Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe | University of Colorado

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About This Course

Perhaps no other relic of the European Middle Ages captures our imagination more than illuminated medieval manuscripts, or those documents decorated with images and colored pigments. Serving as windows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and culture, they communicate complex visual and textual narratives of Europe’s collective cultural heritage and patrimony. In this fashion, illuminated manuscripts are dynamic messages from our communal past that are still relevant today in fields like graphic design and typography. In this seven-week course, students will explore the material creation, content, and historical context of illuminated medieval European manuscripts. Students will acquire an introductory knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics, their cataloguing and periodization (when they were created), the methods utilized to produce them, and their historical context and value.

Student achievement will be assessed using not only traditional multiple-choice quizzes, but more importantly will be evaluated based on individual student projects. In their final projects students will either (1) produce a board of commented images about medieval manuscripts or (2) prepare a physical manuscript using medieval methods. The best of these peer-evaluated projects will be posted on the Deciphering Secrets website, which is our collective citizen scholarship web presence that encourages and supports our global citizen scholars appreciation and contributions to transcription of medieval manuscripts.

Finally, we wish to highlight that this course is an exciting international collaboration between the University of Colorado (USA) and Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain).

Language
English

Level
Beginner

Commitment

52 hours; approximately 7 hours/week

For More Information or to Enroll

Created by:

Instructors:

Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila

Associate Professor
History
University of Colorado System

Fundamentally, I am concerned about and fixated on human interrelations — especially during the Spanish Middle Ages. From the eighth through fifteenth centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims co-existed on the Iberian Peninsula and formed one of most dynamic civilizations in world history. Their coexistence was tenuous, challenging, and intimate. Blood and family relations were both commingled and jealously kept apart. Conflict, collaboration, and accommodation created new and unexpected political and economic alliances. Shared life on the peninsula generated the conditions for new forms of identity to come to life — in essence — hybridized, fractured identities that often borrowed and blended aspects of multiple faiths, values, and families.

My own extensive research in cathedral, municipal, and national archives has led me to conclude that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim relationships were far more integrated—both positively and negatively—than contemporary scholars and the public realize. To investigate these issues, I blend the traditional approach of the historian (painstaking research and interpretation of medieval manuscripts) with new digital technologies (crowdsourced analysis by citizen scholars and applied geovisualization). Thus, as a digital humanist my purpose is to share this inter-cultural history with others, via traditional and novel mediums, so that we might learn and appreciate how 21st century human interrelations have been molded by the past.

Since fall 2010, I have served as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. From fall 2008 – spring 2010, I served as the Burton Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and earned my Ph.D. in May 2008 from the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. I specialize in the study of inter-cultural relations and how group and individual identities hybridize. In particular, I am a scholar of medieval and early modern Spain, religious minorities and religious converts in Spain (in particular, Jews and conversos), and Spanish trans-Atlantic migration to Mexico and Bolivia.

Relying on my specialized training in Spanish paleography and Spanish and Portuguese language expertise, I have conducted research in approximately 40 local, ecclesiastical, provincial, and national archives in Spain, Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States for my dissertation and current book project. My forthcoming text, Blood, Faith, and Fate: Jews, Conversos, and Old Christian in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Spanish America, is under contract with a university press. I have published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto-Jews and reviewed books for The Sixteenth Century Journal and The Americas. I am the fortunate recipient of several research fellowships and awards, including ones provided by the Mellon Foundation, theCouncil for European Studies, Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Program for Cultural Cooperation, the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) and Paul Jacobi Center at the National Library of Israel, and UCLA’s Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies and Center for Jewish Studies.

Prior to returning to the university, I worked for eight years in the public sector, including research and consulting positions at the Institute for the Future, the Texas Legislature, and MGT of America. Lastly, I hold a Bachelor of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley. I am a native of San Antonio, Texas, and have resided in South America, Spain, and both the west and east coasts of the United States.

Ana B. Sanchez-Prieto

Dr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
Historiographical Sciences and Techniques