On 29 January 2026, Professor Yitzhak Hen PhD of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem held a lecture in the MGH online lecture series „Zurück zu den Quellen /Back to the Sources“ with the title „Purifying Texts in the Early Medieval West“.
The international audience with listeners from Germany, England, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and the USA was very impressed both by the presentation itself, which featured a large number of illustrations from early medieval liturgical manuscripts in which non-liturgical and even unorthodox texts were hidden amid the expectable content, and by Hen’s results. Based on the manuscript evidence, Hen was able to show that early medieval monasteries had regionally differentiated approaches to the treatment of „heathen“, unorthodox, and otherwise non canonical texts – in any case, it was not the way that such works were treated by the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos in Umberto Eco’s famous novel „The name of the rose“.
„I have greatly profited from two masterfully thought out and very instructive lectures that I watched on my monitor in December 2025 and this evening. (...) This evening’s lecture by Yitzhak Hen was particularly convincing through his use of the source material and its graphic representation. I would add that his observation that the use of astrological signs and the belief that the Dies Aegyptiaci were bad-luck days, on which one should avoid all forms of activity, were particularly transmitted in manuscripts with liturgical content is also valid for the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. In my work with manuscripts containing memorial texts (anniversary books) in the Staatsarchiv of the Canton Thurgau, I have often seen how unconcerned clerical scribes accepted such „elements of heathen thinking“, obviously considering them as completely compatible with Christian beliefs, copying and handing them down to later generations.“ (Dr Hannes Steiner, former archivist at the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Thurgau, MGH scholarship holder 1997-2000)
For all those who missed the online lecture or would like to further pursue the subject, the following publications are to appear shortly:
- Yitzhak Hen, Western Arianism: Politics and Religious Culture in the Early Medieval West
- In Vorbereitung: Yitzhak Hen, Forbidden Knowledge: The Reception of Unorthodox Texts and practices in the Early Medieval West