Manuscript Studies
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ISSN
2381-5329
Publisher
Discipline
Medieval Studies
Description
Welcome to the open access issues of Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press! Articles and Annotations are openly available on ScholarlyCommons one year after publication. Manuscript Studies embraces the full complexity of global manuscript studies in the digital age. It has been conceived with four main goals in mind. First, to bridge the gaps between material and digital manuscript research; second, to break down the walls which often separate print and digital publication and serve as barriers between academics, professionals in the cultural heritage field, and citizen scholars; third, to serve as a forum for scholarship encompassing pre-modern manuscripts cultures from around the world; and finally to showcase methods and techniques of analysis in manuscript studies that can be applied across different subject areas. For more information about Manuscript Studies and to subscribe, visit the Penn Press website for Manuscript Studies http://mss.pennpress.org/home/
Journal Volumes
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 109
Publication Multispectral Recovery of a Fragment of Richard FitzRalph’s Summa de Questionibus Armenorum from University of Rochester, D.460 1000-03(2020-10-26) Huskin, Kyle Ann; Zawacki, Alexander J.; Heyworth, GregoryMultispectral imaging—the process of obtaining image data from a range of both visible and invisible wavelengths—is a new frontier in medieval studies, raising the possibility of recovering damaged or palimpsested texts that have been illegible for centuries. In this paper we show the remarkable results of applying this technology to University of X, MS D.460 1000-003, a previously unidentified single-folio fragment that was gifted to the university in 1968. Formerly used as a limp vellum binding for a seventeenth-century volume, the text has become so worn that it is all but completely unreadable to the naked eye. The fragment has consequently received little scholarly attention prior to our investigation. Our team recovered nearly all of the lost text and identified the fragment as an excerpt from Richard FitzRalph’s Summa de Questionibus Armenorum. Although this text survives in 45 other manuscripts and fragments, our discovery is highly significant because the Rochester fragment is the only copy of any of FitzRalph’s works in a non-European collection. Moreover, the fragment, whose handwriting dates to no later than 1370, may be the oldest extant copy of the Summa by at least half a decade. We present the process of this discovery, our conclusions about the text, and the potential for multispectral imaging to unlock new information hidden in known but understudied fragments held in archival collections around the world.Publication “My Written Books of Surgery in the Englishe Tonge”: The London Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Lylye of Medicynes(2019-01-08) Connelly, ErinThe Middle English Lylye of Medicynes is an early fifteenth-century translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Latin Lilium medicinae (completed in 1305). The Lylye is contained in Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1505 as a sole text. Although there are many extant witnesses in Latin, there are no other known Middle English copies. The Lylye contains thousands of medicinal ingredients, including 360 individual recipes identified with Rx, with accompanying guidelines for diagnosis and prognosis. Although the text does contain some medical theory and etiology (based on thought from Arabic medicine, specifically Ibn Sīnā, and Antiquity, predominantly Galen and Hippocrates), its main feature is the large volume of medicinal recipes. It is thought to have been commissioned by Robert Broke, ‘master of the king’s stillatories,’ in the early fifteenth century during the reign of Henry VI. This article explores the later provenance of the Lylye amongst the Gale family of barber-surgeons in sixteenth-century London.Publication The Galen Palimpsest and the Modest Ambitions of the Digital Data Set(2019-05-09) Emery, DougThe digital Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP) data set is an archive built on the model of the digital Archimedes Palimpsest. As with Archimedes, the SGP data set is meant to promote the long-term preservation of and access to the digitized palimpsest. The SGP data set follows archiving best practices and uses the Archimedes Palimpsest Metadata Standard for spectral imaging metadata. The data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0). The SGP project used custom software to manage its data and metadata from the time of capture to final data set publication. In the years since initial publication, newly discovered leaves of the manuscript have been discovered, imaged, and added to the on-line archive. Since the publication of the SGP data set, subsequent projects have built on and refined the methods established by the SGP team by moving away from content-based file naming, establishing formal quality assurance practices, increasing automation in the creation and management of data and metadata, and including full bit-depth capture images in the digital product.Publication Thai Manuscripts in Italian libraries: Three Manuscripts from G.E. Gerini’s Collection Kept at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”(2018-05-04) Cicuzza, ClaudioIn this article I present a short description of the three illuminated Thai manuscripts kept in one of the libraries of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, the Biblioteca Maurizio Taddei. These three manuscripts contain various Buddhist jātakas and also non-canonical works, in Pali and in Thai. They are adorned with beautiful depicted images which have been here reproduced.Publication History from the Margins: Literary Culture and Manuscript Production in Western India in the Vernacular Millennium(2022-10-24) Chanchani, Jahnabi BarooahScholars of South Asia have long known of praśastis, eulogistic verses often composed in the transregional Sanskrit language on copperplates, stone slabs, and temple walls, from the early centuries of the Common Era. They have traditionally sieved these documents to recover dynastic histories and have supposed