August 6, 2012

by Siobhan Aitchison

Since my last post describing the excavation of the pit house in the Kitchen Garden‘s frame yard, I have worked on constructing a 3d digital model of what I think the structure looked like. To supplement limited field measurements, I referenced a 1932 survey showing the footprints of the three frames to site my model, and a 1927 plan for a pit house constructed behind the greenhouse for construction detail specifications.

1932 survey showing the footprints of the three frames. We were excavating the one furthest to the north (at the top of this drawing).

Plan and section for a single-span pit house constructed behind the service court greenhouse.

I modeled the pit house using Rhino 3D. My plan is to insert this model with models of the adjacent frames into Google Earth. My fellow interns, Alex and Robin, have had great success georeferencing maps and historic photographs in Google Earth and creating virtual tours, and I hope to follow in their footsteps.

An oblique view of the pit house. The bottom 4-5 feet of the structure was underground. A retaining wall at the front of the house created a 4′ grade change.

An aerial oblique view of the pit house and adjacent cold frames set in the terrain. We are sure that the pithouse and the middle frame had double-span roofs, but the frame on the left might have supported a single-span roof.

A diagram of the pit house construction.

It is still not clear exactly when the pit house was buried and what its primary use was. Aerial photographs and correspondence suggest that it was deconstructed and buried some time between 1950 and 1955. It may have been used for vegetables originally, but it was most likely used for flowers and other landscape plants when the quantity of vegetables being grown at DO was restricted after 1940.

One of several rose plant tags found during the excavation. The pit house could have been used as a forcing house for roses.

I have also been working on an online exhibit of drawings and historical photographs pertaining to the Kitchen Garden’s design, construction, and evolution. This exhibit is still in progress, but the bulk of the copy and images have been posted to the Omeka website organized by Alexis DelVecchio and Paul Cote. The website is not yet public, but we will post the link here when it is! Some of the exhibits, including an exhibit about what kinds of frame yards Beatrix Farrand might have visited and used for reference, are still under construction. In the meantime, below is a sample screenshot from one of the exhibit pages.

The summer has been far too short and I was sad to leave DO on Friday. I will miss my fellow Garden and Landscape Studies interns and the entire staff at DO. I look forward to visiting the gardens soon–I can’t wait to see what the garden staff decides to do in the frame yard!

Shane Bobrycki, August 6, 2012

It’s fine for a priest to spit after taking the Eucharist. “All things are clean to the clean” (Titus 1:15), right? So begins one Amalarius’s unconvincing self-justification for hocking loogies in church. A young acquaintance, Guntard, had called out this early medieval author and churchman on his gross habit, pointing out that no other priest he knew did anything remotely similar. Fretting that Amalarius might “propel” bits of the Lord’s body, together with excess spittle, Guntard asked the wise archbishop whether it was really necessary to expectorate so “immediately” after taking the host.

Amalarius responded with a little indignation. First of all, Christ himself used his own spit to heal the blind and the deaf (John 9:6; Mark 7:33). Second, how many priests had Gundard ever really met, “being just a kid” – a remark that casts disturbing light on the sanitary standards of medieval church floors. Third, spitting is healthy, especially for phlegmatics. “A health-conscious phlegmatic will always try to get rid of excess phlegm” (flegmaticus homo si studuerit sanitati suae sepius curabit flegma eicere). And anyway Amalarius didn’t recall reading in the Bible that phlegmatics were excluded from the leadership of the church:

“For a bishop must be without crime, as the steward of God: not proud, not subject to anger, nor given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre” (Titus 1:7). But I guess your delicate senses, all puffed up with bodily cleanliness, can detect noxious sins in the depths of their fancy that Paul, an Apostle, was unable to discern with the help of the Holy Spirit? Think again!

Salivous greetings from the mezzanine! I’m one of three interns copy-editing and spot-checking upcoming volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series (DOML for short). One of these volumes, as you may have guessed, contains this defense of spitting, along with much else. This is the ninth-century liturgist Amalarius’s long, odd, and fascinating Liber Officialis (“The Book of Offices”).

