Dr. Elza Tiner, Latin professor at University of Lynchburg, will talk about the research she did for the current exhibit, “Image + Text in Renaissance Folios,” at 2 p.m. Sunday, November 5, at the Daura Gallery. The talk, “Image + Text: A Detective Odyssey,” is open to the public and admission is free.
The exhibit, which runs through December 10, includes more than 60 Renaissance-era folios — basically 16th- and 17th-century book pages — that Dr. Tiner translated from the original French, German, and Latin to English. She did much of the research this past spring and summer during a fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Tiner has a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the Institute and was a visiting scholar there over the summers of 2012 through 2014. She also has master’s and doctorate degrees from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.
In addition to translating the folios, Dr. Tiner tried to determine from which books they had been removed. She said it required a lot of “detective work” and was a long, complicated process. When necessary, she sought help from other scholars.
“I sometimes started by translating the French, German, or Latin, to get a sense of what the text or image is about,” she said. “Then I looked up information about it, such as scripture in early French or the Vulgate Bible, for assistance with the translation, and then proceeded to identify the book that once held it.
“The entire process took about eight hours of work per image, sometimes more, sometimes less. The translation of the Latin pages took several workdays because of the extensive commentaries with the lines, which I also translated.”
