Picking Up the Pieces

Dominique Stutzmann, Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes-CNRS

Marina Rustow, Princeton University

The Cairo Geniza is a cache of more than 300,000 folio pages found in a medieval Egyptian synagogue. Its contents are now scattered among 50 libraries and 16 private collections on three continents; single pages can be separated by a few class marks or an entire ocean. The manuscripts are currently being gathered together online thanks to the Friedberg Genizah Project (www.genizah.org) and other digitization projects, but a problem remains: how to match up the disiecta membra to produce whole pages? In this talk, I will present three techniques for finding joins—one automated, one artisanal, and the third a hybrid method. I will also define some problems related to the intermingling of literary, multi-page manuscripts with single-page documents.

Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts is currently under development to become an open-access, user-built, community-driven research tool for the history of manuscript transmission from production to the present. As before, the New SDBM gathers and preserves data from auction and sales catalogues, inventories, catalogues from institutional and private collections, and other printed sources, but it will soon allow users to contribute data, including one's own personal observations of a manuscript or group of manuscripts, and to engage with other users to facilitate research and conversations about both the history of manuscript transmission and the data gathered in the process of recording this history. This demonstration will showcase the new functionality of the database, which will become available to the public in 2016.

Dot Porter, SIMS, University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Grigory Kessel, Philipps University Marburg

Sometime in the 11th century, a Syriac copy of the Rum Orthodox liturgical book Parakletike was made using another Syriac manuscript that once contained Galen’s treatise On Simple Drugs. The medical manuscript was dismantled, the text thoroughly wiped off, and each bifolum was cut into two separate sheets that were consequently folded and gathered into quires of eight folios each. A long and unclear history divides the production of the liturgical manuscript in Syria, its transfer to the St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai and its eventual appearance on the European antiquities market in the 1920s. A recent campaign, initiated by the new owner of the manuscript, has subjected the undertext to multispectral imaging and thereby attracted the attention of the scholarly community. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of a small team of researchers it became possible to make the first identifications of the undertext and thereby to reveal its potential importance. Another direction of palimpsest’s study dealt with finding of its missing leaves and also reached successful results. The paper will introduce the palimpsest and its importance and by way of presenting the results of the special quest for the missing folios it will demonstrate a distinctive significance of those folios for the reconstruction of manuscript’s history.

Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffman, Independent Scholar

While compiling my Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Greek Manuscripts in the Collections of the USA, I have often examined fragments and incomplete manuscripts. A fruitful method of identifying a parent or sibling manuscript is recognition of handwriting. This method has helped me not only to reconnect not only small fragments with their original manuscripts, but also to reunite manuscripts produced as sets—for example, the Four Gospels and the Acts and Epistles. The identification of scribes’ hands, together with codicological analysis, enabled me to recognize manuscripts produced in the same scriptorium and now dispersed in various locations. The worldwide digitization of manuscripts greatly facilitates the unification of fragmented and dispersed manuscripts and makes possible the virtual reconstruction of a manuscript, scriptorium, or library.

Stefan Schorch, Martin-Luther-Universitaet Halle-Wittenberg

Among its different parts, Manuscript Codex 1649 of the University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Philadelphia, includes several leaves of Samaritan provenance, obviously gathered into the present volume when it was (re-?)bound. These leaves contain three different Samaritan texts: a 17th century copy of an exegetico-theological treatise in Arabic and Samaritan Hebrew, dating from the 13th century, the copy of a Samaritan prayer in Arabic, apparently composed in the 12th century, and the fragment of a Samaritan-Hebrew chronicle, copied in the late 19th or 20th century. The paper will explore the contribution of these pages for our understanding of the manuscript culture and the literary history of the Samaritans.

Brent Seales, University of Kentucky

Progress over the past fifteen years in the digitization and analysis of text found in cultural objects (inscriptions, manuscripts, scrolls) has led this year to a new and astonishing discovery. This paper will tell the story of emerging methods for imaging and analysis culminating in a personal account of the discovery, the people involved, and the technical approaches used. The digitization of damaged objects supports a new era of collaboration and exploration that has enabled compelling new discoveries and solutions to long-standing problems.

