About Me

My name is Will Noel, and I am Director of The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  Before that, I was Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to that I was British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History of Art, Cambridge University, and before even that I was Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.The best way to get hold of me is my email: wgnoel@upenn.edu, or Twitter @willnoel.

My area of expertise is medieval illuminated manuscripts.  I have also directed various digital projects, including the Archimedes Palimpsest project, and a project to digitize the illuminated manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum.  I am committed to creating machine readable data sets of medieval manuscripts that can be used for free, by anybody, for any purpose.Below are some of the things I have been involved in:

Profiles

WHITE HOUSE BLOG: Open Science Champion of Change, 2013

TED BLOG: The Wide Open Future of the Art Museum, 2011

A Conversation with Bmore Media, 2011


The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, with Reviel Netz, London, 2007.

The Oxford Bible Pictures, Faksimile Verlag, Luzern and The Walters Art Museum, 2004.

Manuscripts in the Schoyen Collection . IV Medieval Seal Matrices, with Richard Linenthal, 2004.

The Harley Psalter: Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 4, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Books Edited

The Archimedes Palimpsest, with Reviel Netz, Natalie Tchernetska, and Nigel Wilson, 2 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 2011

The Medieval Book. Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, with James Marrow and Richard Linenthal, Hes & De Graaf, 2010.

Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum and Related Essays in Honor of Gary Vikan, Journal of the Walters Art Museum, 63, 2004, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 2005.

The Book of Kings: Art, War, and The Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, with D. Weiss, Lingfield, Surrey, and Baltimore, 2002.

New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art in Honour of  George Henderson, with P. Binski, Stroud, 2001.

The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, with K. van der Horst and W.C.M.Wustefeld, London/MS t’Goy, 1996.


Articles


"Some Transatlantic Trails of W. de Brailes", in James Marrow, Richard Linenthal and William Noel (eds.), The Medieval Book. Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, Hes & De Graaf, 2010.

With Roger L. Easton Jr., “Infinite Possibilities: Ten Years of Study of the Archimedes Palimpsest”,  Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 154.1, March 2010, pp.50-76.

With D. Emery, M.B. Toth, 'The convergence of information technology and data management for digital imaging in museums', Museum Management and Curatorship, 24: 4, 337-356 (2009).

 “William De Brailes in Baltimore, Paris, and Stockholm”, in J. Hamburger and A. Korteweg (eds) Tributes in Honor of James Marrow, Brepols and Harvey Miller, 2006.

“The Multispectral Imaging of the Archimedes Palimpsest”, with Roger Easton, Gazette du Livre Médiévale, 45, 2004, pp.39-49.

“Books in the Home: Psalters and Books of Hours”, in J. Van der Stock (ed), Medieval Mastery: Flemish book illumination from the time of Charles the Great to Philip the Bold, Exhibition Catalogue, Leuven, 2002, pp.57-67.

“The First Iconographer of the Picture Bible”, in W. Noel and D. Weiss (eds),  The Book of Kings: Art, War, and The Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, 2002, pp.109-119.

“The Archimedes Palimpsest: Old Science Meets New Science”, Proceedings of the PICS Conference in Digital Image Capture, Montreal, April 2001.

“Psalters”, in J. Tanis (ed), Leaves of Gold: Manuscripts from Philadelphia Collections, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Exhibition Catalogue, 2001, pp.44-58.

“From Calf to Codex” with Abigail Quandt in J. Tanis (ed), Leaves of Gold: Manuscripts from Philadelphia Collections, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Exhibition Catalogue, 2001, pp.14-20.

“Medieval Charades and the Visual Syntax of the Utrecht Psalter”, in B. Cassidy (ed), Studies in Medieval Psalter Illustration, Stamford, 2000, pp.34-41.

“The Art of the Printed Book before Durer” (with Abigail Cuthbertson), in The Book Arts in the Age of Durer, W. Noel, S. Dackerman, and B. Miller (eds), Exhibition Catalogue, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2000, pp.5-11.

 “The Lost Canterbury Prototype of the11th-Century Bury St Edmunds Psalter”, in A. Gransden (ed), Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy. The British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, XX, London, 1998, pp.161-171.

 “Het Utrechts Psalterium”, with K. van der Horst, Kunstschrift, August 1996.

 “The Utrecht Psalter in England 1000-1350: Continuity and Experiment” in K. van der Horst, W. Noel, and W.M.C. Wustefeld (eds), The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art; Picturing the Psalms of David, London/ MS t’Goy, 1996, pp.121-165.

“The Division of Work in the Harley Psalter”, in L.L. Brownrigg (ed), Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production, Los Altos Hills, 1995, pp.1-15.