History

Introduction

Gallery of Glosses is a digital humanities project that was born in the traditional world of scholarship with the aim of producing an analogue, print edition. The focus of study was glosses on the Gospel of Matthew. Early research indicated that project would only be worthwhile and advance scholarship beyond what was readily available in the editio princeps of the Glossa ordinaria of Adolph Rusch (1480/81) if textual development of the glosses in twelfth-century manuscripts was discernible. In fact, such textual development was discernible, but the complex array of variant glosses and numbers of glosses and positions of glosses created seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a print edition. More to the point, a print edition with standard apparatus seemed insufficient and not the ideal format in which to present the data. As a result, the project turned into a digital humanities one.

Prototyping

In 2020, Atria Larson, with the support and partnership of Patrick Cuba, won an internal research grant from Saint Louis University, a President’s Research Fund award. The grant allowed the creation of “Glossing Matthew,” where the test case for the first RERUM platform for recording glosses consisted of glosses from sixteen twelfth-century manuscripts on Matthew 5. This grant served as seed funding to demonstrate proof of concept that could be beneficial in applications for an external award.

The Gospel of Matthew

The external grant application expanded “Glossing Matthew” into “Gallery of Glosses.” The intent was to open the platform to multiple genres of text and ensure that the workflow of the data-management platform facilitated usage by scholars in different disciplines working with glosses on different kinds of texts. The grant application for a Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities was successful; it was awarded in August 2022.

The two-year grant funded significant development work on the RERUM site, the creation of large amounts of data in the form of hundreds of transcribed glosses with attendant data, and this first iteration of a public-facing website. The grant also supported the participation of a group of external test users. All of them have expertise in digital humanities and an interest in glosses, and they come from different disciplines. These participants provided feedback in the second year of the grant through an online meeting and in-person workshops and a panel at the 11th Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, June 10-12, 2024. Additionally, the grant funded travel to and a presentation on Gallery of Glosses to the world of canon law scholarship at the 17th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, held in Canterbury, England in July 2024.