Dagmar Riedel, Columbia University

Susanne Ryuyin Kerekes, University of Pennsylvania

American collections of Thai (or Siamese) manuscripts were first acquired in the mid-19th century. Missionaries, medics, civil servants, and, later, affluent American travelers of the early 20th century, are among the few who have helped to curate Thai manuscript collections held in the United States, bringing with them those manuscripts deemed “exotic”, or “representative” of Thai cultural heritage. Since these individuals (and even institutional curators themselves) had/have no knowledge of the Thai language, many manuscripts were selected merely for their illuminations and/or aesthetic. Today, thanks to the work of roughly a dozen Thai manuscript experts, these manuscripts are finally being indentified properly, some translated, and even digitized. This talk will present a survey of the 600+ Thai manuscripts held in U.S. collections, and outline the various genres of these manuscripts. Finally, this talk will highlight a selection of manuscripts that may possibly belong to a larger (global) collection, as well as share the preliminary findings of an attempt to reconfigure an early collection of Thai manuscripts (including a Christian proselytizing text) sent by one famous missionary family.

Scott Gwara, University of South Carolina

The digital project called manuscriptlink, a joint venture between the University of South Carolina and The Ohio State University, deploys digital surrogates of dispersed medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments to restore their disjunct parent manuscripts online as virtual codices. Feasibility studies undertaken for the project reveal useful information about the nature of the collections owned by participating institutions, including the number of fragments, their proportionate origins, dates, contents, states of preservation, etc., and the estimated total number of parent codices they represent. Analyses of documented archives reveals estimations about fragment holdings in North America. Finally, a diachronic survey of the manuscript marketplace over thirty years discloses the amount and variety of manuscript fragments, highlighting differences between presumably private holdings and those of American institutions contributing to manuscriptlink. At least notionally, it is possible to define an aggregated American collection of manuscript fragments.

Anne-Marie Eze, Independent Scholar

In 1903 the American art historian Charles Eliot Norton strategically placed his collection of Venetian manuscripts with the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner to safe-guard them “from destruction by fire”. Rendered obsolete by the collapse of the Republic of Venice in 1797, in the following century these patrician and civic heirlooms were mutilated for their illuminated frontispieces and commodified as paintings for the art market. As a temple to Venetian art and architecture in Boston, Gardner’s recently opened museum was the perfect safe-haven for Norton’s collection. There they remained with their miniatures, texts and bindings intact, valued as a corpus of Venetian painting spanning three centuries and multiple genres. This paper presents a hitherto unknown episode of the conscious preservation of illuminated manuscripts by two prominent American collectors at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Beauvais Missal is one of the best-known victims of mid-twentieth-century American biblioclasm, serving as a perfect example of just how great a loss is incurred when a codex is dismembered and its leaves scattered. It also serves as a hopeful case study of the possibilities offered by recent developments in imaging and metadata standards, platforms, and interoperability. The manuscript was written in or near Beauvais, France, in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and was used early on at the cathedral there, as evidenced by an inscription on a lost leaf, transcribed in a 1926 Sotheby’s auction catalogue. It was recently discovered that the manuscript was purchased from Sotheby’s by none other than American industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who owned it until 1942 when he sold it through Gimbel Brothers to New York dealer Philip Duschnes, who cut it up and began selling leaves less than one month later. He passed the remnants on to Otto Ege, who scattered it through his usual means. This paper will introduce the incipient digital reconstruction of the ninety-three known leaves of the Beauvais Missal and present initial findings based on an analysis of the extant portion of the manuscript.

Christoph Flüeler, University of Fribourg & e-codices

The Fragmentarium project intends to put the internet to use as a central workspace for digital research on medieval fragments. In the next three years, it will carry out 12-15 case studies, two doctoral thesis, and build a new web application that will allow libraries, researchers, collectors, and students to work in a virtual laboratory in order to upload, catalog, transcribe, and assemble medieval manuscript fragments. The aim of Fragmentarium is not only to make an input for the often neglected fragment collections in bigger and smaller collections, but also to create a new, interoperable and community-driven platform that fits as good as possible in the workflow, cataloging practice and IT-structure of fifteen major manuscript libraries in Europe and America.