that as a genre, it faded away in the second millennium CE when Islamic polities were established across the subcontinent and new genres of history writing were popularized. In making this supposition they have overlooked the fact that praśastis continued to be frequently composed and written. Yet, their appearance was neither in public spaces nor in public documents, but frequently at the ends of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. In this paper, I carefully analyze a corpus of hitherto un-translated praśastis and other scribal remarks written at the end of oft illustrated sumptuous Jaina manuscripts prepared between c. 1000 –1600 in western India. This was a period during which manuscript culture and literary production burgeoned in the region. Through my close reading of these genealogical micro histories, I shed new light on the emergence of new power elites, literati associations, centers of manuscript production, the rise of professional authors and scribes, and formation of kinship. I also consider the aesthetics and poetics of patronage in the region and ask why patrons in the early centuries of the second millennium CE sought to legitimize their family histories using an archaic genre.Publication Broken Books(2017-10-31) Cashion, Debra TaylorBroken Books is a digital humanities project built collaboratively between Pius XII Memorial Library and the Center for Digital Humanities of Saint Louis University. The goal of the Broken Books is to offer a digital solution to the problem of studying detached leaves from premodern manuscripts. Using online images, descriptive metadata, and nimble digital tools for relating these, Broken Books provides allows any researcher to manage a reconstruction project that also permits outside users to add images and information to it. Although still under development, Broken Books will encourage new contributions to manuscripts studies by facilitating the reconstruction of manuscripts that some time in their history were broken apart and scattered among various locations.Publication Manuscripts of Sir Thomas Phillipps in North American Institutions(2017-10-31) Burrows, TobyThe manuscript collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps was almost certainly the largest private collection ever assembled. Its dispersal during the century after his death in 1872 scattered his manuscripts into public and private collections around the world. These included many collections in North America, several of which now count former Phillipps manuscripts among their greatest treasures. This paper examines the extent to which Phillipps manuscripts are now held in institutional collections in North America and traces the history of their acquisition.Publication Provenance in the Aggregate: The Social Life of an Unremarkable Arabic Manuscript Collection(2019-10-25) Love, PaulThis is a biography of a collection of eleven Arabic manuscripts at the library of the Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale (UNO). These manuscripts do not contain otherwise unknown or even rare texts, since the titles in the collection exist in dozens of manuscript copies in northern African libraries in addition to printed editions. While the bulk of their content may be known to historians, the objects themselves have led rich social lives that merit attention. Like many biographies, however, the story of these objects suffers from a lack of detail. In this article, I suggest that if approached in the aggregate, the long-term provenance of Arabic manuscript collections like this one have a fascinating story to tell about their social histories. Even in the absence of every detail, these objects have much to say about the multiple and overlapping historical contexts through which they have moved. I begin by showing how these manuscripts at the UNO started their lives as Italian papers, situating them in the world of maritime and terrestrial trade that linked the northern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean from the 17th-20th centuries. I then demonstrate how the production and circulation of these texts speaks to widespread intellectual networks of a Muslim minority community and its manuscript culture in the Maghrib during the 18th and 19th centuries when the Ottoman empire attempted to exercise influence over the region. Finally, I show the ways in which these manuscripts were participants in the process of European (specifically, Italian) colonization and colonial knowledge production in northern Africa at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. By placing the aggregated biographies of the manuscripts in dialogue with the history of the broader Mediterranean world, I show how Arabic manuscript collections like this one have much to offer historians.Publication The Glossa Ordinaria Manuscripts of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Monza(2019-01-08) Matter, E. AnnThe Historia de los Reyes Moros de Granada, written by the chronicler Hernando de Baeza in the first half of the XVI century, in Spain, is a valuable text that provides a very different perspective from other late medieval Spanish official chronicles. This article provides an account of the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript of this chronicle which, unlike the two others already known, is complete and includes the ending, which narrates the negotiations between the Catholic Kings of Spain and the last Nasrid sultan Boabdil for the Islamic surrender of Granada. The article describes this previously unknown manuscript, gives an account of the importance of the codex in which it is found, and shows the importance of this discovery for Spanish historiography more generally. A complete transcription in Castillian and an English translation are provided.Publication Of Scribes and Scripts: Citizen Science and the Cairo Genizah(2019-05-09) Eckstein, Laura NewmanIn August 2017, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, in partnership with the Princeton Geniza Project, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University, and the Zooniverse, began the first phase of a larger project to attempt to sort and transcribe Cairo Geniza fragments, entitled “Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.” This article describes the first phase of the projects and its results.