Weigh Your Books!

Experience the Episode

Presented by Medieval Institute

Sit down with Dr. Andrew Irving, assistant professor of religion and heritage at the University of Groningen. We talk with him about his journey to Medieval Studies, his work on the 11th century Uta Codex, why one should always weigh their books, and why liturgy is like a Wagnerian opera.

Meeting in the Middle Ages is hosted by Will Beattie and Ben Pykare, both Ph.D. candidates at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. The podcast is sponsored by the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame and supported by the Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee through their Community Building Award.

Meet the Moderator: Will Beattie

Will Beattie is a Medieval Studies Ph.D. candidate at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. He studies the development of apocalyptic vernacular preaching in early medieval England, particularly through anonymous texts.

Meet the Moderator: Ben Pykare

Ben Pykare is a Medieval Studies Ph.D. student at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. He studies mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the late medieval period, examining competing political and religious claims, mutual influences, and shared spaces.

Meet the Speaker: Andrew Irving '12 Ph.D.

Dr. Andrew J. M. Irving is a tenured Assistant Professor of Religion and Cultural Heritage at the University of Groningen and director of the Centre for Religion and Heritage. Irving conducts research on the material culture of Christianity and contribute to the faculty’s teaching profile (BA, MA, thesis supervision) through his expertise, notably in material culture and religion, manuscript studies and liturgical studies. His position will be located in the department of Christianity and the History of Ideas, a multidisciplinary department with a strong focus on cultural heritages. In this position, he is to help the department’s current Institute for Christian Cultural Heritage (ICCE) transition to a more inclusive Centre for Religion and Heritage that will co-ordinate ongoing, and stimulate new, research activities on material and intangible religious heritage.

Irving’s expertise in research and teaching intersects material culture, manuscript studies and liturgical studies. In his theological training, he specialized in pastoral theology (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and in liturgical studies (University of Notre Dame, USA) before undertaking his doctoral research in Medieval Studies (Medieval Institute, Notre Dame, USA). His dissertation research centered on Gospel books produced at Montecassino in the late eleventh century, a high-point of the Abbey’s cultural and political influence. He has taught liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, Trinity College, Huron University College and Yale University; patristic and medieval church history at The General Theological Seminary in New York; and Latin at Notre Dame.

Irving’s research concerns the relationship between material aspects of manuscripts, their use and the history of Christian worship, and entails detailed physical examination of liturgical books in manuscript libraries across Europe. He is developing a large-scale project to investigate changes across Europe in the design and use of a book of central importance for the celebration of the Mass in the Middle Ages: the ‘missal’. In addition, he is involved in two international digital humanities projects: the Digital Schoolbook on the transmission and reception of the Distichs of Cato, a foundational text in Western education from late Antiquity into the early modern era; and a spectral imaging project on palimpsested manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

Reconsidering Uta: On the Affordances of a Liturgical Book

Celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Medieval Institute with the third in that year’s series of alumni lectures. We brought Andrew Irving ’12 Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Religion and Heritage at the University of Groningen, back to campus.

What does a liturgical book do and how does it do it? The Uta Codex, a famous gospel book produced at the Abbey of Sankt Emmeram in the first third of the eleventh century named after its donor, Abbess Uta, has been called “perhaps the most important work of Western Illumination of its day” (Swarzenski 1901). Its complex illumination series and its much reworked treasure box have received extensive scholarly attention (Cohen 2000; Pfändtner & Gullath 2012). What has remained largely absent from analysis, however, is a wholistic consideration of what this astounding book and box was for. On the basis of careful material analysis this lecture will use affordance theory to re-examine the uses of the book, and explore the implications for the description and analysis of liturgical manuscripts more generally.

Alumni Interview with Andrew Irving Ph.D., '12