52,000.

The number of Roman coins found by Dave Crisp near Frome, in Somerset. The cache represents one of the largest finds of Roman money in Britain, and the discovery follows recent others such as the Staffordshire Hoard.

New research on the 13th century saint Rose of Viterbo may have pinpointed the cause of her death. Until now, her death in 1252 just shy of her twentieth year has remained a mystery. Known her her abilities to foretell the future, rise from the dead, and withstand fire, Rose’s mummified body and heart (which had been removed in 1921 to create a new relic) were scanned and studied by a team of Italian scientists who identified a mass in her heart, likely an embolism. Such research was only possible because of the special way Rose’s body was preserved in a sealed glass casket by medieval monks, who likely understood her saintly importance. Such a casket kept water and moisture from her body, mummifying it and preserving it.

Read this fascinating and rather tongue-in-cheek article from the New York Times on the discovery and other similar cases.

In what is likely one of the more bizarre attractions of Florence, the fingers of Galileo Galilei, the renowned scientist and mathematician, have gone on display in the renovated museum named for him.

In 1737, while transferring Galileo’s body from storage to a tomb opposite Michelangelo’s in Santa Croce Basilica, “admirers”of the scientist took three fingers, a tooth, and a vertebrae from the remains. 95 years after his death, the Catholic Church had finally relented and allowed Galileo to be buried in consecrated ground. The two withered digits appeared at auction last year, after being handed down within the same family for generations. The museum retained the third finger, and the vertebrae is displayed at the University of Padua, where Galileo was a teacher.

Besides physical remains, visitors can also view the only remaining instruments designed by Galileo, including a compass, telescopes and lenses which he used to view Jupiter. The exhibition coincides with the 400th anniversary of the publication of Sidereus Nuncius, the Starry Messenger.

After being questioned by the Catholic Church for heresy in 1616, in believing that the Sun rather than the Earth centered the universe, Galileo was only rehabilitated by Pope John Paul in 1992.  ”My wish is that at some stage those fingers and tooth will be placed with him in his grave,” said Alberto Bruschi, the collector who unknowingly bought the remains at auction last year. “That way, if one day he rises from his tomb, he’ll be in one piece.”

About 80 skeletons have been found in what appears to be the only Roman gladiator cemetery in Britain. Centered around Driffield Street near the city center of York, or Eboracum as it was named then, the rare and extraordinary find promises to shed light on Britain’s ancient and violent past.

The skeletons date from the late first to fourth centuries AD, when York was a thriving city in Roman Britain. Most of the skeletons show “substantial arm asymmetry” – likely from abnormal muscle development on their sword arms rather than shield arms from fighting and training. The skeletons are likely to have belonged to Roman slaves, who were imported to fight for entertainment, as they are markedly bigger and taller than average men from the time. Dental tests of tooth enamel link the men to several Roman provinces, as well as North Africa, which was a prime recruiting ground for gladiatorial combatants. Many of the skeletons also show other telling clues about the past – some are maimed by large carnivore bite marks (tigers, bears, or lions), other have been decapitated – signs of their violent, dangerous, and precarious lives.

York was one of the most prominent cities in Roman Britain, established in 71AD as the capital. It welcomed Roman emperors Hadrian, Septimius Severus and Constantius I, who died in York in 306AD. After 410AD, the Romans fled Britain for Italy, and the empire – as well as its colossal history – sank into the ground like a gladiator’s final cry, “‘Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutamus” – we who are about to die, salute you.

