Library Faculty Member Receives Research Grant from Spanish Government

Susan L’Engle, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the Vatican Film Library in the University Libraries Special Collections, has been awarded a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness as a member of a collaborative project entitled “Illuminated Manuscripts during the Last Centuries of the Middle Ages for the Monarchy, Church, and Aristocracy in the Kingdoms and States of Southern Europe.” She is one of six other scholars from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Germany participating in a three-year project organized by Professor Josefina Planas of the University of Lleida (Spain), the purpose of which is to support research and publication on manuscript production in southern Europe in the late Middle Ages.

For this project, Dr. L’Engle will focus on one of her areas of expertise: the illumination of fourteenth-century Italian manuscripts of the Legend of Troy. The retelling of the history of Troy had a long tradition in the Middle Ages, adapted from the ancient works on the Trojan War by Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius. Two important medieval versions are Benoît de Saint-Maure’s twelfth-century Roman de Troie, written in Old French verse, and Guido delle Colonne’s thirteenth-century Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy), a narrative account written in Latin prose. Dr. L’Engle will be undertaking research on a lavishly illustrated Venetian manuscript of this latter text, MS 17805 at the Biblioteca nacional in Madrid. She will conduct her research in Spanish libraries in early 2014.