In the Liber Officialis, Amalarius offers a complete allegorical interpretation of practically every imaginable part of the liturgy, from the significance of the elements of the mass, the church officials, and the night and day hours, to the secret meaning of individual vestments, vessels, and even hairstyles. The Introit of the mass is like Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Deacons in the mass symbolize the prophets of the Old Testament. A tonsure signifies the shearing away of idle thoughts, and so on. Amalarius was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, but he was not without detractors. One ninth-century critic calls him a “charlatan” (presumptor), complaining that his interpretations were either vapid or heretical or both. Another ninth-century detractor quipped that if the tonsure signified the shearing away of idle thoughts, Amalarius should shave off his entire mind.

For philologists, musicologists, art historians, and historians, this extraordinary document is a goldmine, but its technical subject-matter and Amalarius’s protoromance-tinted Latin make it difficult to translate. My part in this project is to go through our translator’s work for accuracy, sense, and style. This is my second DOML project of the summer, after working on the forthcoming DOML for Alan of Lille done by Winthrop (“Pete”) Wetherbee. There remains much to do. But it will be worth it. Amalarius’s text is full of riches. And I have come to admire Amalarius’s indefatigable refusal to leave any aspect of church service un-interpreted. For him, there is always some hidden meaning lurking around the corner, no matter how mundane the subject. “Although the washing of the church floor serves the practical purpose of cleaning it…nevertheless that act does not lack a deeper meaning.” Be that as it may, I’m just glad somebody was cleaning those floors.

About me:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in medieval history at Harvard University. I work on crowds in the Early Middle Ages.

by Christopher Alessandrini, July 30, 2012

For two months now I’ve been copyediting and compiling Dumbarton Oaks’s 2011–2012 annual report. If you haven’t already, check out last year’s report. It’s an exquisite volume edited by Sara Taylor, Kathleen Sparkes, and Lisa Wainwright. I carry it with me to and from work on a daily basis, almost as a talisman. (“Still reading that book, huh?” the security guard is almost certain to say.)

What it boils down to is this: I spend a lot of time copyediting—restructuring sentences; fretting over serial commas, en dashes, and title formatting; Googling scholars and their institutions of study, etc. The Chicago Manual of Style and I have mumbled and bumbled our way through the gawky early stages of acquaintanceship and are, I am happy to report, in the process of cementing a lifelong friendship. Strunk and White are as always charming and flippant and wonderful conversationalists, though one might say too rigid in their declarations. Merriam Webster and I go way back; I won’t bore you with the progression of our friendship, though I will concede that recently we’ve had some unexpected spats. “Yearlong” could’ve been the end of us, Merriam and me.

When I’m not copyediting, I’m either scribbling to-do lists on post-its, monkeying around on InDesign, sending pesky emails to DO’s wonderful staff (apologies to those who experience dread at the sight of my name in your inbox—you guys have been wonderful!), and searching for photographs to illustrate the report. Here’s a sample spread; the frontispiece features a stunning photograph by Alexandre Tokovinine:

A preview spread, featuring a beautiful photograph by Alexandre Tokovinine

Because the annual report is essentially an institutional yearbook, I spend a lot of my time rummaging blindly through the unkempt bowels of the Shared drive in search of usable images. This often necessitates the unearthing of some mysterious marginalia: Santa Claus making a jolly, bearded appearance at the Christmas party; croquet on the North Vista; old photographs from fellows’ events that appear to be direct descendants of  “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and Edward Gorey’s “The Doubtful Guest.”

Oddly, this all comes together in the refectory. As I watch you artfully rearrange those three leaves of salad on your plate, I know that you’re secretly a cubed cheese fiend (Christmas party, 2011) and that you’ve written a dissertation on cranial modification as rite of passage in Pre-Columbian cultures. I think you’re great. And you—I read your report on the comparison between two botanical texts from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries and I’m itching like mad to talk about them but I don’t even know where to start. I feel young and unwise and in over my head, but it’s not a bad place to be, not really. I read your reports—these narrow windows into your lives—and I feel like I sort of know you, if only a little. I’ve known you for five hundred words and already I’m cheering for you.

