Medieval manuscript access gives students illuminating experience

Students in an art history elective offered this past spring at Rochester Institute of Technology had the unique opportunity to take part in a nationwide program sponsored by antique bookseller Les Enluminures. 

The Illuminated Manuscripts course allowed students from various disciplines to use RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection – one of the country’s premier libraries in graphic communication history and practices – as their classroom. 

For their primary projects, students chose a medieval manuscript from Les Enluminures’ Manuscripts in the Curriculum collection to feature in an online exhibition of their own creation using a program known as Omeka.

“They did some really lovely work and they explored themes like the history of heraldry,” said the course’s instructor, Sarah Thompson, associate professor in RIT’s School of Art. “They talked about marginal decoration and marginal scribbling in the manuscripts, and whether you can associate botanical illustrations in manuscripts with specific regions.”

Les Enluminures started the Manuscripts in Curriculum program that made the RIT class possible in an effort to provide students around the country a hands-on learning experience with some of the medieval manuscripts from their extensive collection.

Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection, applied for RIT to take a turn with Les Enluminures’ artifacts. He said he thought they would serve as powerful teaching tools for Thompson’s course. 

With Galbraith hosting the class right in the Cary Collection for the second half of the spring, some of the space’s own manuscript leaves were also available to students. 

“To have a class in here for half a semester and making primary resources a centerpiece of the class is really perfect,” said Galbraith. “It was amazing to see the students engaging in deep study with real historical objects.”

According to Adrian Veenje, a rising sophomore in the School of Film and Animation, the course was like no other he’s taken. 

“This class is about the motivations behind production – why someone would want a manuscript and why an artist would approach his or her work a certain way,” said Veenje. “The manuscripts provided by Les Enluminures were a spectacular enhancement to the standard curriculum, and I’m grateful to have experienced them in person.”

Veenje's project can be found here.

Having an on-campus resource like the Cary Collection enabled the students to have this rare chance, according to Thompson. 

“Without that space, we would not have been able to have this opportunity,” she said. 

“All of the staff in the Cary Collection were extremely helpful,” Thompson added. “They provided all of the guidance for us so that we would make sure that we were, in fact, handling things appropriately. The students actually learned about how you hold a manuscript, how to transport it from one place to another, how to turn the pages so that you wouldn’t risk damaging the book.”

Thompson said Illuminated Manuscripts will be offered again and the Cary Collection will continue to play a role in future iterations of the course. Students in the course this past spring were from a range of areas of study in the College of Art and Design, including 3D digital design, film and animation, glass, graphic design, industrial design, metals and jewelry design, new media design and photography. There was also a student from the computer science program in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Systems. 

Other student projects from the class:

Stefan Aleksic

Ian Buchanan

Alyssa Minko

Katherine Smith