Digital Proceedings of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age

Charters Encoding Initiative Overview

Georg Vogeler — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:51:35 PDT

The Charters Encoding Initiative considers the possibilities of a standard to encode medieval and early modern charters with XML. It represents a working group to notify our intention to work continuously together, to spread our proposals in the scientific community and to integrate them into existing standards especially the guidelines of the TEI. See also http://www.cei.lmu.de/.

Digitized Manuscripts and Open Licensing

Hugh Cayless — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:51:34 PDT

This report examines the issue of copyright law in digitizing manuscripts and making images available online. Specifically, it looks at the possible solutions provided by Creative Commons.

Panel Report: Legal Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age

Timothy Stinson — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:50:27 PDT

Following the model established by the previous year’s Symposium, the 2nd Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age concluded with a panel discussion. The overarching topic of the panel was open access and the digitization of medieval legal documents. The panel comprised a group of scholars with diverse specializations, including medieval legal history, medieval charters, information science, papyrology, and epigraphy.

Early Islamic Legal Manuscripts: What we know; what we may yet discover

Jonathon Brockopp — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:41:38 PDT

Forty years ago, Fuat Sezgin completed what is still our only survey of early Islamic legal manuscripts (in the first volume of his Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums). Since that time, Joseph Schacht drew the attention of the scholarly community to important collections of manuscripts in Fez, Kairouan, and Tunis, and Miklos Muranyi has published a series of articles and books probing the riches of these collections. But much more work remains to be done. The Kairouan collection is of particular importance. Virtually uncatalogued, this collection contains some of the oldest legal manuscripts in Arabic, including fragments datable to the early ninth century CE. In this paper, I will review the accomplishments of scholars thus far and suggest some of the ways that further study of these manuscripts can increase our understanding of the development, practice, and study of early Islamic law.

Readers in the Margins: Pictorializing the Study of Roman Law

Susan L'Engle — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:41:37 PDT

The shortened version of the paper presented here will address the various types of marks--graphic and pictorial--made by readers in the margins of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century manuscripts of Roman law. The graffiti and their multiple functions will be discussed in the context of the early teaching and study of law, particularly in Bologna.

A scholarly version of this paper will appear in the Festschrift for Richard and Mary Rouse, edited by Christopher Baswell, Sandra Hindman, and Consuelo Dutschke, published by Brepols, and slated to come out in 2010.

Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection in the Free Library of Philadelphia

Kathleen E. Kennedy — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:39:43 PDT

The Hampton L. Carson Collection of Anglo-American Common Law comprises one of the largest collections of English common law manuscripts in North America. The statute collections in the Carson Collection provide samples illustrating a range of topics of central importance to the study of English legal history, bibliography, and medieval English culture. LC 14 20.5 and LC 14.21 date to around 1300, and are among the earliest statute collections, copied as the nature of statutes as law was still developing. LC 14 09. 5 dates to the later fifteenth century, as legal manuscripts were beginning to compete with print. MS 14 09 5's illuminations have been used to identify a group of manuscript artists who seem to have specialized in legal manuscripts. In "Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection" I will introduce these manuscripts and others as I assess the usefulness of the collection for scholarly research.

Henry Charles Lea: Jurisprudence and Civilization

Edward Peters — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:37:01 PDT

During the same nineteenth century when the modern study of legal history got underway in Europe, from Savigny to the Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917, Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909), an ocean away and without a serious library in sight, undertook the study of several aspects of ecclesiastical and legal history that brought him into contact with canon law at virtually every turn. This talk will deal with Lea's encounter with canon law - in and out of historical study proper - in the young and library-thin America of the 1850s and 60s. That is, I will focus on Lea's early work - Superstition and Force (1866), An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy (1867), Studies in Church History (1869), and the beginning of his work on the various inquisitions. In the preface to the second edition of Superstition and Force (1870) Lea remarked that "The history of jurisprudence is the history of civilization." For Lea, that jurisprudence included canon law.

Mutating Monsters: Approaches to “Living Texts” of the Carolingian Era

Abigail Firey — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:33:57 PDT

Scholars of pre-modern legal history face interesting problems with the interpretation of their materials because the ideal of fixed written laws is compromised by the variability in handwritten transcription of the texts. The variability may lead to inadvertently peculiar readings of the law in specific instances, or may have resulted from deliberate manipulation of the texts to adapt them to particular interests or circumstances. While such textual evolution occurs in many professional fields (medicine, music, liturgy, etc.), it raises especially interesting questions in the field of legal studies because of the implications for the authority of the text and the threshold of “forgery.” This paper investigates new methods for assessing the relationship between “standard” versions of legal texts and the degree and frequency of alteration in manuscript witnesses, using the Carolingian Canon Law project as one possible model for using a digital environment to study the histories of “living texts”, that is, texts that potentially mutate in each manuscript representation.

