Title
Shaping the Soul: Books in Medieval Life
Description
Viewing a medieval manuscript is a profoundly intimate experience. Unlike today’s mass-produced publications, medieval manuscripts are unique, bespoke productions, revealing traces of both their makers and their readers. Medieval books also performed a number of roles: developing moral character through education, nurturing interiority through meditation and prayer, creating community through shared use in worship, forming the public self through legal documentation, and more. Shaping the Soul demonstrates the various ways that people understood themselves and their world through books. Highlights include a nun’s private devotional handbook, a lawyer’s manual with amusing doodles for memory aids, a grand choir book, a thirteenth-century Bible, and sumptuous books of hours.
Curated by Curated by Professor Gross (Professor of English) and Alli Sanders (BA ’26), this exhibition was made possible in part through the Manuscripts in the Curriculum initiative developed by the international art dealer Les Enluminures (Chicago, New York, and Paris). Lewis & Clark was the first liberal arts college to participate in this program. Shaping the Soul also benefited from generous loans made by Phillip J. Pirages’s Fine Books & Manuscripts (McMinnville, Oregon).
The original web-based digital exhibit is available here.
Curated by Curated by Professor Gross (Professor of English) and Alli Sanders (BA ’26), this exhibition was made possible in part through the Manuscripts in the Curriculum initiative developed by the international art dealer Les Enluminures (Chicago, New York, and Paris). Lewis & Clark was the first liberal arts college to participate in this program. Shaping the Soul also benefited from generous loans made by Phillip J. Pirages’s Fine Books & Manuscripts (McMinnville, Oregon).
The original web-based digital exhibit is available here.
Subject
Literature
Creator
Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives
Date
2026-01-12/2026-03-08
Collection