Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center
This talk 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. It aims 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. In research supported by SIMS in 2015, I examined the rich holdings of the Schoenberg collection in the astral sciences. Here I will present a close look at four case studies, of manuscripts in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, that show manuscripts as tools of the trade for practitioners as well as curious readers. Their tissue of marks of production and use can shed light on the social meaning of these practices.
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.
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is a palaeographer, epigraphist, and papyrologist with a research focus on ancient religion and magic. His work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin on the ERC-funded project ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation examines the transmission of astrological texts in Greek papyri. He is Senior Editor of the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum for the Near East and Egypt, and from 2016 to 2021 he was an editor of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (University of Oxford).
Featured Image: Loose note found in a late 15th-century astrological manuscript entitled Laṭāʼif al-kalām fī aḥkām al-aʻwām, dated 11 Rabīʻ al-Ākhir 852 A.H. (June 1448 CE) (University of Pennsylvania Libraries, LJS 466)