New Worlds, New Visions: Mapping the Early Atlantic World

http://munkwitzhouse.com/newworlds

Too often we, as teachers of history, complain about students’ inability to “read” primary sources or their incapacity to understand historical context. For many students, a course in early modern European history is simply a connect-the-dots from “the dark ages” to “modernity,” of tracing an unquestionable linear line from the Renaissance through the Reformation to the Revolution. But we know there is so much more than Michaelangelo, Martin Luther, and Marie-Antoinette, more wonders than Brunescheli’s dome, William Tyndale’s English bible, and David’s painting of Marat – if only we had the time to interest students in knowing more. My digital resource, designed to supplement a syllabus I hope to teach some day, explores the transition from medieval times to the era of European exploration through the study of maps and mapmaking, the shift from thinking about place to visualizing space. The course and website are meant to explore the often taken-for-granted shift in mentalités, about people’s understanding of their surroundings, no less than of themselves and others, through the ways in which they saw and understood the earth, its representations, and its history.

But such a class is by nature extremely dependent on visualization – without seeing the maps themselves, students cannot properly “see” the past. This is the reason I decided to create a supplemental website that compiles the course information (schedule and assignments) alongside images of the maps, divided by week/topic. Based on a WordPress platform, the site I designed is of course an open-source project, and interested individuals other than the students in my hypothetical course could naturally view these digital representations as well. The website was designed to be as simple and user-friendly as possible, and thus navigation is limited to the tabs at the top of the page, with each week’s readings/discussion questions as well as the relevant maps, broken down into individual weeks. Thumbnails of maps in each week show the varied and shifting nature of maps, while clicking on each map brings up a super-sized image. This enlargement is important because many of the maps discussed are quite large, and too many important details are lost in smaller images. By compiling all this information onto one site, I hope to further encourage students to engage with the materials on their own terms and time, beyond the standard Powerpoint presentations in class.

The mentalité and cultural understanding of space and spatial representation throughout the early modern era is so foreign to our current understanding that it is nearly impossible to recover. It was my thought, in creating a syllabus and digital resource for this class, to rectify this present misunderstanding of time and space. We live in a globalized world, but we tend to forget that before 1968, no one knew outside of their own imaginings what the world really looked like. By examining how conceptions of the world changed, and how space and power intersect through the early modern era and in the Atlantic World, I believe students can gain a precious understanding of social, cultural, and cartographical histories and their context.

“The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry”

Website for Exhibition on view in the Robert Lehman Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 2–June 13, 2010

The Duc du Berry’s sumptuous Belles Heures (Book of Hours) is one of the most prized items in the Metropolitan Museum’s vast collections. Belles Heures were private devotional books produced during the Middle Ages for wealthy families, and they exist in surprisingly high numbers, though few are such as ornate and lavish as the Duc du Berry’s. Each book of hours contained standard religious content, but its visual images were dictated by its patron, thus many of these surviving texts illustrate personal desires and artistic preferences, becoming customized windows into the past. Books of hours are difficult to display in museums because as bound volumes, they can only be opened to one page/two folios. Because the Duc du Berry’s Belles Heures is currently unbound for conservation, the Met offers visitors a rare opportunity to view all the pages and illustrations from this seminal work. Rather than only offering the images to a physical exhibition, the Met has also created a separate website to accompany and supplement the display.

By clicking through from the Met’s main webpage, one can easily access the exhibition’s online site. This is a well-designed and functional site for both visitors and scholars. The site is divided into four main sections: “Table of Contents,” “Manuscript Sections,” “Related Events,” and “Additional Resources.” Helpful information is included for visitors on special exhibition events (lectures, tours, etc) and historical background. Scholars will find the manuscript gallery and links to former related exhibitions more relevant, but the site deftly caters to both groups without being overly simplistic or academic.

The most important part of the exhibition site is undoubtedly the manuscript gallery, which links to a wonderful gallery of images from the unbound volume – images that could not be seen properly unless the volume was unbound. When the volume is eventually reconstructed, these digital images will still allow us to research and examine these valuable but brittle pages. Some images are even accompanied by abridged commentary from the Audio Tour, while there are several video clips to enhance the experience (via the YouTube Channel for the Met). The site is also equipped with a handy calendar to track related events at the Met.

