Fall 2017
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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 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 Textual Contents of Pāli Samut Khoi-s: In Connection with the Buddha’s Abhidhamma Teaching in Tāvatiṃsa Heaven(2019-01-08) Unebe, ToshiyaThis article provides an overview of the collections of Thai manuscripts in Japan, especially the Royal Manuscripts presented to the Kakuozan Nittaiji temple and other palm-leaf collections kept at Japanese universities and libraries. It also briefly discusses collections of samut khoi (illustrated folding paper manuscripts) of the Phra Malai dating from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century preserved in museums and libraries in Japan.Publication A Tool for Exemplary Pastoral Care: Three Booklets of the Edwardes Manuscript in Context(2019-01-08) Weaver, HannahAs the recent bloom of literary scholarship around manuscripts shows, the longstanding desire to correct and emend their lessons has ceded to an appreciation of what we can learn about medieval reading and writing practices from them. This paper addresses the question of genre through three apparently disparate manuscripts associated with the Augustinian canons at Oxford in the early thirteenth century. United by 1300 into a single codex that was later bound into the larger Edwardes manuscript, Gui de Warewic, La Chanson de Guillaume, and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle share a scribe, a lettrine artist, and a concern with acceptable Christian conduct that leads to the suggestion that the manuscript functioned as a reference codex of exemplary history. While a baronial household could have used such a manuscript, library evidence points to the possibility of Augustinian ownership of the completed codex. In addition, the Oxford houses of regular canons, Oseney Abbey and St. Frideswide’s Priory, were unusually involved in the care of their dependent churches; additional testimony from a fourth contemporary, related manuscript, Brother Angier’s Dialogues, reveals the importance of caring for sinners. Though at first glance Gui de Warewic, La Chanson de Guillaume, and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle seem firmly rooted in the secular, lay sphere, putting their codex in context hints at an unexpected destination: as a tool for Augustinian pastoral care.Publication The Western Manuscript Collection of Alfred Chester Beatty (ca. 1915–1930)(2019-01-08) Cleaver, LauraAlfred Chester Beatty and his wife Edith were amongst the last figures of a generation of London-based collectors who created major collections of medieval manuscripts between c. 1915 and c. 1930. In shaping his collection, Beatty benefitted from the advice and example offered by older collectors, in particular Sydney Cockerell and Henry Yates Thompson, and from the skills of those who worked in museums, notably Eric Millar. This period saw major developments in the study of medieval manuscripts. Much of this work was rooted in connoisseurship and concentrated on grouping books by region, artist and date. Trained by Cockerell and others, Beatty worked to develop connoisseurial skills in order to build a collection that could rival those in museums. The publication of catalogues of a selection of his books, and the sale of part of his collection in 1932-1933, helped to draw attention to the manuscripts that he considered to be of the finest quality. At the same time, the rejection of volumes from the collection, which were often never publicly linked to his name, helped to establish the collection’s reputation for excellence and to consolidate contemporary ideas about a canon of illuminated manuscripts that were to have an important influence on both twentieth-century collecting and scholarship.Publication Statim Prosequi: An Index as a Product, Instrument, and Medium of the Medieval Franciscan Inquisition in Tuscany(2019-01-08) Clement, Geoffrey W.Codex Casanatensis Ms. 1730 is a compendious work containing a wide assortment of texts related to the medieval inquisition. This codex was conceived and executed as an unitary whole, and produced in the early fourteenth century for Franciscan inquisitors in Tuscany. While many texts in Casanatensis 1730 appear in other inquisitors’ codices, there are also texts that are unique to Ms. 1730. Among these is an index at the start (fol. 1-37) that not only covers Casanatensis 1730 in its entirety, but also contains features that render it especially utilitarian. Through an exploration of these unique features in the index of Casanatensis 1730, it appears that in the index alone, an inquisitor had at hand an alphabetically-arranged mini-libellus that comprised thirty-seven folios of a work that ultimately contains 297 folios, and that set forth his duties, powers, procedures, possible penalties et al. The index was composed in a form that was not only a summary of authoritative lengthy legal texts in the codex, but one that was easily accessible, consultable, and portable. Casanatensis 1730 was never intended to be read from beginning to end. It was an early inquisitorial legal reference work with encyclopedic contents, but those very same contents were reduced to index entries, which are brief summaries, to which inquisitors could quickly and easily refer. The index of Codex Casanatensis 1730 was the medium by which a complex body of legal texts was reduced to its essentials, and re-arranged into a form that could be accessed quickly