The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project is the 2025 winner of the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies (DHMS) Prize awarded by the Medieval Academy of America!
The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project is a comprehensive resource for the 1,000+ miracle stories written about and the 2,500+ images painted of the Virgin Mary in these African countries, and preserved in Geʿez between 1300 and the present.
PEMM was launched in March 2018 by Professor Wendy Laura Belcher alongside a
“truly impressive, cross-institutional team” to catalog and translate Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), the Ethiopian compilation text that contains these stories. The project was developed in partnership with Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities and received major NEH funding in 2020. The PEMM data portal and web application was launched in fall 2023.
The DHMS awarding committee praises PEMM as “perhaps the only large-scale medieval African text digital humanities project in existence.” PEMM is a shared digital library providing metadata in a centrally available system, allowing users to search across collections from multiple institutions. This benefits the 100+ institutions in the PEMM database by extending the reach of their digital collections.
The project has 33,399 pieces of metadata on 1,000 amazing and surprising stories; 38,110 pieces of metadata on 1,000 manuscripts; 108,144 pieces of metadata on 2,500 beautiful paintings; 2,086 pieces of metadata on 500 archives, and 68,125 pieces of metadata on 3,000 translations, as well as 1,724,512 pieces of metadata in story instance and 39,092 pieces of metadata on keywords.
The awarding committee was “deeply impressed” by the accessibility and sustainability of the site’s architecture and design that makes PEMM an excellent resource for students, scholars, and the general public. The committee also notes the project’s commitment to making sure their data is accessible to “the stories’ original creators”: the Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Egyptians from the Horn of Africa.
The committee continues:
This project truly achieves the most important goals of digital resources: sustainability, usability, and a commitment to the ongoing preservation and access to often-overlooked and unknown stories, texts, and histories. We applaud this monumental achievement.
The Medieval Academy of America is a scholarly community committed to deepening, broadening, and sharing knowledge of the medieval past in an inclusive and equitable way.
Explore the PEMM project here!
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