In a talk she delivered at the 2024 Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, SLIS faculty member Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis discussed the history of women creating, reading, and owning medieval European manuscripts. To honor Women’s History Month 2025, we spoke with her about this research and its connection to her Simmons courses.
Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis, a faculty member at Simmons’ School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), delivered a talk at the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair on November 9, 2024 entitled “Women as Writers, Readers, and Owners of Medieval Manuscripts.” In this presentation, Davis (who was recently featured in The Atlantic magazine) explored medieval women as craftspeople (e.g., visual artists and scribes) and twentieth-century women who owned medieval objects in the greater Boston area. Here manuscripts refer to handwritten documents produced before the advent of printing in the Western world (printing was developed much earlier in China), which were assembled into a codex, or bound book. Medieval European manuscripts often feature hand-painted illustrations that accompany the text.
When conducting this research, Seymour de Ricci’s multi-volume Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, which appeared in the mid-to-late 1930s, was a key source for Davis.
“De Ricci included major collectors who owned numerous medieval objects, including J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, in addition to less wealthy individuals who may have possessed one or two manuscript fragments [i.e., a section or single page from a larger manuscript],” she says. “The Census lists literally dozens of women as collectors, though they have not appeared in academic scholarship.”
Uncovering Hidden Networks of Women Collectors
After consulting de Ricci’s Census, Davis embarked on a quest to identify these women. “Back then, women were listed with their married name, so my first step was to identify who they were as individuals. To find this out, I conducted genealogical research, examining real estate records and other kinds of historical records,” she explains.
This detective work enabled Davis to uncover a vital network of women who lived in Boston, Wellesley, and the surrounding suburbs. Many of them were Wellesley College faculty or alumnae, and others had attended local women-centered institutions, particularly Dana Hall (a private girls’ school in Boston) and Pine Manor College (a post-graduate program of Dana Hall located in Brookline, which is now Messina College within Boston College).
“These women traded manuscript fragments with one another or gave them as gifts to each other. They would also gather in someone’s home for a type of salon, where they discussed their collections,” Davis says. “It’s a lovely story of women supporting one another and finding community in the early twentieth century … And I like the idea of them gathering, discussing their medieval manuscripts … I would have loved to be a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on their conversations.” Revealing these hidden networks, Davis’ research offers a nuanced perspective on women’s history and art history in the greater Boston area.
Toward the end of her book fair talk, Davis turned to the most famous female art collector of the city, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose collection, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, lies in close proximity to the Simmons campus. “I also addressed Gardner’s ‘frenemy’ type of relationship with Belle da Costa Greene, who directed J.P. Morgan’s library, which is now the Morgan Library and Museum in New York,” Davis says.
As explored in a current Morgan exhibition, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” Greene was a Black woman who passed as White among New York’s upper strata. This decision afforded her certain privileges and opportunities that she would not have otherwise enjoyed because of her race. The exhibition celebrates Greene’s impeccable connoisseurship, which enabled J.P. Morgan to amass one of the finest medieval manuscript collections outside of Europe. Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty ’03MS, ’23HD, the inaugural director of the Smithsonian Library and Archives, wrote the Afterword for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
During the research process, Davis realized that the relationship between Gardner and Greene was very different from the supportive networks of women collectors in the Boston area.
“Gardner and Greene famously hated one another,” she says. “On the surface, they were very nice, since they were women of dignity and elegance. But in their correspondence [with other people] they reveal their mutual disdain for each other.” Reading the letters that Gardner wrote to her mentor, art historian Bernard Berenson, Davis encountered Gardner’s many insults toward Greene (including racial insults). In turn, Greene’s letters to Berenson — the two were lovers — coined a pejorative alternative name for her rival: “Was-abella.”
Diversifying the Field of Medieval Studies
Certain historical shifts may account for why Americans, including American women, collected medieval artifacts between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“In that time period [circa 1880s to 1940s], there was a growing interest in the medieval world. Rich individuals like Morgan, Hearst, and John Paul Getty were trying to establish themselves as men of stature, which they did by aligning themselves with a sophisticated European background, and part of that included owning a piece of the Middle Ages,” Davis says.
One example of the medieval revival is relatively close to Simmons’ campus. The Hammond Castle in Gloucester exemplifies “an obsession with a medieval aesthetic.” As Davis explains, modernity’s infatuation with the Middle Ages had economic and racial overtones. “Major collectors like Morgan, Getty, and Hearst were immersed in American Exceptionalism … they were capitalists to the core. But they still craved a centuries-old White, Christian ancestry.”
