A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) is a treasure-trove of medieval materials – much of which is on microfilm, part of their long-term mission to preserve our written past. It is, for nerds like me, a fabulous place to do research. In a single day I can compare things from Italy, France, Germany, and Austria without getting on an airplane or having to worry about figuring out how to manage dinner after a full day’s work. I’m lucky to be here in Collegeville, Minnesota as a Carpenter Fellow, with housing, meals, and research support that let me concentrate on a project that draws on HMML’s collections.

HMML is not just European, of course – a couple of days ago I got a whiff of the “Smelly Book,” an Ethiopian Psalter from the 17th century which has had some haaaaard history, blackened as it is by fire– and HMML is consciously working in various places where the written record is under threat. Syriac, Armenian, Lao: there is an abundance – literally hundreds of thousands – of things in languages I don’t speak or read.

But, as I indicated, I’m here because HMML lets me put manuscripts from different places into conversation as I work on my book about Franciscan sisters. I’m currently looking at the rules that shaped their daily lives – and getting happily sidetracked by the words women spoke when they made their vows, their “profession formulae.” After all, these women were Franciscan Tertiaries, whose religious life could take several forms. There’s a tension between “we’re not nuns” reality of their Tertiary status and “we live in community following rules” that’s an interesting space for my book project to live.

For example, here’s one difference that caught my attention (and ate my mid-week): a profession formula from Solothurn, published by Brigitte Degler, explicitly makes room for a woman who might later feel called to a more rigorous monastic life. The Freiburg versions I’m working on instead have her promise “for all the days of my life.” That sounds like a minor difference, but it opens up a big question: how did these women understand the commitment they were making, and what possibilities did they imagine beyond it?

This is the kind of question that gets me to my (standing) desk in the morning. And HMML makes a Latin Editing Before Lunch kind of lifestyle possible, letting a scholar dive deep into a project while leaving the dishes and laundry back home.

So here’s a bit of what a day here at HMML looks like for a scholar in residence, the pictorial version:

walking with a book in the Emmaus residence basement, with coffee and tea, and more coffee

 

small but comfortable housing; 3 meals a day in the refectory

beautiful campus – with a glimpse of the lake on the way to work

The most visually arresting campus image: the abbey church

“My cell”: microfilm reader, computer, notebook, coffee -- all the fun stuff!

Working on bibliography in the Alcuin library

 

walking campus trails: lake-side, arboretum; last week’s step-count was 106,529 steps, or 50.4 miles!

(Okay, okay, regarding step-count: I did go backpacking over the weekend – here’s a couple of pictures of bears, all three, including mama bear playing peekaboo. Those were from off campus, though – up at the Paul Bunyan State Forest on the North Country trail...)

For the adventurous: Walking to St Joe’s via the Lake Wobegon trail. (One could bike, if one biked. It’s 6 miles, each way, so plan enough time. Weekends can be well-spent!) I recommend Flour & Flower for the baked goods.

Progress!

So, what does progress mean to me? Well, at this point, it's:

• 23 tabs open across three browsers. 
• 19 footnotes on a working edition that will be the basis for discussion of “lived life” in Chapter Zero, the book’s introduction.
• 88 files of notes, bibliography, and outlines for the middle section of Chapter One.
• 28 pages of handwritten notes.
• An outline of the book’s opening gesture – often the hardest part to figure out. Yay, I have a hook! (It’s still a secret, but I’m having such fun with it! And I figured it out while walking at lunchtime looking at the leaves change color.) 

The way I treat HMML is as an almost frenetic immersion in my material. The goal here isn’t to produce prose, it’s to produce the knowledge that will inform my prose when it comes time to write. There’s a great deal to be said for having the time to follow a question past the “here’s a footnote” stage until it actually becomes interesting – and then keep following it. Here, I can do that, take a walk by the lake, and arrive at dinner without having had to plan it. For this Carpenter Fellow, that’s a very good day.

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