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The Dragon Prayer Book Project: Studying Northeastern University’s Only Medieval Manuscript

Partially supported by an American Rescue Plan award.

The Dragon Prayer Book Project studies Northeastern University’s only medieval manuscript. This ongoing research involves a comprehensive and multidisciplinary study of the manuscript, conducted primarily by teams of undergraduates. The work of recent years has focused on transcribing, translating, and encoding, with the aim of rendering the manuscript accessible and searchable.

Since the manuscript was discovered in Northeastern’s archives in 2010 by Dr. Erika Boeckeler (English), the team has learned that it was created by and for Dominican nuns not long after 1461. These religious women lived in the Convent of Saint Catherine near the city of Nuremberg in southwestern Germany. A sister with considerably high ranking and wealth owned the Dragon Prayer Book: it contains the spoken parts for the nun who conducted a ritual flagellation, and is made out of animal skin rather than the more inexpensive paper. Convent life revolved around this and similar manuscripts, from which prayers were sung approximately every three hours daily. At the time, the St. Catherine’s Convent possessed the second largest library in Europe; a few decades later, printing presses would flood the continent with more cheaply produced books. Remarkably, many of the library’s books were written in not just Latin, which was then the language of the Catholic liturgy, but also late medieval German, as is the case with the Dragon Prayer Book.

Projects on the Dragon Prayer Book include:

  • Historical research into the convent and religious life in the period
  • Investigations into the manuscript’s notated music and into medieval music, resulting in a chant workshop with Dr. Myke Cuthbert of MIT, and a concert performed by the NU Madrigals
  • A complete transcription and translation of the manuscript, encoded with the goal of offering a searchable side-by-side-by-side web presentation
  • Identification and categorization of all the prayers
  • Research into the source of the paper endpages and the origin of the binding’s unique stamps
  • An alternate reality game accompanying a major exhibit on the manuscript at Northeastern University Snell Library, the library’s first-ever lobby exhibit
  • Bioarchaeological studies:
    • Mass peptide fingerprinting determined that the parchment pages were made from cowskin, the binding was made from sheep, and the glue from rabbit
    • X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) determined the mineral composition of the inks
    • Dirt on the pages has been studied in two ways: 1) with a densitometer, to discover which pages are the dirtiest and thus were most used, 2) through lab testing to both compare the soil on the pages with soil gathered from southwestern German convents, and to determine the book’s bacterial signatures

Future projects hope to explore machine reading applications based on the complete encoded transcription and translation. Possibilities include machine reading other manuscripts from the St. Catherine Convent’s extensive library, which would allow for comparisons of prayers and the liturgical structures in which they occur (e.g. holy mass, matins, vespers, etc.).

The DPB Project has been featured in national and university media, and many undergraduate team members have received competitive grants to conduct their research. The Project regularly holds interactive workshops for the university community.

Principal Investigator

General

  • Laura Packard (former Student Project Manager)
  • Alexis Bond
  • Anna Olivia Smith
  • Kieran Sheldon (Alternate Reality Gamemaster)
  • Zahra Aliyeva

Music

  • Laura Packard
  • Connor Hamill
  • Meghan Jones

Bioarchaeology

  • Amanda Cinelli (Bioarchaeology Lead)
  • Zakary Ganhadeiro (former Bioarchaeology Lead)
  • Shaila Saiffee (former Bioarchaeology Lead)
  • Natalie Hackman
  • Caley Vahedi
  • Shannon DiMuro

Transcription/Translation/Encoding

  • Lucas Faria de Sá Tucker (former Transcription Lead)
  • Savannah Miller (Translation Lead)
  • Alexander Roth (Transcription Lead)
  • Delia-Rose Constantin (Transcription Lead)
  • Andrew-Maynard Goutier (Alex)
  • Edzani Kelapile
  • Sanjana R Kashyap
  • Natalie Hackman
  • Caley Vahedi
  • Shannon DiMuro
  • Armina Parvaresh Rizi
  • Julia Lee
  • Val Goorha
  • Emily Boyle
  • Nishta Gangeddula
  • Pablo Beltran
  • Min Yimsiri
  • Melody Wooster

Expert Consultants

Explore more about the Dragon Prayer Book Project on its website, Dragon Prayer Book Project: Discovering Northeastern’s Only Medieval Manuscript.

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