The quality of materials presented is superb. The manuscript images are lovingly presented in beautiful quality and in straightforward layout. The pages are distinguished by sub-headings (Calendar Pages, St. Catherine Cycle, Great Litany, etc) and marked by a thumbnail of the most impressive or important section of the visual.  Each page is also numbered by the place it occupies in the volume (Folio 6r, Folio 223v, etc). When you click on a thumbnail, the full image appears with its title and brief summary, although another click on the image will take you to the image alone. The image gallery speaks to the care and detail from which such a digital resource has been created, not only in scanning and reproducing quality images, but also in presenting the images in contextual and accessible (both digitally and historical) ways. The online gallery includes all images from the Belles Heures, including the Ex Libris page, but it does not include the blank pages or any of the close-ups of the creation process (lined and numbered pages in the artists’ hands, the quality of the vellum, extreme magnification of image details) – these fascinating images, which provide important historical context for the production of the volume, are only available in the hardcover exhibition book.

The site does not present an overt interpretation of the Belles Heures, but rather subtly introduces it as part of a larger process of manuscript creation during the medieval era. The curators and historians present the unbound pages in tandem with the concurrent display at the Met, “The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy,” which also highlights the Duc du Berry, his family, and other contemporary French nobles. Duc du Berry is presented as one of the greatest patrons of his age, but the site does not delve into intricate historiography on French politics, art, or socio-cultural patterns – as is fitting with the purpose of the exhibition site.

The site is also easily navigable, although it contains and directs a great deal of information. Additional pages are clearly marked and the design is sleek and uncluttered, so that both computer amateurs and veterans alike can surf its layout. Confusingly, the link from the main Met page directs to the “blog” address for the exhibition site, which is where they can add or delete new posts. While all the relevant links/info is presented on the right side (as on all pages), it would be more helpful if the direct link from the main site connected to the exhibition’s introduction, in my opinion.

If the goal of historical websites is to raise level of web-based historical work and people’s general knowledge, the Met’s exhibition site on the Duc du Berry’s Belles Heures does an admirable job. While the immediate purpose of site is to accompany and supplement the current exhibition at the Met, this online resource is – and will continue to be – useful to many people, including students, professors, and ordinary visitors, long after the physical exhibition closes and the volume is rebound.

Want to own the sumptuous Book of Hours owned by Francois I of France, patron of Leonardo da Vinci? How about the Psalter of Elizabeth de Bohun, great-grandmother of Henry V?

If you have a cool few million handy, they – and others like them from the renowned Arcana Collection – could be yours, as Christie’s will be auctioning the collection on July 7 in London. The auction will feature 48 separate lots of treasured medieval books, with an estimated value of 11 to 16 million GBP. If you’re in London between July 3-7, you can view these beautiful items at Christie’s.

The Arcana collection was compiled by an anonymous American businessman over the course of three decades, and it seems such a shame to separate it now – similar to the urge and passion to keep together the Staffordshire Hoard. These books are exquisite as individuals, but together they are a precious slice of the past, an illuminated representation of the early modern world. Their craftsmanship and detail is simply breathtaking – as this close-up shows.

 See more illustrations in this great article in the Daily Mail.

The July 7 sale is just the first of a series of auctions that will disperse the Arcana collection to bidders. While it would be great if a single museum could purchase the entire lot, the limited operating budget of most institutions makes that highly unlikely. In my opinion, a leading candidate would be the Met in New York, which is currently displaying one of the finest examples of medieval literature, the lavishly illustrated Belles Heures of Duc du Berry. The Art of Illumination examines this beautiful devotional work in a new way – because the book is currently unbound, each detailed page is on display. In my favorite example of digital history, each page can also be viewed online in the well-designed and easily accessible manuscript gallery, where you can see examples like the Office of the Dead (left) and St. George and the Dragon (right).

