Name: Sarah Kurth
Class Year: 2028
Major: Intended History of Art, Spanish
 
Internship Organization:  Bryn Mawr Department of Spanish
Internship Title:   Digital Humanities Fellow
Location:  Virtual/Salt Lake City, UT
 
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!  

I’ve been transcribing Spanish Inquisition trial documents housed at the University of Pennsylvania. I completed transcriptions of five trials, each centered around a woman accused of being a false convert from Islam to Catholicism. I read through the folios in their entirety, created a plain-text copy in a working document, and included short summaries of the content at the bottom of each page. To finalize my internship, I authored a blog published at UPenn. I’ve really enjoyed getting a look at what daily life looked like for the five women before and after their imprisonments by the Inquisition.  

Folio 893 from the Henry Charles Lea Collection Ms. 728

Why did you apply for this internship?

I’d been doing Paleography work during the Spring Semester with Professor Phipps, and had fallen in love with the process of transcription as well as the content within these primary documents. I thought that this internship would be an amazing opportunity to explore what a focus of career in a similar field could look like. I’m so excited to continue my work this year and in the future, potentially through a senior thesis.
 
Was there anything special about how you found this internship? 

I found it through being the facilitator for Professor Phipps’ Paleography Working Group, a weekly meeting of interested students that I’m excited to continue working on this coming year. 

What has been your favorite part of this internship? 

my transcription

I was consistently moved by the stories included in the trial’s witness testimonies. There were so many beautiful moments of female relationships across the five trials. It’s staggering to witness events that occurred 500 years ago, that could have just as easily happened last week, like two sisters being sent to sleep over at their friends house while their parents were out of town. 

Can you give us three adjectives and three nouns that describe your internship experience? 

Tragic, beautiful, nuanced. Spain, religion, justice. 

Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you? 

Paleography is such a specific skill, and I’ve loved getting to familiarize myself with specific notary’s scripts, as well as the general vocabulary and formatting of Inquisition trials. Even if I don’t go into a paleography-related field as a career, I think that the critical thinking skills and added Spanish vocabulary will aid me in the future. 

What is most rewarding about your internship? 

Getting to familiarize myself with women whose lives were not evaluated positively. It’s my hope that my work this summer will make the trails more accessible to future engagement and research, broadening the impact of these women’s trials on Inquisition scholarship. 

Was this internship what you expected it to be? 

Everything and more!