Circulations

Lisa Fagin Davis, The Medieval Academy of America

Digital images of medieval manuscripts have been available online for nearly thirty years, in various formats, viewers, and applications. As with other forms of digital scholarship, the first decades of digital medieval studies have been a period of experimentation and development of best-practices, with the evolving goals of reducing storage requirements, improving speed of access, reducing redundancy, improving sustainability, developing discoverable data models, and facilitating equitable access for the worldwide community of users. The recent development of interoperable and linked-open-data models have allowed for the establishment of a rich cloud-based infrastructure that allows students, educators, scholars, collectors, dealers, librarians, curators, and an interested public to dig deeper by following embedded links; easily form those links themselves; and use that linked data to make important new discoveries. Several important digital medieval resources have been restructured to take advantage of these new models. At the same time, there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of provenance studies as a field in and of itself. In this lecture, manuscript scholar Lisa Fagin Davis will use a series of case studies to demonstrate how research in the linked-open-data environment can facilitate important discoveries about the movement of medieval manuscripts through space and time. 
 

Konrad Hirschler, Universität Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

This paper delves into the intricacies of book circulation in Greater Syria and neighboring regions, using case studies to examine the mechanisms. It will explore how books were put into circulation, especially in relation to the notion of “immobilized” (endowed) books, a notion that, at first glance, seems to contradict the mobility of these objects. These mechanisms, in turn, open the question of what factors influenced the books’ subsequent differing regional trajectories. These two angles will be combined with a reflection on how the source materials available to us, especially manuscript notes such as audition certificates, influence the ways we write the history of the book in the region.
 

David Rundle, University of Kent

The history of the Renaissance is often written as a process not so much of circulation as of spread from centers to peripheries. What is less often done is to consider the routes that linked those spaces, and the mechanics of travel required. This paper suggests that if we attend to such matters as they relate to humanist manuscripts, the center / periphery dichotomy becomes complicated to the point of collapse. In place of emphasis on metaphors of spread and on the concept of cultural distance, the manuscript evidence suggests ways in which the construction of the Renaissance was what we can call Europolitan, an international enterprise achieved (as we shall see) despite the vagaries and the real dangers of travel. Examples will be drawn primarily from the relations between Italy — the self-proclaimed center-point of intellectual vitality — and those people they claimed were barbarians cut off from the whole world: the peoples of Britain. The discussion will concentrate on the first half of the fifteenth century, the heyday of the construction of the new script of littera antiqua, the age of Poggio Bracciolini (who knew England as well as his homeland), Leonardo Bruni and Humfrey, duke of Gloucester. As will be seen, however, it is not possible to write this history as one of two poles: we need to consider the ‘in-between’, the routes taken and the people who take them. It will, therefore, broaden into a wider discussion with implications for how ideas circulate across Europe.
 

Xin Wen, Princeton University

The Tang dynasty (618–907) originated in north China, but expanded into one of the largest empires in landmass in the medieval world. While traditional annals give brief sketches of the timeline of the Tang conquests in all four directions, paper manuscripts excavated in western China and Central Asia since the late nineteenth century allow scholars to understand the Tang’s conquest of Central Asia in particularly rich detail. These manuscripts, discovered in ancient tombs and abandoned beacon towers, include imperial edicts on military movements, reports on the observation of hostile forces, plans to deploy soldiers, and warnings about incoming enemy soldiers. In addition to these manuscripts written in Chinese, there are also manuscripts in local Central Asian languages (Khotanese, Tocharian) as well as those in Tibetan produced by the major geopolitical foe of the Tang, the Tibetan empire. In this paper, I make use of these diverse array of materials and recreate the network through which military intelligence circulated between the Tang emperor in the capital to the hundreds of thousands of common soldiers in Central Asia. I argue that this network was sustained by a tireless bureaucracy using paper manuscripts as both a means of documentation and a way to enforce policies. These paper manuscripts were as important as the soldiers and generals in the Tang’s successful conquest and governance of Central Asia.
 

