Romance of the Rose
The Romance of the Rose Project at Johns Hopkins University aims to create a digital library of as many manuscripts of the Rose as our resources can manage. Rather than producing digital “critical editions,” we seek to provide access to a broad range of manuscripts – chronologically as well as esthetically – that we judge representative of medieval vernacular manuscript production where scribes and artists did not hesitate to add, emend, cut, or otherwise alter the work they were presenting. To this end, we have so far selected and digitized some fifteen manuscripts ranging from a rather “ordinary” example from the early 14th century to a sumptuously-painted and -copied presentation manuscript offered to King Francis I of France in 1520. In addition we have two, and soon three, manuscripts from private collections that have never been available to scholars.
Our intended audience is broad-based, ranging from scholars of the Rose, to undergraduate and graduate students, to whatever members of the informed public – the “digital museum-going public” – care to access our site. In keeping with the pedagogical and scholarly mission, we have assembled teams of transcribers in Germany, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the US to transcribe manuscripts that we post on the site. Since none of these has been transcribed before, the transcriptions permit scholars and students to compare different versions on our site to see how varied they can be in places, both from the standpoint of the text and the images and decorative programs. In the same way, students learning paleography can study the different kinds of scripts used in the three-hundred-year range of our manuscripts.
In addition to transcribing manuscripts, we are making them searchable at a variety of levels: words, names, themes, rubrics, subjects of illuminations, classical, biblical, and other kinds of references (e.g., myths, dates, historical items). We are also providing a means to compare folios from different manuscripts at the same time – something that would not be possible otherwise. In the last five or six years, the Hopkins Rose project has been used in classes from Europe and North America to Australia and New Zealand. The manuscripts on our site have also come to be used by scholars preparing papers on this work.
Tim Stinson, a CLIR post-doctoral fellow and member of the Eisenhower Library's Rose Project team, will describe the technical challenges and approach of this enterprise, especially as they reflect and support scholarly research and teaching. The Eisenhower Library intends to build "agnostic" digital library infrastructure that will provide a comprehensive, open, modular framework to support Rose and other digital library initiatives. The current approach calls for building upon a Fedora-based repository infrastructure that will interface with various applications to provide appropriate functionality for scholarly research and teaching, and library-based preservation activities. To date, the team has considered image presentation and manipulation interfaces from Luna Insight, ARTstor, MDID, and customized tools based on Zoomify and Fedora disseminators. Fundamentally, the Rose technology team focuses on scholarly needs as defined through continuous feedback, usability testing, and meetings such as the March 2006 Rose workshop.
A note on the work:
The Roman de la Rose was the most significant vernacular work in Europe from the 13th to the end of the 15th
century. Its importance can be judged from the fact that there are some
250 manuscripts extant. Since this was the first vernacular work to be
illuminated on a grand scale, the majority of the extant manuscripts do
have important programs of miniatures or even half-page paintings,
historiated and decorated initials, and extensive rubrication as well
as page decoration. Since some manuscripts were
produced for the nobility, these have even more elaborate artwork,
including some painted by known court artists. The Rose engaged
the attention – and frequently the ire – of some of the most noted
writers and thinkers of the Middle Ages. These included: Dante,
Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Jean
Gerson, Villon, and a host of others in every European country. Translations or paraphrases of all or part of the work exist in the known medieval vernacular languages in Europe.
