Project Members

Jonathan Rubin

Jonathan Rubin teaches at the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar Ilan University, Israel. His work focuses on two main themes: the intellectual history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and travel literature. Among his publications are: “The Manuscript Tradition of Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terre Sancte,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 30 (2020), pp. 257-286; “Spiritual and Practical Instructions for Pilgrims: A Preliminary Presentation of Two Unknown Texts,” Mediterranean Historical Review 35.2 (2020), pp. 211-218; and Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291 (Cambridge, 2018).

Jose Maria Andres Porras

Jose Maria Andres Porras is a postdoctoral associate member at the Faculty of History at Oxford University. He has recently graduated from his DPhil student in History having previously completed a BA in History and Political Science and a MA in History at the University of Haifa, Israel. His doctoral research, funded by the AHRC and St Hugh’s College, examined attitudes towards biological descent in late medieval Tuscany with a special focus on the interaction between intellectual ideas and social practice. He is interested in late medieval intellectual and social history, the history of medicine, and has always had a great passion for manuscript studies, codicology, and palaeography which he deepened at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, the Medici Archive Project in Florence, and the Beinecke Library at Yale. He works as research assistant in the ‘Reading the Holy Land’ project and has been focusing on the creation of the database with the manuscripts of our corpus, the edition of some minor works of it, and the study of texts from the corpus.

Rahel Salquin

After decades as a freelance tour guide, touring with groups all across Israel, Rahel Salquin is currently studying at the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archeology at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. She is passionate about the archeology of the Crusader Kingdom in the Holy Land, and working as a research assistant in the project “Reading the Holy Land” constitutes a great opportunity to combine archeology with historical and geographical sources pertaining to this time period.

Laura Nuvoloni

Laura Nuvoloni is a manuscripts and early printed books curator and cataloguer. Having studied Italian Philology at the University of Venice and Latin Palaeography at King’s College London with Professor A.C. de la Mare, she worked in the Departments of Western Medieval Manuscripts at Sotheby’s London and the British Library and the Department of Rare Books at Cambridge University Library. She was the principal cataloguer of the Guilford Manuscripts and the Medieval Medical Harley Manuscripts at the British Library, and the Incunabula Collection at Cambridge University Library. She presently is the Curator of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at Holkham Hall Library. Her research interests focus on the codicology, palaeography, decoration, production, and provenance history of manuscripts, documents and printed books produced in Europe until the early 16th century. As a collaborator to the ‘Reading the Holy Land’ project, she concentrates in dating the scripts and assessing the place of origin of the manuscript copies of the texts and of their medieval owners and annotators.

Tilmann Gaitzsch

Tilmann Gaitzsch studied Theology in Leipzig, Thessaloniki, and Zürich, and Levantine Archaeology in Tel Aviv. He is currently writing his PhD in Old Testament Studies at the University of Leipzig. During his undergraduate and graduate years, he gave tuitions in ancient Hebrew and Greek, and worked for the Minerva Center Members Prof. Angelika Berlejung and Prof. Takayoshi Oshima. He was involved in planning the conference and the publication on “Teaching Morality in Antiquity” and in Prof. Berlejung’s project on “Textual Amulets Between Scribal Magic and Materiality”. His research focuses on Mediterranean connectivity and medical history especially during the biblical periods of the southern Levant. Another field of his interest are ancient languages and their historical trajectories. This triggered his participation in the project “Reading the Holy Land” which makes the multilingual reality of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem especially apparent.

PAST MEMBERS

Henri Gourinard

Born in France, Henri Gourinard earned an MA in medieval history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) and at the University of Poitiers (France). He is currently lecturing in historical geography and history of the Near East at the Polis Institute (Jerusalem). His main research interests are the history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the birth and the evolution of traditions attached to holy sites.

As a licensed tour guide, Henri Gourinard is currently involved in developing historical content for a visitor center, in Abu Ghosh (Israel) and a pilgrimage-hiking trail in the Holy Land.