feast of Saint Matthew (September 21)

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4

If proof were needed that we medievalists should not underestimate the interest and capability of the general audience, this was it. People of all ages, from children who had barely learned to write their own names to retirees, they all found something in our display that provoked their interest and that served as gateways to quite extensive conversations about sundry aspects of medieval life. It was clear that these conversations served to demystify the Middle Ages to a lot of people and through the various details - for instance the abbreviation of texts, the practice of writing, the similarity between their script and ours - the Middle Ages became a little less strange and a little more familiar, the medieval world becoming both larger and at the same time less alien as more details were filled in.