One story that especially held my interest involved the re-creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Tunic in sugar cookie squares. Some Pre-Columbian junior fellows crafted it as a farewell to former director of Pre-Columbian Studies, Joanne Pillsbury. Take a look:

Dumbarton Oaks Tunic, in sugar cookie squares

Andrew Hamilton, the junior fellow who spearheaded the project, managed to kill two birds with one stone: frosting the individual tocapu squares proved a painstaking process, but it offered Andrew unexpected insight into the tunic’s makeup. He was forced to interpret it in a defamiliarized context; in carefully reproducing the tunic square by square, he noticed patterns emerging that he’d glossed over in the Textile Gallery, where the tunic remained behind a pane of glass. This surprising research allowed Andrew to complete a chapter of his dissertation.

About Me

I’m a rising sophomore at Harvard College from Lexington, Massachusetts.

Lain Wilson, July 26th, 2012

After a whirlwind of a summer, my seals internship has come to an end. I was very happy to have assisted in the first phase of uploading commentaries and transliterations to the online catalogue. In addition, I was lucky to have had the opportunity to work with a new part of the Dumbarton Oaks website, the “online exhibits” feature. Complementing the completion of DO Seals volume 6, Jonathan Shea and I created an online exhibit for the imperial seals, which is presented here as the final project of the internship, although the process of cataloguing will no doubt stretch on for some years.

The exhibit is in five parts. Largest and most important is the chronological section, which includes a representative seal, typically one whose imperial portrait is the best preserved, and an accompanying short biography and commentary on the seals for each emperor included in the Dumbarton Oaks collection. I picked out the examples, wrote the biographies for emperors up to 1204, and selected the appropriate quotations from the sources; Jonathan did the same for the post-Fourth Crusade emperors, as well as the design and layout for the website. An example, of Herakleios and his son and associate Herakleios Constantine, can be found here.

The other four sections cover specific seals or elements: a selection of usurpers whose seals demonstrate some interest in their iconography or design, the development of religious imagery, the evolution of imperial titles, and the design programs employed by rulers to convey an ideology of imperial dynasty. These sections attempt to demonstrate the ways in which Byzantine lead seals function as works of art, on the one hand, as well as, on the other, works of propaganda.

Lead seals, like coins, were a form of circulating portraiture, not only promulgating the emperor’s image, but also a sense of his relationship to the divine, to his family, and, not least importantly, to the past. Byzantine society was not static, but it made great efforts to portray itself as consistently and, oftentimes, as conservatively as possible.

But change it did: Greek titles replace Latin ones, family names appear, saints’s cults expand and elaborate. Lead seals, employed by Byzantines over a thousand years of the empire’s existence, are chipped from its cultural fabric. In many ways provide a faithful guide to the ways in which an outward form might appear consistent while its elements undergo fundamental transformations.

In D.O.’s Pre-Columbian collection, you can see several objects associated with the bloody ancient Mesoamerican “ballgame,” which often culminated in human sacrifice. The interns’ croquet matches this summer have featured slightly less bloodshed, but just as much ferocity.

Croquet may seem dainty and laid-back, especially when you’re playing in the extensive grounds of a DC mansion, but it’s no leisurely lawn game. We interns have been playing after hours for ultimate glory, and there is no pity.

There have been multiple showdowns. The first ended with many of the girl interns doing cartwheels, while Lain and Danielle (ahem, myes) came in for the win. In the last game, DC’s summer humidity tested many of us, while mosquitoes savagely punished those foolish enough to brave the gardens without bug spray (i.e. all of us). But alas, such distractions cannot crush pure talent. There were victory laps and tears, cruel game plans and screams of fury.

Now as summer winds down, there are only three weeks left to find out who is true king of the Game of Games…

It was hot!

We interns decided to do a group baseball game during our stay in DC. Six of us hopped on the Metro and made our way over to the stadium, peanuts in hand. It was days after Independence Day and it was crazy hot. Luckily we were under an overhang or else the sun would have been unbearable. Sweating, we watched the game, which was very close. At one exciting point, a home run ball landed right in the next section over. It came down to the 9th inning where the Nationals pulled through with the win.