Research Seminar: Medieval Midwest: Discovery and Accessibility of Small Manuscript Collections through the Peripheral Manuscripts Project

The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is an ongoing initiative with the goals of identifying Midwestern United States medieval manuscript holdings and making them discoverable. The project focuses predominantly on small collections at institutions of higher learning, but also on other kinds of collections with manuscript holdings (museums, monastic institutions, public libraries, and more). Originally a four-year grant (2020–2024) funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources with twenty-two partner collections, the project is now entering a second phase (2025–2028) with twenty-three more collections and over a thousand new items. By digitizing and cataloguing medieval manuscript collections across the Midwest, this project aims to bring attention to, and to celebrate, the medieval manuscripts in the region, as well as the communities that study and care for them. This talk will explore the project’s regional focus and consortial digital collection model, the work of building regional community and knowledge around Midwestern manuscript collections of all kinds—a very local sort of Medieval Studies, and some of the modern histories of manuscript circulation in North America that partner collections highlight.

Dr Liz Hebbard is Assistant Professor of French/Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University, and founding co-director of the Indiana University Book Lab. She is a specialist of the music and literatures of medieval France, particularly Occitan song, and a palaeographer and codicologist specializing in pre-modern book production, material culture, and the reuse of parchment manuscripts as binding material. She has published on troubadour and trouvère song and its reception, medieval manuscripts in Midwestern US collections, manuscripts as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars, and on the early 20th century American biblioclast Otto Ege. She has just finished her first book, Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadours. Dr Hebbard is the Primary Principal Investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, which will be the focus of her talk.