The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series presents regularly scheduled lectures related to the study of premodern manuscript books and global manuscript culture by scholars at all levels from Penn and around the world. Started in 2021 as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, the series offers a virtual space for students, scholars, and citizen scholars to come together to hear about and discuss the latest research in manuscript studies.
Hanna Vorholt (University of York) considers the layout lines and grids inscribed on manuscript pages as tools for cognition, creativity, and control.
J. D. Sargan considers generative modes of reading through the premodern archive to seek out trans lives beyond the ephemeral glimpses that have gone unnoticed in the historical record.
Ali Noori explores manuscript copies housed in Penn Libraries' collections of a 15th-century Islamic devotional manual Dalail al-Khayrat (The Guide to Goodness), composed by the North African Sufi mystic al-Jazuli (d. 1465) and considers the parallels between this Islamic bestseller and the roughly contemporary medieval European bestseller, the Book of Hours.
Michael Zellman-Rohrer offers a progress report on a larger project to place manuscripts on the astral sciences (astronomy and astrology) from Europe and the wider Mediterranean world in social context and to bring these products of premodern science and their producers and users, in the fullness of their languages and faiths, into dialogue with social history and the history of science.
Paul Babinski examines the provenance of Islamic manuscripts held in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, tracing the genesis of the collection and its historical contexts from the library’s founding in the seventeenth century to the present.
Sarah Griffin and Megan McNamee will discuss their exhibition Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar on view at Lambeth Palace Library in London and explore ideas about time in the Middle Ages through the concertina-fold almanac, a rare and remarkable book type introduced in the fourteenth century
Dr. rer. nat. Hussein Adnan Mohammed, head of the Visual Manuscript Analysis Lab at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, delves into key challenges encountered in the journey to integrate of novel machine learning and AI methodologies to streamline and enhance the efficiency of manuscript research.
Peera Panarut, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, considers the meaning of scribal notes and colophons found among the pages of Thai and Pali chanting manuscripts in the Penn Libraries' collections and the implications for our understanding and interpretation of these books.
Suzette van Haaren, post doctoral researcher at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, presents a meta-analysis of VisColl, in particular its implementation software VCEditor, as a digital tool developed at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Stdues for as a tool for studying the codicology of medieval manuscripts.
Seamus Dwyer, Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Smith College, explores the concepts of Latinity and artifice in late medieval English manuscript cultures and considers new avenues for understanding how medieval scribes and readers intended their books to achieve highly social, communicative ends in the wider world.
Francesco Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Penn, reflects on the interactions between textuality and materiality, message and medium, visual-verbal discourse and its physical support through readings of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida and Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.
Nicholas Herman, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator of Manuscripts, introduces BASIRA, a powerful web-based open access database of depictions of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 to 1600 CE.
Marianna Shreve Simpson explores the disordered folia of LJS 278, a 17th-century illustrated Persian copy of Dioscorides' De materia medica.
Peter Stokes discusses the possibilities and challenges of applying machine-learning technologies to transcription of potentially millions of images of digitized premodern manuscripts.
Peter Emanuel Diamond presents the years-long effort to annotate the early 18th-century commonplace book of Francis Daniel Pastorius and explores the story of radical Protestant traditions, early abolitionist thought, and utopian ecological planning revealed in its pages.
Lynn Ransom, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, and L. P. Coladangelo, Kent State University, introduce the new Digital Scriptorium Catalog, an online linked open data platform for creating a national union catalog for premodern manuscripts in American collections.
Andrew D. Turner, Senior Research Specialist, Getty Research Institute, delves into controversies and investigations surrounding the earliest known Mayan manuscript.
Meagan Allen of the Science History Institute considers the questionable authenticity of a work often attributed to Roger Bacon – the Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magiae using paleographical analysis.
Yasmin Faghihi, Head of the Near and Middle Eastern Department at Cambridge University Library and the editor of the online union catalog for manuscripts from the Islamicate world FIHRIST, discusses the problems and potential of name authorities in manuscript research.
Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies 2022-2023 Visiting Research Fellow Dr. Federico Botana reveals the secrets of the trade in medieval manuscripts found within the card index file of the Italian bookseller Leo S. Olschki (1861 - 1940).
Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Director of the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and Professor of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic Manuscript Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, will discuss and demonstrate the Hebrew Palaeography Album, a new online tool to study medieval Hebrew writing practices.
Medieval rolls are notoriously difficult to represent online. In this lecture, Lisa Fagin Davis and Dot Porter will show medieval rolls recently published in Digital Mappa, a new digital publishing tool that centers the image and enables the annotation and linking of both images and text.
From some curious habits by scribes of late Middle English manuscripts, Professor Daniel Wakelin shall argue that scribes were sometimes not interested in, or were even vexed by, the material form of texts.
This lecture will discuss some of the issues relating to the digitization of manuscript rolls, focusing on a fifteenth-century genealogical roll produced during the Wars of the Roses, the Canterbury Roll.
This lecture centers on the historiography and future of Italian manuscript illumination with the goal of suggesting new methods of attribution and assessment for art historians, dealers, and collectors.
In this talk Tara Andrews will present some of the features and puzzles of the manuscript tradition of the Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, give us glimpses into the history of the developing Armenian diaspora.
In this talk, Professors Akbari and Gillespie offer an overview of their research findings, lessons learned from the pandemic, and upcoming exhibition of Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.
Imre Galambos gives a talk on the wider context of Chinese manuscripts, connecting them with non-Chinese scribal cultures of Central Asia.
This lecture offers two perspectives on early twentieth century American collection of British rare books and manuscripts.
This talk will begin by revealing a stunningly beautiful and previously unknown detached miniature from a royal Book of Hours created by the court artist Jean Bourdichon around 1498.
In this lecture, creators Dot Porter, SIMS founding member and Curator of Digital Research Services, and Alberto Campagnolo, book conservator and adjunct professor at the University of Udine, will present a new version of the online collation modeler VisColl.
This talk explores how experience—natural knowledge from the sensorium—was translated into science—understanding natural laws and causation—in both the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages.
This lecture will explore the history of the Monastery and its association with manuscript production and manuscript ownership, and how the library holdings reflect the presence of Christians from several different language traditions. A special focus will be on the recent work of the Sinai Palimpsests Project.
Image above: Detail from LJS 242 Basis grammatice, fol. 9v