The Team
Professor Julia Smith
Chichele Professor of Medieval History
All Souls College, University of Oxford
Crafting Documents, c. 500- c. 800 CE grew out of my interest in the cult of relics in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Dissatisfied with trends in the study of saints and hagiography, a decade or so ago I decided to focus my own attention on the post-mortem careers of Roman martyrs, and in this context I stumbled by chance on references to relic labels. Two realisations rapidly followed: that early medieval relic labels survive by the hundreds but have never been systematically studied as a historical source, and that the numerous relic inventories from the same centuries are proxies for labels which no longer exist. My recent publications have been devoted to exploring this large corpus of neglected historical texts, with a strong emphasis on relics as a form of material culture. But relic labels themselves are as much material culture as text, and I soon became equally fascinated in them as artefacts of a distinctive documentary materiality.
In 2020, my friend and colleague at the University of Warsaw Robert Wiśniewski mentioned to me a former student of his who had become a specialist in the conservation of ancient books, and offered to put us in touch. So I entered into email correspondence with Grzegorz Nehring, by then working in Berlin as a postdoc under Professor Ira Rabin in the 'Analysis of Artefacts and Cultural Assets Division' of the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM), the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing. I sent Greg a small selection of photos, which he showed to Ira, who was immediately interested. Many emails and Zoom conversations later, we won the Anglo-German AHRC-DFG award which funds Crafting Documents, a happy reminder of the importance of serendipity to academic research.
Professor Ira Rabin
Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Berlin
Simon and Hallsworth Visiting Professor, John Rylands Research Institute and Library Manchester
Ira Rabin studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Between 1979 and 1983 she worked as a student and later as a staff member of the Conservation Department of the Jewish National and University Library (JNUL), with specialisation paper and parchment conservation. In 1983, she returned to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to continue her studies in physical chemistry, particularly in mass spectrometry. In 1987 she moved to Berlin, where she obtained a PhD degree in physical chemistry at the Max-Planck-Society in collaboration with the Free University. Until 2003 she worked in basic research in cluster physics in the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society and continued her research on parchment but as a hobby. Since 2003 her main research interest has been dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Between 2005 - 2007 she worked in Israel as a scientific advisor to the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Jewish National Library. 2007 - 2010 she coordinated the international Qumran project. Currently besides conducting research dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls and history of black writing inks she is working towards including ink composition into description of historical manuscripts.
Professor Oliver Hahn
Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Berlin
Oliver Hahn received his PhD in Chemistry in 1996. After a stint spent as a research associate in the Department for Restoration and Conservation of Books, Graphic Arts and Archival Materials at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, he now works for the BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin. His areas of special interest include the scientific analysis of manuscripts, drawings, paintings, pigments and inks as well as the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage. Hahn is head of the institute’s Division 4.5 “Analysis of Artefacts and Cultural Assets”. Since 2014, he is Professor at the University of Hamburg, Arts Faculty. The Division 4.5 keeps a close collaboration with the CSMC at Hamburg University.
Current research projects located at the CSMC and BAM deal with the non-destructive investigation of manuscripts by means of different non-invasive analytical techniques. The qualitative and quantitative investigation of writing inks using micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis is a suitable method for obtaining composition fingerprints of different materials. Manuscripts under investigation include different manuscripts such as W.A. Mozart’s “Magic Flute”, G. Büchner’s “Woyzeck”, J. W. v. Goethes “Faust”, J.S. Bach’s “Mass in B minor”, as well as “Genizah Fragments” and the “Dead Sea Scrolls”. In addition, he works towards estimation of potential risks induced by volatile organic compounds coming from construction materials. To this aim, the atmosphere and air exchange rate within exhibit cases are monitored in collaboration with several museums and manufacturers.
Dr Ana de Oliveira Dias
Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Ana’s primary areas of research are intellectual and visual culture in early medieval Iberia and Continental Europe, c. 500-1000 CE, with a strong focus on manuscript production and reception. In Crafting Documents, she will be conducting a detailed analysis of the selected sets of relic labels to assess penmanship and scribal practices in the period, and to explore how the cult of saints affected, and supported, the development of writing technologies in the early Middle Ages.
Ana received her Ph.D. in medieval History from Durham University in 2019 and, prior to joining the University of Oxford, she was a lecturer in early medieval history at Durham (2021-2023), a visiting fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester (2021), and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, in the ERC-funded project ‘CULTIVATE MSS’ (2020-2021).
Dr José Andres Porras
Wadham College, University of Oxford
jose.andresporras@history.ox.ac.uk
José is a historian of intellectual, cultural, and social history of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages. He finished his DPhil in 2023 at the University of Oxford, in which he explored how intellectual and social attitudes towards biological descent in the period 1250-1400 changed as a result of the rediscovery of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine. More generally, his research explores how natural philosophy, medicine, theology, and political thought shaped conceptions of human personhood and society. He is a collaborator in the project Reading the Holy Land, led by Prof. Jonathan Rubin (University of Bar-Ilan) and funded by the Israel Science Foundation, for which he has helped develop a database with twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries Latin accounts of the Holy Land and their manuscripts.
Since 2023, he has worked as research assistant for the Crafting Documents project, being responsible for the design and development of the project's main database.
