In a small room at the campus library at Lewis & Clark College, glass cases keep the dust off a recently acquired set of centuries-old objects.

“Shaping the Soul” is an exhibit of over 30 manuscripts from the Middle Ages, the first of its kind in Portland in almost three decades. The exhibit in the college’s department of special collections displays items that originate from Western Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries. The oldest manuscript on display dates back nearly 800 years.

Karen Gross, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College, helped curate the exhibit from items previously held by a Paris and Chicago-based art dealer.

“[The dealer], kind of like on a cooking show, presented us with a box of ingredients and said, ‘Go make something with it,’” Gross said.

The end result is quite the smörgåsbord of artifacts.

Included in the selection are highly illustrated and personalized prayer books that often bear the marks of their original owners.

“There’s a very sweet psalter, or a book of Psalms, that was owned by a German family, and you can actually see evidence of a child learning how to write on one of the pages in it,” Gross said.

While the Middle Ages are commonly associated with intense religiosity — think of the churches and monasteries that sprouted up all over Medieval Europe — not all the objects in the collection are religious.

Hannah Crummé, head of special collections and college archivist at Lewis & Clark, says her favorite item is actually a legal document that shows a woman in 15th-century France attempting to leave her property to her daughters rather than her husband and sons.

“I love this item because it’s visually striking,” Crummé said. “It isn’t the codex — book — that we’re familiar with, but is instead a large round scroll, and it shows people fighting for their rights 500 years earlier than we really think of.”

Although the types of manuscripts vary — from religious to legal to educational — Gross said every item reveals something about the context in which it was made.

“One of the things that makes these manuscripts so amazing is the way that they embody the whole network of trade, in terms of pigments needing to come from minerals all across Asia or Africa or Northern Europe, plants grown in the Iberian Peninsula, all coming together to then be read by a housewife in England,” she said.

While these documents from the Middle Ages may be more interesting to medieval scholars or college history majors, Gross thinks the exhibit appeals to all visitors, not just medieval scholars or college history majors. For some, that might be an appreciation of the personalized nature of prayer books, which she says resonates with today’s DIY culture.

“Human beings have been wanting to customize their books and make them their own,” Gross said. “[They] have used them and abused them, kissed them [and] scribbled in them for centuries.”

For Crummé, the exhibit allows visitors “to engage with the continuous emotional relationship between people and books, intellectual relationship between people and books [and] how it is that we come to be ourselves through a relationship with text.”

“Shaping the Soul” is free and open to the public until March 6, 2026, at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

Hannah Crummé and Karen Gross spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation:

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/08/think-out-loud-lewis-and-clark-medieval-manuscripts/