
Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison
Centre for Research Collections Fellow, April - September 2024
Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison is an early-career academic working on medieval literature (Middle English and Latin) and iconography. After studying for a BA and MPhil at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Hope obtained her PhD from Durham University in 2022, funded by a Durham Doctoral Studentship, with a thesis entitled ‘The Virgin Mary Between Ecclesia and Synagoga: Typology, Sin and Anti-Judaism in Medieval English Literature, c. 1200-1500’. Since August 2022, Hope has been a Teaching Fellow in Medieval History of Art at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Hope’s primary research and teaching interests include medieval Christian constructions of stigma, particularly regarding anti-Judaism, mental illness, and gender; biblical interpretation and retelling; typological associations and oppositions; and the often unpredictable relationship between iconographic compositions and textual sources. Hope is writing her first monograph, Love and anti-Judaism in Medieval English romance: Typologies of violence and desire, which is under contract with Manchester University Press.
Project Title: Edinburgh’s Erfurt Manuscripts: Composition and Collection between the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This fellowship supports Hope’s work on the nineteenth-century acquisition of a distinctive collection of medieval manuscripts by the University of Edinburgh, held in the Centre for Research Collections. The manuscripts were all produced in the fifteenth century in Erfurt, Germany. These manuscripts contain previously unprinted autograph texts authored by Johannes de Indagine, who was a prior and monk at a Carthusian foundation in Erfurt for much of his life, and he may have presided over their compilation and use in Erfurt as a clerical authority. Johannes de Indagine wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs, which he made a concerted effort to spread by donating copies to different clerical houses both around and beyond Germany.
Recent scholarship has identified the importance of the figure of Synagoga, the often-feminised personification of Jewish faith and community in medieval Christian sources, to interpretations of the Song of Songs, a love dialogue from the Hebrew Bible which was a significant focus of exegesis and polemic across the Middle Ages. Theologians such as Bede, Honorius Augustodunensis, and Bernard of Clairvaux wrote extensive commentaries on the relevance of the Song of Songs to Christian life, worship of Christ and Mary, and the end of time. The Erfurt manuscripts also contain earlier texts relating to Synagoga, such as Ekbert of Schönau’s Stimulus amoris. The project will therefore investigate potential links between the texts in the Erfurt compendia, such as these interests in Synagoga and the Song of Songs, to find theological patterns and dialogues between them in the context of anti-Judaic polemic in Latin literature.
The acquisition of the manuscripts in Edinburgh also presents avenues for new research between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Three manuscripts seem to have already been in the Edinburgh collection before the 1840s, the date which Catherine Borland’s catalogue suggests they were acquired. The additional Erfurt manuscripts seem therefore to have been collected in the 1840s through funding acquired in the Reid bequest. This project will aim to provide insights into the local curatorial and academic interest that motivated the building of this Erfurt collection in nineteenth-century Edinburgh.