Abstract: This article studies paratextual scribal features from the oldest leporello manuscripts of three Thai Buddhist poems composed for and by the royal court of Ayutthaya: the Pali-Siamese Nanthopananthasut kham luang and Mahachat kham luang along with the Sanskrit-Siamese Supritithammarachachadok kham luang . The manuscripts date from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and are each composed in a special bilingual format known as the Indic-vernacular bitext. Two kinds of compositional modes govern these works: exposition , where phrases in Indic are followed by their rendering in Siamese, and exegesis , where a distinct unit of Indic, often a stanza of verse, is cited in full before being subject to a complex form of analysis. The scribal features we focus on—color, script, spacing, and punctuation, along with markers for verse citation, section division, and musical notation—form a unique constellation among all known bitextual manuscripts in Southeast Asia. We argue that these scribal features are crafted to accentuate the differences not only between Indic and vernacular passages but also those between exposition and exegesis, thereby revealing the inner workings of each composition.
Abstract: This essay tells several related stories concerning the provenance, loss (including, as it shows, the imagined loss), and re-emergence of some of the witnesses of Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy (1477), one of the central texts of late medieval English vernacular alchemy. Taking into account the kinds of infrastructure and digital labor that make such discoveries possible, it untangles several bibliographic knots which have confused the record of this poem’s material survival since the late nineteenth century. It also traces several previously missing or otherwise untraced manuscripts of the Ordinal to their current institutional homes, uncovers several previously overlooked witnesses, and introduces a new, previously unknown manuscript that recently emerged from a private collection. An appendix includes a fully corrected and updated handlist for the poem, whose now forty-seven known witnesses are held in nineteen archives across six countries.
Abstract: Narcissus Marsh began planning a public library for Dublin at the end of the seventeenth century. By 1704, a library building had been constructed near Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and Marsh turned his attention to its contents. He planned a collection of 10,000 books “with none but ye most usefull Books in each Faculty and Science.” Marsh was prepared to buy books from London and the Continent and sought advice on what the most appropriate new titles for his library might be. He bought books individually and en bloc , including volumes from the library of the Dublin scholar Dudley Loftus. However, he recognized that buying collections risked adding books that he did not want. Marsh deliberately bought what he called “Oriental” manuscripts, which he left to the Bodleian Library, but a few European volumes remained in Dublin. Among the volumes acquired from Loftus that did not obviously fit Marsh’s plan were a small number of medieval manuscripts. More medieval books were added when, in 1701, Marsh recruited a Huguenot refugee, Elie Bouhéreau, as librarian for the new collection, with the agreement that he give his books to the library. In the following century, further manuscripts were given by Church of Ireland clergymen. Although the twenty-three volumes of medieval manuscripts now at Marsh’s Library form but a tiny part of the overall library, they provide insights into of the roles of intention, opportunity, and personal choice in the formation of this early modern library, which in turn ensured the survival of some medieval manuscripts.
Abstract: The Sortes Sanctorum, a prognostic and divinatory text known as “lots of the saints,” is present in numerous medieval Latin manuscripts dating from the early ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Scribes, compilers, and readers, including (prospective) priests, monks, and bishops, considered it a significant addition to educational materials such as schoolbooks, Bible glossaries, encyclopedias, and treatises on computus. By offering personal advice, the text gives us a window into the spiritual concerns of medieval readers during times of uncertainty. The diversity of genres associated with the Sortes Sanctorum at the manuscript level demonstrates a broader and more engaged readership than previously recognized. Newly identified manuscript evidence from the ninth to twelfth centuries suggests that the text could adapt to different intellectual settings of the early and high Middle Ages. This study demonstrates that the text transitioned from marginalia to an integral component of main texts, attracting interest within computus and encyclopedic compilations. The research employs a manuscript-centric and paleographic approach, paying close attention to the placement of the text in codices and to the text’s transmission history. These methods help reveal the sociocultural significance of prognostic texts such as the Sortes Sanctorum within the context of medieval knowledge systems.
