The in-person examination of documents, ranging from the 1100s to the early 20th century, allowed the academics to glean new insights into their areas of research.
LONDON — Eight hundred years separate medieval historian Stephen Spencer and his current topic of interest, the Third Crusade.
Such a span could well present a challenge in uncovering fresh sources to shed new light on the period between 1189-1192, when King Richard I of England and King Philip II of France teamed up to attempt to recapture Jerusalem from Islamic rule.
But after a few hours painstakingly going through the ornately handwritten Latin in the weighty chronicle in front of him, Spencer thinks he may have found an account overlooked by historians of the crusades for centuries.
The Northeastern University researcher, in preparation for his forthcoming book, “Rewriting the Third Crusade,” has been granted access by Lambeth Palace Library in London to Ralph of Diss’s “Imagines,” a historical account written in the late 12th century that covers events between 1180-1202.
Spencer believes the work by the former dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London has been potentially unfairly marginalized by those studying the events of the Third Crusade.
“Ralph of Diss didn’t go on crusade,” says the assistant professor, “and that’s why crusade historians have afforded him very little attention. So this text has been almost entirely passed over. But as the dean of St Paul’s, he was incredibly well placed to receive information about the crusade and we know that he sent his chaplain, William, on crusade.”
Pointing to some faint “W. H.” initials marked on a page that has been inserted within the animal-skin parchment pages of the book, Spencer says this could suggest that Ralph of Diss had access, in the form of his chaplain William, to a firsthand source who was providing him with information from the front line of the battle for the Holy Land, allowing the chronicler to update his account.
“I think most of the additions relating to the Third Crusade ultimately reflect information provided by his chaplain,” continues Spencer. “My tentative hypothesis is that the ‘W. H.’ could reflect William.”
Microfilm copies — a method for preserving documents — of “Imagines” have been created to allow researchers to read the text without needing to thumb through the physical manuscript. But Spencer explains that he would not have been able to spot the faintly marked initials without access to the original.
The 12th-century codex is part of Lambeth Palace Library’s restricted materials and was one of its founding documents in 1610, having previously been kept in St Paul’s library before the Reformation.
Julia King, the rare books librarian at the library, says that, in order to protect such valuable items from being “overused,” those requesting to see them need to be able to show a “genuine research need.”
“For someone like Stephen,” King says, “who is an expert in the crusades and needs to see the way the specific handwriting is working and can’t work from pictures and needs to see how the original is laid out on the page, we are happy to let them work with it.”
Spencer requested to see the chronicles of Ralph of Diss as part of a combined research project by historians based at Northeastern in London, titled Global Footprints in an Urban Archive.
Funded by a collaborative research pop-up award from Northeastern University’s Humanities Center, five academics and three Ph.D. students — including medievalist associate professor Lars Kjaer and crusades researcher Simon Chaplin — combed through Lambeth Palace Library’s collection to find works that had the potential to open new avenues to their studies.
Another Northeastern professor who benefited from seeing source material in its original state was Olly Ayers and his research assistants for Mapping Black London, a digital project focused on recovering the stories of people of color across the city’s long history.
Ayers and history Ph.D. students Libby Collard and Odile Jordan had requested to see the wedding license of Ignatius Sancho, an abolitionist, writer and musician who died in 1780. Ayers describes him as “probably the most important Black Briton of the 18th century.”
They were initially told that the paper document from 1758 was too badly water-damaged to be inspected in person. But after requesting that it be re-evaluated, the team was allowed to see it with their own eyes. “The volume is intact — fragile, but intact,” says Ayers, London director of the Humanities Center.
The researchers believe the license amounts to concrete evidence of something they have long thought — that Sancho was older than his early biographies claim.
An early historical account of Sancho’s life, written to accompany a book of his letters, is likely a widely fictionalized “slave narrative” of the type that were commonly conjured up to fill in the blanks about the lives of prominent Black people during that period, Ayers explains.
“The biography written about him is by someone Sancho probably never met and is full of details that we know are salacious, scandalized and flat out wrong,” he adds.
“That gives a date of birth of 1729, but it says things we know are probably untrue, like that he was born on a slave ship and his father threw himself overboard — it conforms to this genre of slave narrative. But this evidence basically allows us to firm up the idea that he was born before 1729 because it says, ‘Charles Ignatius Sancho, aged at least 30 years.’
“That reinforces a suspicion that we already had that he was born at least two or three years before the standard accepted date, which is not a small thing to discover on a Thursday afternoon.”
The existence of the wedding license, with its possible repercussions on understanding Sancho’s true age, was known, says Ayers, as it is listed on the “Find My Past” U.K. ancestry website.
But he says the Society of Genealogists has inputted the “bare bones” information, meaning Sancho’s age was not publicly available. “It is a classic tale,” he continues, “but you cannot beat going to the archive, seeing the actual document and — lo and behold — you find out the information by getting out of your office and going to the source.”
Northeastern associate professor Michael Peplar, whose expertise is in the history of ideas about family and marriage, requested to see papers related to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advisory Boards for Moral Welfare, with a focus on its international outreach.
The documents from the 1920s and ’30s depict how the Anglican church created a “network” to respond to social and health needs across the British Empire, which Peplar says would have been at “its height” during this period.
“I’m interested more broadly in policy on marriage and families,” Peplar says, “and the church is an influential voice in policy making in those areas. There has been some interesting material in here that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.”
For Sue Jones, there was a “serendipity” to taking part in the collegiate research effort. The art historian has been studying Flemish 15th-century painter Jan van Eyck for most of her career.
When looking at van Eyck’s enduring influence on culture, Jones, a former curator, started researching how 16th-century manuscript illuminators copied figures from his paintings into their Book of Hours, a form of popular Christian household prayer book from that period.
The assistant professor has traveled across Europe, including to The Vatican, to see examples of these replicas in manuscripts, but had not realized that a calendar containing a reproduction of van Eyck’s “St Jerome in his study” existed in London.
“I’ve actually looked at these manuscripts for years,” says Jones. “They are in Milan, Rome, Baltimore and Paris, and I’ve seen quite a few of them. But I didn’t know there was one here.
“This research was all put to one side a little bit and I have been picking it up in bits and pieces when I had a bit of time. It is a little bit of serendipity for me that I could find something like this that is really quite useful and so local as well.”