Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) Project

The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary digital humanities project (PEMM) is a comprehensive resource for the miracle stories about the Virgin Mary in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt, and preserved in Gəˁəz parchment manuscripts between 1300 and the present. Directed by Prof. Wendy Laura Belcher and managed by Evgeniia Lambrinaki, PEMM was launched in March 2018, using as its base the miracle story identifications William F. Macomber made in the 1980s.

Dataset. PEMM 1.0 includes much of the data collected by the project from its inception to July 15, 2022, for the whole period of Evgeniia Lambrinaki's management (before she stepped back to pursue a doctorate). This includes 953 identified stories (called Canonical Stories); 491 fully cataloged manuscripts (in Gəˁəz and a few in Arabic) (called Manuscripts); 38,836 stories documented in those manuscripts (called Story Instances); 20,001 typed Gəˁəz incipits (unique first lines) for those stories; and 2,011 paintings with 3489 scenes in 229 manuscripts (called Paintings). The manuscripts come from 79 repositories and libraries around the world (called Collections) and the stories were composed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt (and probably Nubia, although not confirmed), as well as Europe and the Levant (called Story Origins). PEMM is open source, and the current data is available through its Github site, updated hourly: https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/pemm-data

Limitations. The Zenodo PEMM 1.0 dataset does not include some information that PEMM has created, namely its story translations, but also the story keywords created by Princeton students, and some other minor material.

Database. The PEMM Project uses Google Sheets as a lightweight relational database. To learn about this innovative digital humanities approach by Princeton’s CDH’s, read the “Is a Spreadsheet a Database?” (February 21, 2021) article by PEMM lead developer, Rebecca Sutton Koeser.

Website. The current PEMM website (not yet its web application and data portal) is at https://pemm.princeton.edu

Team. PEMM was created in collaboration with Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities (mainly with Rebecca Sutton Koesser, Jean Bauer, and Nicholas Budak, but with additional support from Gissoo Doroudian, Rebecca Munson [of beloved memory], and Kevin McElwee); directed by Prof. Wendy Laura Belcher; managed primarily by Evgeniia Lambrinaki into mid-2022 and then by Blaine Kebede; contributed to by catalogers Jeremy Brown, Mehari Worku, Dawit Muluneh, Solomon Gebreyes, Vitagrazia Pisani, Ekaterina Pukhovaia, and Steve Delamarter; web programmed by Henok Alem; edited by Taylor Eggan; assisted by Bret Windhauser; typed by volunteers (including Mihret Melaku, Tariku Abas Sherif, Beimnet Beyene Kassaye, Annabel S. Lemma, Tsega-ab Hailemichael, Chiara Lombardi, and Ellen Perleberg); and translatated and/or summarized by Princeton undergraduates (including Lauren D. Johnson, Sana Khan, Jason O. Seavey, Leia R. Walker, Nati Arbelaez Solano, Daniel Somwaru, Mika J. Hyman, Grace Matthews, Allie V. Mangel, Ellen Li, Elliot Galvis). Support at Princeton is provided by Michael Franz.

Partners. Among its board members are Elias Wondimu, Melaku Terefe, Solomon Gebreyes, Eyob Derillo, Meron Gebreananaye, Sofanit T. Abebe, Habte Michael Kidane, Hagos Abrha, Mussie Berhe, Woldesemait Teklehaymanot, and Alessandro Bausi. Among PEMM’s institutional partners are Beta Maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies of the Universität Hamburg, created and directed by Principal Investigator Alessandro Bausi; Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, led by Father Columba Stewart; and the British Library, Asian and African Collections, with Eyob Derillo as cataloger.

Internal Funding. PEMM’s first and second phase were made possible by the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities, directed by Meredith Martin, and its team of Natalia Ermolaev, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Gissoo Doroudian, Rebecca Munson (of beloved memory), Nick Budak, and Kevin McElwee. The second phase was supported by a CDH Research Partnership grant. The third phase was funded by the Princeton Humanities Council, executive directed by Kathleen Crown, through the David A. Gardner Innovation Grants for New Projects in the Humanities, and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Other important funders throughout were the Princeton Department of African American Studies, directed by the Eddie S. Glaude, as well as the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (directed by Wallace Best), the Program in African Studies (directed by Emmanuel Kreike and now Chika Okeke-Agulu), the Center for the Study of Religion (directed by Jonathan Gold), and the Department of Comparative Literature (directed by Thomas Hare).

External funding. PEMM’s fourth phase was made possible by two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded for work from fall 2021 through summer 2024. In the 1970s, NEH provided funding for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library (EMML), which microfilmed thousands of manuscripts in Ethiopia, which serve as the backbone for the PEMM project. Today, the NEH Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations Grant funds the team of experienced researchers with rare language skills to catalog stories in parchment manuscripts, translate stories into English, and write short introductions to them. The NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant funds a public-facing open-access web application and data portal to share the stories in, images about, translations of, and scholarship on this crucial body of medieval African literature and to build upon our innovative prototype tool for searching in Gəˁəz.