Lynn Ransom
Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination. Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the research potential of Name Authorites in Linked Open Data contexts.
Lynn oversaw the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (2014-2017) into an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world's pre-modern manuscripts and served as the Principal Investigator for the US team on the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project, a Round 4 Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge Award recipient (2017-2020). She is currently serving as the Director of Digital Medievalist (until 2022) and the President and Executive Director of Digital Scriptorium (2021-2023). She is also Co-Editor of the Schoenberg Institute's journal Manuscript Studies. A list of her other publications can be found here.
Of the thirty-five manuscripts that remain of the 12th-century Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, not a single one dates from before 1590, but over half of them were produced by 1700. This pattern of survival reflects a wider reality for Armenian literature, where the ravages of war and persecution, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, gave way to a period of relative peace in the 17th century that provided an opportunity for a conscious "rescue" of the Armenian literary heritage, especially (but not exclusively) centered around the Amrdolu monastery of Bitlis, near Lake Van. In this talk I will present some of the features and puzzles of the manuscript tradition of the Chronicle that speak to this restoration, and at the same time give us glimpses into the history of the developing Armenian diaspora.
A video recording of this lecture is available via this link.
More information about the SIMS Online Lecture Series can be found here.
Tara L. Andrews is a Research Director at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and University Professor of Digital Humanities in the Institute for History at the University of Vienna. Her fields of expertise include the history and historiography of the Christian Near East in the tenth to twelfth centuries, the application of computational and statistical methods for reconstruction of the copying history of ancient and medieval manuscripts (stemmatology), and reflection on the implications of employing digital media and computational methods in humanities contexts.
