Dear DM-L Colleagues,

I and two colleagues have just published a study correcting a “misdiagnosed” plague image from the 14th century:  Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, and Wolfgang Müller, “Diagnosis of a ‘Plague’ Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1 (Fall 2014), 309-26, available open-access at: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/.  (Open-access funding was underwritten in this case by the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.)

I’m sending notification to this list because this study may have implications for the wider Digital Medievalist community. What we argue is that a mistaken label was attached to an image being sold in the British Library’s “Images Online” database (where high-quality images are sold for a fee): the BL labels it “Plague victims blessed by priest." As far as we were able to determine, the misinformation originated with the staff of the BL and did not come from earlier scholarly misinterpretations. We argue that in fact it is clearly an image of leprosy—a “reading” of the image supported both by medieval iconographic traditions and, more importantly, by the text which surrounds the image in its original manuscript context.  (We provide a full edition and translation of the Latin text in our study.) 

The British Library has been apprised of our study, and they responded that they do intend to alter the meta-data attached to the image in their databases. I assume that also means that they will cease to market it as a “plague” image. (Images Online is the fee-based distribution office of the BL; the image is also available, at a lower resolution, in the BL Illuminated Manuscripts catalogue, where it is under a CC0 license.) Even if they correct the metadata, however, there is no way to “take back” all the incorrect uses of the image, given how widely it has already been disseminated into popular culture with the mistaken interpretation. (Most recently, in the BBC’s History magazine, October 2014, p. 90.)

I am not a coder myself and have only a user’s appreciation of the technical side of Digital Humanities.  Still, given that metadata might well be seen as having a comparable value to the medieval texts and images we are concerned to digitize and/or analyze digitally, I thought this might be a case that people might find instructive.

Please feel free to contact me directly (monica.green@asu.edu) should you have any further questions about the image or our study.