Spectacles of Erudition: Physicians and Vernacular Medical Writing in Early Modern Spain

Michael R. Solomon — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:25:48 PDT

This electronic presentation explores the curious typography in the sixteenth-century Brocar edition of Luis Lobera de Avila’s vernacular hygienic treatise The Garden of Health or Otherwise Called The Knights’ Banquette with a Regimen for Living in Times of Health as Well as in Times of Disease [Vergel de sanidad que por otro nombre se llamava Banquete de cavalleros, y orden de Bivir: ansi en tiempo de sanidad como de enfermedad] ( Alcalá de Henares 1542). Whereas sixteenth-century vernacular medical treatises written for laymen avoided the extensive use of Latin, which vernacular medical authors believed impeded the usefulness of their treatises, the Brocar edition surrounds the Spanish text with abundant commentary and gloss in Latin that often overwhelms the vernacular. I argue that the widespread presence of Latin in this layman-oriented treatise was designed as an indexical device that helped the reader image the physician. Rather than distract or discourage the patient, as many vernacular authors believed, the Latin commentary created a visual residue of the physician/author and an uncanny sense of his lingering presence. This textual presencing of the physician was designed to comfort and reassure non-professional readers, confirming for them that the medical information in the vernacular was grounded in the knowledge of a competent and learned medical professional.

Panel Report: Scientific Manuscripts in the Digital Age

Gerhard Brey — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:35:33 PDT

The 1st Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age was concluded by a panel discussion under the title "Scientific Manuscripts in the Digital Age". The members of the panel comprised both digital humanities specialists and scholars working in the history of science. This report summarizes the discussion.

Archimedes in Bits: The Digital Presentation of a Write-Off

William Noel — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:33:12 PDT

The Archimedes Palimpsest is considered by many to be the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction. It was purchased at a Christie’s sale on October 1998, by an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. The collector deposited the Palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, for exhibition, conservation, imaging and scholarly study in 1999. Work has been ongoing ever since. The Archimedes Palimpsest contains seven of the Greek mathematician’s treatises. The manuscript was written in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) in the 10th century. In the 13th century, the manuscript was taken apart, and the Archimedes text was scraped off. The parchment was reused by a monk who created a prayer book. The Archimedes manuscript then effectively disappeared. Since 1999, intense efforts have been made to retrieve the Archimedes text. Many techniques have been employed, including multispectral imaging, x-ray flourescence imaging and synchrotron x-ray scanning at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. The imaging efforts have led to a re-evaluation of the work of Archimedes, and to the retrieval of entirely new texts from the ancient world.

Spoken Text and Written Symbol: The Use of Layout and Notation in Sanskrit Scientific Manuscripts

Kim Plofker — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:32:01 PDT

Because of the traditional reverence for oral composition and recitation in Sanskrit literature, most Classical Sanskrit treatises, including scientific ones, were composed in verse and intended (at least in theory) for memorization. Written versions of Sanskrit texts are often presented in imitation of their ideal oral form, as an almost continuous and unformatted stream of syllables. Manuscripts of technical works on subjects such as mathematics and astronomy, however, had to combine this “one-dimensional” text stream with graphical and notational features generally requiring two-dimensional layout, such as tables, diagrams, and equations. This paper looks at how the ways in which this synthesis could be achieved posed several significant challenges for Sanskrit scribes.

Understanding the Language of Alchemy: The Medieval Arabic Alchemical Lexicon in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms Sprenger 1908∗

Gabriele Ferrario — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:30:54 PDT

The editing of medieval alchemical texts poses a number of challenges to the modern scholar. Problems such as the lack of source identification, complicated compositional structures, and a tendency toward intentionally obfuscatory language make the task of reconstructing the original letter of text a practical impossibility. This paper will argue that an alternative approach toward editing alchemical texts must be considered. This approach will be determined by focusing on issues related to the technical lexicon of practical alchemy, and in particular, to the problems related to the understanding of the words used by the alchemists for describing the substances used in their operations.

Manuscripts of Latin Translations of Scientific Texts from Arabic

Charles Burnett — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:30:45 PDT

Manuscripts of translations give one the opportunity not only to compare texts in two different languages but also to compare the formats of those texts and to consider whether any features of the source manuscript have passed over into the target manuscript. Though it is very rare to find the very manuscript that a translator used when making his translation, there are translations in which, in one way or another, the Arabic Vorlage has influenced the way the translator has set out his material. By examining the manuscript evidence from scientific texts, this paper explores various ways in which translators dealt with certain formal challenges posed by the translation from Arabic into Latin.