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The Liber Memorialis Project: Updates
The Liber Memorialis is entering its second year and is going strong! Several new students joined the team, and others continued from last year. They have been meeting weekly to finalize translations of the text, and are also hard at work on materials like podcasts and lesson plans that can be used in high-school and middle-school classrooms. The final product will be open access, and can be integrated (for free!) into Blackboard and Canvas learning management systems. New Members: Julia Womersley-Jackson, Riley Kozal, Madeline Baird, and Hollis Martin. Continuing Members:, Benjamin McClarty, Patrick Carpenter, Hannah Ryan, and Elissa Press.
The Project also received an “Arts and Sciences Exchange” award from the Office of the Provost to
support their partnership with Swem Libraries. We are pictured here at the awards night ceremony,
where we presented our work to an audience of the public, talking about Roman children, our translation process, and why we believe that open-access publications are the future of our field. It was a pretty glamorous affair – we sort of felt like we were on Oprah!
Finally, some formal scholarship arising from the project was accepted to be presented at CAMWS this year. Professor Swetnam-Burland, Patrick Carpenter ’28, and Ben McClarty ’27 wrote a paper titled “Miracula, Myth, and Memory in L. Ampelius’ Liber Memorialis,” exploring a section of the text that features the wonders of the ancient world. We were able to show that the treatment of sanctuaries, statues, and other unusual phenomena in the Liber Memorialis related to the practice of “mythography” (writing about myths).
Want to learn more: check out our website! https://sites.google.com/wm.edu/the-liber-memorialis-project/home