Abstract: This article reports the findings of a recent interdisciplinary project to extract and analyze the genetic information contained in parchment manuscripts. We discuss the genetic analysis of ninety-one parchment manuscripts held by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Manuscripts tested ranged in date from the eighth through the twentieth centuries and originated in a wide geographical area spanning England, much of Europe, the Middle East, and northeast Africa. The article comprises an overview of the project and its aims, a description of methods and outcomes, and a discussion of the implications and promises of such research for a variety of humanistic and scientific fields.
Abstract: This article traces the manuscripts of the Dajānī family in the "abandoned property" collection, currently housed in the National Library of Israel. During the Nakba in 1948, more than seven hundred manuscripts were appropriated from Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem. Since then, the manuscripts were hardly accessible and have only recently been digitised. Drawing on the paracontents of these manuscripts, this article demonstrates the vitality of Palestinian book culture in late Ottoman Palestine. In the two case studies presented in this article, libraries of Dajānī family members demonstrate different types of engagement with manuscripts in the same period. Ḥusayn Ṭaha al-Dajānī from Jerusalem represents a middle-class bibliophile, while ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Dajānī from Jaffa is portrayed as an active scholar. By identifying one hundred and three manuscripts from these two libraries and tracing their afterlives, this article reconstructs for the first time remnants of former private libraries within the understudied "abandoned property" manuscript collection.
Abstract: This article presents a pilot study on how computer-based metrics succeed in measuring the consistency of handwriting in early medieval charters written in new Italian cursive. The consistency is measured in terms of variation observed in handwriting specimens, and it is benchmarked to human assessments of the handwriting consistency and of the script type in the same specimens. The metrics are produced by the Script Analyzer tool, which enables user-defined ductus representations. It turns out that the Script Analyzer based handwriting consistency measurements do reflect the human consistency ratings of an informant panel and, to a lesser degree, the script type classification into basic and cancelleresca cursives proposed in previous research by the editor-paleographers of the same charters. This suggests that Script Analyzer metrics can largely address the same graphical features as the human eye. To verify the conclusions, it will be desirable to repeat the study on a larger sample and with other scripts.
The idea that LOC 38 and Willcox 1 (as well as the Yale leaf discussed above) were likely produced in the same locale is further supported by the way many of the Spanish manuscripts that currently reside in the United States arrived there. Although the full explanation of what happened to the liturgical plainchant manuscripts of Spain during the Spanish civil disturbances of the nineteenth century is a matter for another article, it is helpful to remember that once a monastery or convent was closed (through the process of disamortization), its property in many cases was seized by the government, including its liturgical books.54 Entire wagonloads of such manuscripts, generally from the same municipality, diocese, or province, were sold off at auction as scrap, where they were bought up at bargain basement prices by enterprising antiquarians, art dealers, and booksellers who subsequently sold them to American antiquarians, art dealers, and collectors. More than one manuscript from a particular Dominican monastery or convent, therefore, might have found its way to the United States, despite the odds. The Dominicans of Spain were as hard hit as the other orders during the civil disturbances of the nineteenth century, and efforts to obtain a clear picture of their liturgical practices have been hampered by the same losses of archival material and sources as those suffered by the regular clergy in general. Mercedes P & eacute;rez Vidal has exhaustively studied what remains of the female Dominican Order in the province of Castile and reports that almost no manuscripts from those convents have survived from that region: a handful (six perhaps) of fifteenth-century choir books from Toledo along with a few printed books, an eighteenth-century manuscript from Zamora, and a profession ritual from Segovia.55 The loss of liturgical sources and archival material from the monasteries of male Dominicans in Castile appears comparable.
Abstract: This annotation introduces two collections of ancient Chinese manuscripts, recently discovered in China, the Anhui University collection and the Wangjiazui collection. It contextualizes the importance of these newly recovered manuscripts and provides an overview of the content of these two collections.
