Hah, I'll be there the day after 😂

(Looking at the image above, it looks to me like they might have re-mounted it differently when it was put back into storage—I seem to recall the hinges being on the sides, which would have worked better for flipping them around. But I may be misremembering!)

I'm sure if I were to write about this manuscript now, I'd have lots of better things to say with over 15 years more medievalist experience behind me, but this was still really "my first" manuscript, and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it popping up here 🥰

You can see the result in this shot of the exhibition, to the left! We preserved the posthumously imposed grid-sequence for the images—I think the black backing makes them look a bit like a series of stained glass windows—but on the other side was the equally patchwork set of carved-up texts.

But while you can use the hinges on the flat mounting to lift the flaps and see the versos, that's obviously not possible during the exhibit. So I asked the curators to reset the pieces for a freestanding display that could be viewed from both sides.

When chopping up these books (🤬), unscrupulous sellers cut right through the "unimportant" side of the page without illustrations (even though these often had some quite lovely decorated initials in red, blue, and gold). And I wanted visitors to understand where these pictures came from.

My very favorite was, of course, this delightful book of hours, or rather what remained of it, and it's what I wrote about in the catalog. Problem was that the original mounting, seen above, only told (literally) one side of the story—there's text on the back of every one of those images.

Our theme was "Repeat, Reveal, React", focusing on the use and meaning of visual repetition. (We had a pretty sweet catalog cover, if I may say so myself 😉)

True to my self-appointed mission in life, I squeezed a few medieval manuscripts, some European, some Arabic, into our show.

I will inquire about the possibilities!

Editing texts is such a valuable community service! It's a real shame it's not given more recognition in many academic funding structures.

Haha, ponhierat seems weirdly specific 😂 The DMF gives the head form as "poignère", which makes sense, but sadly no actual citations :( Guessing it's not a large amount of grain, though!

NB If I wanted, I could also teach the machine what this word is now—this is why having automatic text recognition is no substitute for having humans who can also read these scripts. We always need to be able to have the last word over the computer!

So having been through all that, I don't really know any more than I started out with: these lords had X units of grain, but what that amounted to in real terms is anyone's guess. However, at least I know what the document actually says (and have learned a cool new word to boot)!

"Ponheria" leads me to "poneria", where we learn that... it's a measure of grain used in southern France! 🙃 Cross-checking with the dictionaries of medieval Occitan and Middle French, they agree that it is, indeed, a measure of grain.

How big is it, you may ask? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To the Latin dictionary! Specifically, I'm a huge fan of Logeion, or as I call it, the Latin multi-dictionary, because it combines all the juiciest sources, including the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources and DuCange's excellent medieval Latin glossary. logeion.uchicago.edu