Fleming, Benjamin J

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2017 - 20192
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  • Publication
    Digitizing Penn’s Indic Manuscripts
    (2019-10-25) Fleming, Benjamin J
    The University of Pennsylvania possesses the largest collection of Sanskrit and vernacular Indian languages in the Western hemisphere. In 2014, UPenn was awarded a three-year Preservation and Access Grant (PW-51547-15) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), entitled “Providing Global Access to Penn’s Indic Manuscripts.” The project was completed in 2017, within the scheduled three-year period for the award. The original terms of the grant stipulated that staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now absorbed by the Kislak Center) at Penn Libraries was to catalog, rehouse and digitize its Indic manuscript collection, building on efforts from previous years. The collection highlights Penn’s historical commitment to traditional Sanskrit studies and also includes a broad range of vernacular sources including Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, Awadhi, Bengali Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, Persian, Tamil, and Telugu. In this article I outline some of the recent history leading up to the NEH project, including my own involvement as project cataloger and collection consultant. I will then give an overview of the project and highlight some of its scope, content, and significance. Finally, I will consider some possibilities for promoting the collection in the future.
  • Publication
    The Materiality of South Asian Manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania MS Coll. 390 and the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh
    (2017-06-06) Fleming, Benjamin J
    The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.