Thanks to a 1.285 million GBP grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Staffordshire Hoard will be able to stay in the Midlands where it was found. Together with all other grants and donations raised for the project (including 900,000 GBP from the general public), the 3.3 million GBP threshold has been met. This is a remarkable victory for the most important collection of Anglo-Saxon artifacts ever found, as the collection will now be able to share homes between the Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums, in the heart of the landscape from which they were unearthed and which was their dirt-bound home for 1300 years.

Check out this great BBC slideshow on the collection.

For my digital history resource, I will be creating a website for a course I designed, entitled “New Worlds, New Visions: Mapping Space and Power in the Early Atlantic World.” This course charts the development of mapping and cartography from the 1100s through the 1600s by focusing on European interaction with the budding Atlantic world. By examining how space, place, and power were viewed and drawn during this time, we can better understand how the Atlantic world developed and how exploration and expropriation unfolded in new lands.

As you can see, the Psalter Map of 1265 represents geography through Christian history, at a time when no one truly understood what the world looked like as whole. Whereas the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemueller represents a new secularized and scientific way of viewing the world, for very political, imperial, and diplomatic purposes. Understanding this transition in cartography is necessary to understand the early modern world itself, as well as its complicated transition into the modern world.

The website will be based on a WordPress platform and will include more than a simple syllabus and course description. As well as listing week-by-week assignments and readings, the website will also allow digital interaction with the stars of the show: the maps themselves. This will be the most important, but also most difficult, aspect of the project, since many of these maps are obscure and without digitalized copies/pictures. Scanning images does not easily solve the problem, since some maps – like the Hereford mappa mundi, for example - are large wall coverings. The scope of the project will, therefore, encompass the creation of a virtual online class reference site, where students and other interested scholars may converge to learn about mapping space and power in the early Atlantic world. While focused on and limited to supplementing the course as I designed it, the site will also be helpful to other professors, scholars, and students because the maps themselves can be studied and used in a myriad of fascinating ways. I plan to have the WordPress platform installed and the main/subsidiary pages created by late March, whereby I will begin adding map images during early April. The final project will be completed by April 28.

This year the most talked-about dog at Crufts won’t be the winner. Rather, the celebrity’s name is Hatch, she’s a mongrel (gasp!), and she’s nearly 500 years-old.

Meet Hatch. She was a ratter on board the famed Mary Rose (Henry VIII’s flagship), when the ship sank on July 19, 1545, taking all but 30 lucky survivors (of a crew of 500) to a watery grave. Hatch, so named because she was found near the sliding hatch door of the carpenter’s cabin, is one of 19000 objects recovered from the Tudor wreck. Because seamen were superstitious of cats on board ship, dogs like Hatch were important members of the crew (she was likely the only female member) as they lived on deck to help with rodent problems. Hatch seems to have been marvelously efficient at her job - of all the artifacts found on the ship, only a few partial rat skeletons have been found.

The wreck, along with Hatch and thousands of other objects, was located in 1967 and raised from the seabed in 1982. The discovery allowed researchers to pinpoint just what sunk the seemingly-invincible Mary Rose so precipitously in 1545, during the Battle of The Solent between English ships and a French invasion force. Unlike previous estimations that assumed the Mary Rose turned too sharply and took in water through her open gun points, examination of the ship and its artifacts shows that a French cannonball is actually to blame.

After years of reconstruction (and restoration, like the ship above), Hatch’s skeleton will be displayed during the dog show as a special guest of the Kennel Club, and then she will be returned to Portsmouth to the Mary Rose museum, where she will be displayed for the first time (read about the new museum here and how you can help make sure she has a home). As Rear Admiral John Lipiett stated, “Nowhere else in the world is a single moment in Tudor life captured as it is with the Mary Rose.”

After 500 years of loyal service to King and country, Hatch is not only the world’s oldest sea dog, but also a reminder of the important role of pets in everyday life and how very much they mean to us. She is the mascot of a past that seems so very close to us, as it is far away.