Agata Paluch, Free University of Berlin

Kabbalah—initially a form of esoteric Jewish religious knowledge—became a key part of the intellectual curriculum for early modern Europeans, Jews and Christians alike. In my presentation, I will focus on the rise and spread of the so-called Lurianic kabbalah, which emerged in Safed, Palestine, in the late sixteenth century within the circle of Isaac Luria, a charismatic teacher and mystic. I will follow its journey through the production and circulation of Lurianic manuscripts in East-Central Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As the intellectual value of Lurianic kabbalah grew, so did the demand for Lurianic manuscripts in Europe. In my talk, I will discuss how Ashkenazi (East-Central European) Lurianic manuscripts, which first circulated as unique objects of study in the early seventeenth century, became luxurious items of display in the early eighteenth century. In describing the circulation of manuscripts of kabbalistic knowledge, I will focus on the processes that allowed some parts of that knowledge to emerge and remain esoteric due to social restrictions in making and reproducing certain kabbalistic texts. In parallel, I will show how contemporary and digital editorial practices have amplified elite forms of kabbalistic knowledge in scholarly narratives and the historical magisterial works of kabbalistic literature. I will discuss the principles that guided their presence and status in modern studies of kabbalah and the kinds of absences their material and virtual presence occults. Focusing on the cultural operations of bookwork, I will examine how the circulation of manuscript objects—premodern and contemporary—has shaped their meanings and contributed to the production and reproduction of broader cultural and intellectual constructs associated with elite and esoteric forms of knowledge. 
 

Julia King, Lambeth Palace Library

Women’s manuscript culture was largely dependent on the circulation of manuscripts and texts within and between different textual communities in late-medieval England. The landscape of women’s devotional reading, therefore, existed in the social networks that developed between nuns and vowesses, gentry and noble laywomen, and their male colleagues, tutors, and family. Network analysis, long established in the mathematics and social sciences as a method of measuring and mapping community relationships, can successfully be used to analyze late-medieval communities of reading.

My own work has used basic network analysis to examine the networks of the sisters of Syon Abbey, England’s first and only Birgittine monastery, finding that the Syon sisters were likely more connected with other women’s religious houses than we have previously thought. This network examined the relationships between book owners, measuring the relationships between e.g. donor and recipient to create a one-mode network. However, the codicological complications of late-medieval English devotional manuscripts, coupled with the emergent research questions in this field, require a use of network analysis that is computationally and conceptually more complex than basic one-mode network analysis.

This paper will extend my previous work on late-medieval English women’s devotional cultures of reading to explore the implications of extending network analysis to include two-mode data. I will explore this from both a methodological (practically, how does one set up a two-mode network in a network analysis software that is optimized for one-mode networking?) and book historical perspective (what can we learn about manuscript circulation from a network that measures both book owners and the texts that they owned?) For those engaged in quantitative analysis, this paper therefore explores a new avenue for the analysis of social networks of manuscript circulation.
 

Paul Love, Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane

Manuscripts produced and used by Ibadi Muslim communities have been on the move in the Maghrib and beyond for over a millennium. Yet most Ibadi texts, including most extant copies of pre-modern texts, were copied from the 18th century onward. This means that any study of these manuscripts must address their early modern and modern histories, including their encounter with colonialism, their role in shaping post-independence nationalist historiographies, and contemporary efforts at manuscript documentation in the region.

In this presentation, I follow the history of manuscript migration connected to Ibadi communities in the Jebel Nafusa through four intersecting themes. The first relates to the objects themselves, pausing to consider the history of their production, based on a survey of manuscript catalogs and data from recent digitization and documentation projects in the region. This dimension has migration at its core, since many “Nafusi” manuscripts were produced outside the Jebel Nafusa in other centers of Ibadi learning in Northern Africa.

Continuing to follow the manuscripts as they moved through space allows us to trace the trajectories of their copyists and owners. Using exemplary private libraries today located in Djerba, Tunisia, I present a migrant manuscript trajectories that connect the Jebel Nafusa, Cairo, the Mzab Valley in Algeria, and the island of Djerba. I then turn my attention to an important but often neglected aspect of Maghribi manuscript histories; namely, their colonial legacies.  Finally, I highlight the work done by local Ibadi organizations in the past two decades to document and to preserve individually and collectively owned manuscript collections.
 