and easily by anyone in need of such a handy reference guide; thereby expediting the inqusitorial process and better enabling an inquisitopr to “Statim prosequi…immediately prosecute”.Publication Conversational Lollardy: Reading the Margins of MS Bodley 978(2019-01-08) Schirmer, ElizabethConsiders an unusual set of “key-object” annotations, pictorial as well as verbal, that appear in the margins of the Middle English gospel harmony Oon of Foure in Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 978. Argues that the margins of Bodley 978 record a variety of conversations shaped by lollardy. After briefly locating the Bodley manuscript in relation to the larger Oon of Foure tradition, the article proceeds by tracing a set of often-repeated annotative objects across the Bodley margins—key, sword, cross, lantern, heart. Taking these messy and amateurish finding aids seriously as intellectual work, it finds the primary Bodley annotator(s) developing a nuanced response to lollard hermeneutics and ecclesiology. Rather than defending scriptural translation or asserting scriptural authority, the Bodley key-object annotator(s) explore the nature of scriptural signs and track shifting modes of divine communication across the gospel narrative. And rather than directly attack the abuses of the clergy, they explore the nature of works and the uses of power—clerical and lay, human and divine—as they evolve across the unfolding arc of salvation history. Other hands respond variously to this annotative project, sometimes developing and other times critiquing the readings developed by main hand(s)’ key-objects. Lollardy itself emerges from this study, less as a coherent set of doctrines identified by a “sect vocabulary,” and more as a scripturally-grounded language for thinking with, a set of discursive and conceptual resources for entering into conversation on reformist topics in the vernacular.Publication The Summula de Summa Raymundi in Gordan MS 95, Bryn Mawr College(2019-01-08) Izbicki, ThomasRaymond of Peñafort’s Summa de casibus conscientiae, including its fourth book, the Summa de matrimonio, was one of the most successful texts for pastors and confessors composed in the Middle Ages. Written by a Dominican friar in the thirteenth century, it treated cases of conscience in a systematic manner. It also examined matrimony and the other sacraments. The Summa was subject to detailed commentary by William of Rennes, updates by John of Freiburg reflecting new papal pronouncements, and abridgment for pastors’ greater convenience. One important summary was done in Latin verse, a work attributed to Adam of Aldersbach, a Cistercian monk. Eventually Adam’s Summula de summa Raymundi itself received a detailed prose commentary. This commented version was printed in Cologne in the late fifteenth century. Gordan Manuscript 95 at Bryn Mawr College, from the collection of Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, contains Raymond’s Summa with his commentary on the trees of consanguinity and affinity, which indicated whether couples were not permitted to marry because of blood kinship or sexual contact. It concludes with an extended extract from Adam’s work added after the texts by Raymond had been copied. That extract varies from the printed version and two manuscripts located at the University of Pennsylvania. The excerpts display differences from the other available texts of Adam’s work, including additional lines of verse, suggesting that it was drawn from a different manuscript tradition.Publication The St. Chad Gospels: Diachronic Manuscript Registration and Visualization(2019-01-08) Parsons, Stephen; Parker, C. Seth; Seales, W. BrentThis paper presents a software framework for the registration and visualization of layered image sets. To demonstrate the utility of these tools, we apply them to the St. Chad Gospels manuscript, relying on images of each page of the document as it appeared over time. An automated pipeline is used to perform non-rigid registration on each series of images. To visualize the differences between copies of the same page, a registered image viewer is constructed that enables direct comparisons of registered images. The registration pipeline and viewer for the resulting aligned images are generalized for use with other data sets.Publication The Two Yoḥannǝses of Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome: Reconstructing Biography and Cross-Cultural Encounter through Manuscript Evidence(2019-01-08) Kelly, Samantha; Nosnitsin, DenisThe Ethiopian Orthodox monastery of Santo Stefano degli Abissini in Rome was one of four diasporic Ethiopian communities around the Mediterranean and played a central role in disseminating knowledge about Ethiopian language, culture, and religion in sixteenth-century Europe. Yet apart from its most famous member, Täsfa Ṣǝyon, very little is known about the identities and careers of its monks. This article draws on the surviving Geez manuscripts of Santo Stefano’s own library, as well as European correspondence and archival documents, to reconstruct the biographies of two influential denizens of Santo Stefano. Hitherto believed to be a single person, Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare and Giovanni Battista “the Indian” (whom we identify instead as Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus) in fact followed quite different career trajectories, and illustrate the variety of ways in which Ethiopian Orthodox identity could be negotiated in a Catholic European setting.