Amid the Gothic revival, the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), a community of scholars who study the Middle Ages, was established in 1925. Davis currently serves as the organization’s executive director. In recent years, she has shepherded significant changes that have helped diversify the MAA and the field of medieval studies.
For example, the MAA now offers an annual Article Prize in Critical Race Studies, The Belle da Costa Greene Award (research funds for faculty of color), the Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program, and other forms of support and recognition for scholars and areas of scholarly study that have been marginalized within medieval studies at large.
“We want to value and promote the work of medievalists who have been under-represented in the field, including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ medievalists … We are also expanding the field geographically to include Asia and Africa,” Davis says. “It is very exciting, and hearing these different voices and perspectives has enriched our discipline.”
Beyond the academy, diversifying medieval studies helps counter disturbing trends in the political sphere. “Even to this day, White supremacists appropriate the Middle Ages for their own agendas. They are obsessed with medieval purity, which is very dangerous,” Davis says. By dismantling a purist view of the medieval past, scholars counter these pernicious mythologies.
Davis is especially excited about the MAA’s centennial conference, which is scheduled to take place at Harvard University in March 2025. “It’s going to be our biggest conference ever, and it will be amazing. There will be all kinds of special events, performances, and exhibitions. Our team at Harvard and other Boston-area colleagues did a phenomenal job with the programming,” she says.
Honing Librarianship with Medieval Studies
In her SLIS courses, Davis introduces graduate students to medieval manuscripts from a librarian’s perspective, focusing on collecting, archiving, and curatorship. She explains how modern booksellers routinely dismembered manuscripts (i.e., pulled them apart, page by page), and sold them as individual leaves to maximize profits. This way of selling manuscripts as fragments circles back to Davis’ book fair talk — this is how women in the Boston area would have acquired these objects.
Another topic that Davis addresses is provenance, or the history of ownership. Knowing who owned manuscripts and other works of art is useful for authenticating materials. (In other words, it can help curators detect modern forgeries). Even more importantly, “I tell my students that,
as a curator, you need to know that the objects in your care have been legitimately acquired,” Davis says. “At some point along an object’s long journey to the United States, it may have been acquired illegitimately … this often happens during times of major upheavals, like wars and ensuing destruction and looting.”
Davis’ own research has led to several repatriations. “I did a repatriation case for the Boston Public Library. When I informed them of my findings, they immediately called the Department of Homeland Security to start repatriation proceedings. It’s the right thing to do,” she says. With more than 500 US institutions owning medieval manuscripts and/or fragments, provenance research is an important skill for librarians to have in their repertoire.
In her course “The Medieval Manuscript: Charlemagne to Gutenberg” (LIS 464), Davis’ favorite aspect is the final project. The class rebuilds a medieval manuscript that had been dismembered and dispersed during the early twentieth century. Each student receives a page or (digital) image of a page from different libraries, and they catalog it themselves. Then the students work collaboratively to assemble images of the codex in the proper order. For this assembly, they use a manuscript software called Fragmentarium.
“There is a moment in the class where we push the button, and the whole thing comes together. The students always cheer and burst into applause,” Davis says. “They know that we did something important. This object no longer exists — it has been irreparably destroyed. But by using their librarian skills and digital tools, they’ve done reparative work, which is incredibly rewarding.”
In her discussions with SLIS students (most of whom are not medievalists), Davis contemplates the significance of these premodern European objects in North America. “They [medieval manuscripts] matter precisely because they are not part of our cultural patrimony … In Massachusetts, Indigenous communities like the Wampanoags were decimated. You cannot go outside and see their monuments and works of art,” she explains. “But by holding this medieval artifact in your hand, you become part of a longer chain of human history. This brings history to life, and it is really powerful.”
Davis also finds contemporary resonance in these old artifacts. “Our current political climate is very Orwellian,” she says. “Something may have happened recently, but people are already denying that it happened; they are contradicting the historical record. And as a medievalist, I will fight against this denial of history.”
Enshrining truth, critical thinking, and sound interpretation, medieval studies correlates with the key principles of library and information science (LIS) and information literacy. “Librarians will save the world,” Davis says. “The work of librarians and archivists is crucial for keeping us honest.”