Laura Cleaver, University of London

In modern scholarship, collectors have typically attracted more attention than dealers as owners of medieval manuscripts. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some manuscripts spent more time in dealers’ stock than they did on a collector’s shelves, either because they did not sell, or because they were repeatedly bought and sold. In addition, manuscripts were traded between dealers, both locally and internationally. Over the last five years the Cultivate MSS project (funded by the European Research Council) has worked with the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts to document the movement of manuscripts in Britain, France, Germany, the USA and further afield. Some of the most valuable sources have proved to be unpublished dealers’ records, which document complex trading arrangements between booksellers. Co-operation between dealers in the context of auctions, most famously in the operation of “rings” or “revisions”, is well-known, if challenging to study. However, dealers also bought books from one another for profit, and facilitated the movement of books on a sale-or-return basis. Using archival material generated by the firms of J. & J. Leighton and Bernard Quaritch between c. 1890 and the start of the Great War, this paper will showcase the potential of London dealers’ archives to shift the traditional emphasis in provenance studies from collectors to an international trade in which dealers worked together to serve their clients and make profit from these unique books.
 

Alexis Hagedorn, Columbia University

Sometime in the early nineteenth century, fragments of one or more Carolingian manuscripts were recycled to bind various novels for a renowned French cabinet de lecture. When a group of the cabinet’s books eventually made their way to the open shelves of a North American research library, these bindings provided the sole evidence of the books’ shared origins. Understanding the choice to repurpose an ancient manuscript requires a consideration of the sources of manuscript waste and the goals of the binders who employed them. Once commonly removed to be cataloged separately, waste fragments in bindings pose challenges for access and preservation.

Sandra Hindman, Les Enluminures

If you search the Internet for the “Circulation of medieval manuscripts,” as I’m sure the organizers of this symposium did, you find three categories of information.  First, the circulation of manuscripts during medieval times (selfies, etc.); second, the circulation of manuscripts today as fragments (“fragmentology”); and third, the circulation of manuscripts through digital resources.  If you join the words “circulation” with “special collection” or “rare books,” the term that comes up most frequently is “non-circulating.”  Indeed, it comes as no surprise to this group that medieval manuscript materials in college, university, municipal, state, and national libraries throughout the world are almost exclusively “non-circulating.”

Fragmentology and digitization are certainly useful tools to heighten scholarly awareness of and access to medieval manuscript material.  But nothing beats the “real” thing. In this brief presentation I will bring together a few historical and contemporary examples of the circulation of medieval manuscripts, manuscript leaves, and cuttings.  These include the South Kensington Museum’s circulating collection from the nineteenth century through 1908; the well-known Ohioan Otto Ege’s circulation of leaf exhibits beginning in the late 40s; a touring exhibition organized in the 50s by a Kansas City bookdealer Frank Glenn, “The Grolier Society:  Magic Carpet on Wheels”; and the New York art dealer Mortimer Brandt’s circulating exhibition on “Miniatures from Illuminated Manuscripts” in the 60s.

I became a medievalist thanks to the magic of handling medieval manuscripts early on in my studies first at University of Chicago.  We at Les Enluminures really, really believe that teaching with actual medieval manuscripts is a transformative experience.  Many of our manuscripts offered for sale for the last twenty years through www.textmanuscripts.com are now seeing active use by librarians, teachers, and students in university and college libraries across the United States and Canada, as well as abroad.  Now in its third cycle (it began in 2017) our unique and innovative program “Manuscripts in the Curriculum” speaks directly to our commitment; it enables participating schools – colleges, universities, and other educational institutions – to borrow a group of manuscripts for teaching during a segment of the academic year. Although public display of the manuscripts is encouraged, central to the philosophy of the program is the integration of real manuscripts into the curriculum in courses where students can work closely with original material under the guidance of a professor.  Coming on the heels of these earlier initiatives,” Manuscripts in the Curriculum” is distinct from them in its emphasis on the special opportunities offered by the study of whole manuscripts. I hope to show you how.
 

David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt University

Syriac is a medieval dialect of Aramaic that flourished in both the Roman and Sassanian Empires. Texts in Syriac comprise one of the largest corpora from the period of Late Antiquity (circa fourth through seventh centuries C.E.). With over 1000 items, the Syriac manuscript collection of the British Library has shaped Western scholarship on Syriac more than any other collection. This influence can be attributed both to the richness of the holdings and to the fact that since 1870 the collection has been discoverable through a highly detailed catalog written by William Wright.

