DJPH collaboration: Rosamunde Baele and Marie Hartmann

DJPH collaboration: Rosamunde Baele and Marie Hartmann

With its own Dahlem Junior Host Program, the Dahlem Humanities Center supports young humanities scholars who would like to invite guest researchers from Germany or abroad to Freie Universität Berlin. The program enables them to host scholars whose research is of central interest to their own projects for a period of, generally, up to 8 weeks.

Rosamunde Baele and Marie Hartmann are art historians with a shared interest in materiality, use and semantics of illuminated late medieval manuscripts.

Baele’s research on French-Flemish manuscripts and late medieval religious book culture is central to the PhD project Hartmann has been working on at Freie Universität Berlin since 2020, titled “Visual Translations – The Materiality and Mediality of Black Books of Hours.”

Because of her ‘double background’ as both an art historian specialized in comparative stylistic and iconographic research of medieval books of hours and prayer books and as an expert in handling of manuscripts (from a codicological perspective), Baele’s stay as a guest researcher allows Hartmann to critically debate methodological questions of her very much ‘materiality-based’ dissertation.

In this DJHP collaboration, they want to deepen their already initiated debate on the tension between studying facsimiles, digitized manuscripts and originals (Hartmann), and how these different versions of a book’s materiality influence both art historical research and cataloguing (Baele). They will also explore the potential of joint scholarly discussions while consulting actual three-dimensional manuscript (copies) through work sessions at the splendid facsimile collection of Dr. Detlef M. Noack.

For more information about the collaboration, please click here.