The action-adventure movies he watched as a kid shaped the direction Zach Hines took in life, especially when he chose a major (anthropological archeology) and a study area (medieval manuscripts).
“I loved Indiana Jones. I love the idea that buried somewhere was a historical object that would change the world, and so my life has been metaphorically all about digging up the past and trying to, you know, expose to the world all kinds of cool stuff that people didn't know or don't know exists,” he said.
Today, Dr. Hines is an assistant professor of English specializing in medieval literature, manuscript culture, and the history of books. Hines’ work is not as dangerous as Jones’ unless you count paper cuts and super-chilled reading rooms, but it is fascinating.
“I am really lucky that my job enables me to do a lot of different kinds of business, and I describe my job most often as getting to be curious,” he said.
While research and service are a big part of what he does, Dr. Hines spends a great deal of time in the classroom. “I teach a lot of students, and I teach everything from first-year composition classes to these highly specialized classes for English majors and history majors. Every student at Ohio State, more or less, has to take these classes where we sit down and talk about how to write, how to think critically.”
He learns something new with every group of students and marks down the ideas that really strike him in the books he teaches from. Students love that learning goes both ways from teacher to learner.
“First year writing classes are classes that not all students want to be in. They are requirements that students have to take, so I try to make it as fun as possible. I remind them that the goal here is not for me to teach you about the Middle Ages or literature,” Dr. Hines said. “The goal here is for me to teach you how to think, how to argue, how to write persuasively. I encourage them to bring their own perspective, their own ideas, their own background, their own faith, their own potential major for the future. And that really changes what students think about these classes.”
The books of the Middle Ages were beautiful, complex investments built to last. The pages are made of animal hides, which necessitates heavy covers with strong clasps to keep the pages from returning to their original shapes. Dr. Hines’ study interests span from those made of hides into those printed on the early printing presses in the west. There is something about them that spans the centuries.
“A lot of scholars remember their first encounter with a manuscript. It's a very cool thing, because it is not what you expect, even if someone's read a lot of books. Most pre-modern books are not made of paper, they're made out of animal skin, so calf skin or goat skin. It's very, very difficult to tell what kind of skin you're made of that have been meticulously prepared and then cut and folded and collated and written on. And when you touch one for the first time, it's so surprising because it doesn't feel like paper. It’s remarkably durable, and the substrate kind of smells.”
While the Ark of the Covenant has remained elusive, Dr. Hines has found binding nails and human hairs in the books that had been in place since the book was bound nearly a thousand years ago. It is exciting. He never knows exactly what he will find when he sits down to take a look.
“The secret is you have to go and look at a thousand books. You have to call up every single book that might possibly have something, and you kind of know what you are looking for, but you do not know that you are going to find it. And so a lot of times, I have never found anything that I thought I was looking for. But there is always something to be discovered,” Dr. Hines said. “There are real people that produced these books and real people whose stories have been lost.”
He collects facsimiles of manuscripts, particularly those of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works. He likes having them and brings them to his students.
“It is so useful in teaching. I can bring it to the classroom and open it up. So, these things are fully digitized. Students could look online, zoom in to like the quarter inch,” Dr. Hines said. “But it is something different, holding it in your hands, even though it is a copy. It is a facsimile. It is a reproduction. There is still something to being able to hold an object in your hands.”
Sometimes those objects frustrate the students. While you might think the hardest part of studying manuscripts would be the cursive script, you would be wrong. It’s the abbreviations that change with each scribe and sometimes with each sentence.
“I had this really great student who was just so frustrated she could not figure it out what these words were. It was the same word spelled five different ways in five different lines. Spelling just wasn't a thing that was particularly important in the Middle Ages,” Dr. Hines said. “The writing, spelling, syntax, it's all very different. It takes students some time to get used to. They get good at it, and there's something so satisfying for them about being able to read something in your language, but an older version of your language, a native speaker, that is 600 years old. Most of these students will not have lots of foreign languages, and being able to read something old in the language it was written, there is something really cool about that.”
