Posted July 28, 2025 by Rose A. McCandless, DS Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow
For this month’s blog post (and possibly next month’s, as well), I spoke with Sarah Noonan and Liz Hebbard from the Peripheral Manuscripts Project (PMP) to discuss our two projects and their shared values, with an eye on thinking about how undertakings like DS or PMP are challenging the status quo in manuscript studies (in a good way!) and raising questions about cultural heritage stewardship and medieval studies research in the 21st century. While I was writing this blog post, I started to see common threads that I hadn’t noticed before, particularly regarding the value of smaller institutional collections and how ideas are shifting about who is responsible for curating history.
The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is working to identify, describe, and digitize manuscript holdings in smaller, lesser-resourced and/or non-R1 institutions across the Midwest. Their digital collections, which will continue to expand especially with PMP’s next round of funding, can be found and explored here.
Sarah and Liz noted that one of the most productive aspects of the PMP is when institutions realize what materials can be considered “in-scope” for the project. It’s common for institutions to bring out boxes of unprocessed materials, saying “we’re not sure if anything in here will be relevant” and project team members work with partners to identify manuscripts that otherwise would have remained in the dark for decades to come. Through PMP and its collaborators, manuscripts in several smaller collections across the Midwest are described (though, as Liz aptly pointed out, description is never complete!) and discoverable. We have a similar experience at DS when institutions realize that our scope has broadened significantly since the first iteration of DS; we now include non-Latinate materials, which many institutions have in similar numbers as, if not greater than, Western European manuscripts (and PMP is expanding their own scope in this way for their next round, as well). Many institutions don’t realize at first that DS supports non-Western premodern manuscripts, and are delighted to learn that we want to include them in our Catalog. Additionally, manuscript fragments continue turning up in unprocessed boxes even in larger collections, such as Rochester Institute of Technology. It’s a frequent occurrence for one of the curators that I work with in my metadata creation work for DS to add fragments to our cataloging spreadsheet that have only been unboxed recently as a part of archival processing workflows. (So, friendly invitation to all small institutions to take a gander through the boxes in the basement! You never know what treasures you might find.)
Between digital humanities projects, manuscript description efforts, active scholarship, etc., there is significant firepower coming from the American Midwest (consisting of states from Ohio to Nebraska, and Minnesota to Missouri) in manuscript studies, and the region’s growing importance in the field includes both people and collections. PMP and DS are both working to bring awareness to the richness of the manuscript collections in the Midwest, whether that’s the immense and highly under-studied collection at Ohio State University (whose fragments are currently in DS, with more than 100 codices soon to be added) or the smaller but no less interesting collections of the University of Dayton or Saint Meinrad Archabbey. The work of fragmentology in particular, I think, will benefit greatly from this increased discoverability, as fragments that have been spread among numerous smaller institutions and collections will begin to see the light of day and, hopefully, be incorporated into reconstruction projects (existing and future). It’s also incredibly important for North American students and scholars alike to realize that you don’t have to go to Europe to participate meaningfully in medieval studies—many fascinating manuscripts can be found in one’s own backyard.
Finding manuscripts locally can engage folks in numerous ways, especially as it relates to how the manuscripts arrived in the Midwest in the first place (which is an important form of local history!). I was fortunate to hear Liz and Sarah’s presentation at the Schoenberg Symposium for Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies in November 2024, in which they highlighted some fascinating local figures that they have come across in their work describing manuscripts for PMP. These folks show how manuscripts move in smaller communities and how smaller collections are formed. Liz and Sarah particularly highlighted the role of manuscripts as formers of social ties, especially through gift-giving. The work of the PMP and the value of small, so-far-undiscovered collections in the Midwest were the topic of Liz’s contribution to a group of annotations edited by Eric J. Johnson (Head of Thompson Library Special Collections at Ohio State) in the Fall 2023 issue of Manuscript Studies. These annotations focus on manuscripts in so-called “flyover states,” highlighting and amplifying collections and manuscripts in the Midwest. The contributions to this series of essays, including my own on a manuscript bible broken in the 1990s in Akron, Ohio, demonstrate the variety and research potential of these underutilized collections. And note! The manuscripts discussed in this series and represented in Midwestern collections overall are not strictly Western European: Joshua Mugler’s contribution, for example, shines the spotlight on Eastern Christian and Islamic manuscripts in Minnesota.
My own experience of finding manuscripts in my own backyard has in fact put me on the career path I’m pursuing. While studying for my B.A. at Ohio State, I began to understand the depth of the history of commercial biblioclasm in Ohio. Between Otto F. Ege (1888-1951, based in Cleveland, OH, which is also my hometown) and Bruce Ferrini (d. 2010, based in Akron, Ohio) alone, a vast number and range of premodern manuscripts have been dismembered and their constituent parts sold off in the region that I grew up in. When I learned this, I felt a calling to work in fragmentology, trying to reconstruct even one of the manuscripts broken as a result of these Ohioan biblioclasts (this research resulted in the above annotation, and is ongoing). While working with manuscript material produced in France in the thirteenth century, I was able to connect more deeply with my own local Ohio history.
Beyond describing and documenting the manuscript holdings of Midwestern institutions, PMP is also raising questions about who is responsible for stewarding cultural heritage in this country. In a time when we are asking questions about different types of institutions and their ability to responsibly protect and amplify material history, PMP and DS alike stand as a reminder that major elite universities and repositories are not the only ones with manuscripts. The collections of Harvard and Yale will naturally continue to be central to manuscript studies in North America, but it is a misconception that these are the only institutions who have the ability to protect our cultural heritage. We ignore smaller collections to our own detriment, as they too contain multitudes that we haven’t even identified yet. Let us look to institutions like Ohio State, Western Michigan University, or the University of Dayton, all of which steward remarkable manuscript collections, and incorporate them actively into instruction and public programming. Let us no longer overlook the “fly-over” states; instead, try driving through—I guarantee you’ll find some fascinating manuscripts and brilliant scholars along the way. And indeed, Sarah and Liz noted that with increased discoverability of manuscripts in smaller institutions made possible by projects like DS and PMP, we will begin to realize the true breadth of material that is held outside of major coastal repositories.