Paleography - about to be axed at King's College, London (2)

The Mary Beard blog I mentioned a few items ago takes up the issue of unprofitable subjects in higher education, exemplified by paleography, the study of ancient and pre-modern handwritten scripts:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/university-cuts-redundancies-and-byebye-palaeography.html


My comment:


This comment might look long, but I guarantee it will excite any of you who read it.

Let's look at some pointers to what can be done with state encouragement in the form of centrally funded centres of excellence. First two examples concerning Soviet paleography, that might surprise some of you:

http://hebraica.orientalstudies.ru/eng/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1325&Itemid=128

This second example is quite fascinating, and shows the contribution of dedicated paleographers to the wide range of human endeavour illuminated in recorded history:

http://ranumspanat.com/lublinskaya_obit.htm

"Historians of medieval and modern Europe have suffered a grievous loss with the death of Alexandra Dmitrievna Lublinskaya, who died of a heart attack on January 22, 1980, shortly after taking part in a defence of a doctoral thesis at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.

Alexandra Dmitrievna was born in 1902, a daughter of the Rev. Dmitri Stefanovitch, a historian of the Russian Church, who was made, in 1911, rector of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. She enrolled in the Petrograd University, where she attended the courses of the noted medievalists I.M. Grevs, L.P. Karsavin, and Olga Dobiache-Rozhdestvenskaya, a disciple of Ferdinand Lot. It was Professor Dobiache who soon recognized the talents of her student and put her, in 1922, on the staff of the Public Library with its rich collection of medieval West European manuscripts. This was fortunate, for soon thereafter regular teaching of history was discontinued in Russian universities, not to be revived until 1935. At the Public Library, Alexandra Dmitrievna, under the guidance of Dobiache, fully developed her talents as a paleographer. The features peculiar to this science attention to minute detail that often leads to a significant discovery put a special imprint on all her subsequent scholarly work. In the 1930's she began to teach courses in West European paleography in the Leningrad University, and in 1949 was appointed to the chair of Medieval History. Eight years later she joined the Institute of History in the Academy of Sciences, while continuing her active involvement in the life of the Leningrad University.

The scholarly output of Professor Lublinskaya comprises close to 200 publications dealing with a great variety of topics. It is quite impossible to do justice to them all in this short review. Very roughly they can be subsumed under three categories: works on paleography, critical publication of historical documents, and monographs and articles on the social and political history of medieval and early modern France. It should be noted that in the periodization of history commonly accepted in the Soviet universities, the "Middle Ages" extend to mid-seventeenth century. One of the results of Lublinskaya's many years of paleographic studies was the publication, in 1969, by her and several of her disciples of a manual on Latin paleography from the first century to the eighteenth. This textbook is a model of clarity and conciseness; its chronological and geographical breadth is quite unusual in works of this sort.

During her work in the Leningrad Public Library, Mrs. Lublinskaya began a systematic study of the Dubrovsky Manuscript Collection housed in it since 1805. This collection comprises over 14,000 documents dealing with France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany and other countries from the 13th century to the 18th. P.P. Dubrovsky, a secretary of the Russian legation in Paris, acquired in 1791-92 a mass of manuscript materials from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, among them many of the papers from the collections of Achille de Harlay and of Chancellor Séguier. The Harlay collection contains a large number of letters from the official correspondence of Catherine de Medici and of Constable Anne de Montmorency. In 1962 Lublinskaya published 128 documents from this collection under the title Documents pour servir à l'histoire des gueres civiles en France (1561-1563). These documents fully vindicate the views of L. Romier and R. Mandrou that the Wars of Religion had started much before the "Vassy Massacre" of March 1562; they also reveal the impotence of royal government in those years."

And here's different example of what paleography can do, involving collaboration between state-funded historical work (Chinese universities) and specialized US paleographical work. In the field of Judiac history in China god help us all...

http://www.sino-judaic.org/index.php?page=current_issue_highlights


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There's a blog and petition protesting against the projected axing of palaeography at King's.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=303202385890&ref=share

Read it and sign it!

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I just added a follow-up general comment:

A present without history is like a human being without a birth or childhood. An abomination. Hail Mary! (Not you, Mary - the other one...)

And a present like this that doesn't care to know where it's coming from, will run full speed ahead on to rocks or into an iceberg.