After a century and a half, however, a digital finding aid for the collection is an urgent desideratum. Over the last decade, Syriaca.org (a digital scholarly collaboration) has worked to create authority file infrastructure on which to base a new catalog. As an incremental step toward full re-cataloguing, Syriaca.org has just published Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library: A New Digital Edition of Wright’s Catalog (Michelson and Potter, 2024, bl.syriac.uk). This paper describes the intellectual models developed as part of this digital finding aid.

The project offers three areas for new insight into digital manuscript description. First, because the description of Syriac manuscripts requires an unusual level of domain specific expertise, the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library project resulted in a unique style of collaboration between historians of Syriac literature and librarians. This model is already proving to be useful  for manuscript description in similarly under-studied fields (such as Ethiopic, Coptic, etc.). Second, because the project was designed to meet the demands of both historians and librarians, the resulting data model combines standard codicological description with emerging digital humanities use of linked data graphs. This data structure is a promising trajectory for the digital description of manuscripts. Lastly, although the base dataset was a printed catalog, the digital version has proved to be more than the sum of its parts. The project design intentionally sought to overcome some of the inherent limitations of the source catalog including its hierarchical arrangement and the biases associated with its nineteenth-century audience.
 

L.P. Coladangelo (Kent State University; Digital Scriptorium) and Rose A. McCandless (University of Denver; Digital Scriptorium)

Manuscript cataloging is a diverse art due to the complex and unique nature of manuscripts as handwritten objects and their relative rarity compared with printed materials. There exists no standard cataloging methodology for manuscripts and institutional metadata contributed to the Digital Scriptorium (DS) Catalog, an online union catalog aggregating manuscript records from institutions across North America, varies in robustness of description, encoding formats, and other elements of data organization. The DS Catalog, therefore, serves as a bridge enabling the harmonization of diverse institutional descriptions and the broader linked data environment, which includes Wikidata, an open, crowdsourced, global database for structuring data found in online resources like Wikipedia.

Out of a desire for increased accessibility, discoverability, and data reusability, the research team developed a crosswalk from the DS Catalog and Wikidata. A crosswalk is a visual and textual tool used for translating one metadata standard to another. Crosswalks address issues of interoperability between metadata schemas and vocabularies by matching semantically equivalent or similar elements or values. The research team used, as the basis for this crosswalk, the WikiProject Manuscripts Data Model, which outlines basic guidelines for entering manuscript objects into Wikidata. In order to upload manuscript records from the DS Catalog to Wikidata, the research team identified ways to map the DS data model, and the manuscript records and data values found in the DS Catalog, to Wikidata. This presentation will walk through the development of this mapping process, the tools used, obstacles encountered, and solutions identified, and the implications for the future of manuscript cataloging and data reuse.
 

Elizabeth K. Hebbard, University of Indiana–Bloomington, and Sarah Noonan, St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana

By November 2024, the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, hosted at Indiana University Bloomington and supported by a 2020 CLIR Hidden Collections grant, will have completed digitization and description of 70 codices and 593 medieval manuscript fragments and documents held by twenty-two Midwestern institutions. In celebrating the end of this project, we reflect on how manuscripts in our region have built community among our partners during this project, while recognizing that the histories of these collections are also stories of community building. This talk will explore how partner collections came to be and what these modern histories of manuscript circulation reveal about the ongoing significance of these items for institutions and the communities they serve. Partner collections established through donations from former faculty, alumni, and staff tell poignant narratives of how medieval manuscripts--just as they did in the Middle Ages--continue to operate as vehicles of memory and expressions of dedication that create and strengthen personal and institutional relationships. In our remarks, we will highlight some partner collections that were previously unreported and call attention to the dynamic status of many partners' collections. New donations arrive periodically; new acquisitions are made; items are sold; collections are consolidated. In this state of flux, our project goals of identifying regional holdings and making them discoverable is ongoing. There is more work to be done–more conversations to be had, more partners to collaborate with, more cornfields to drive through–in order to determine where manuscripts can be found and how they continue to cement social bonds and build networks of memory in North America.