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The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series

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.

Detail from LJS 242 Basis grammatice, fol. 9v.

Upcoming Events

Dec 05
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

The Guide to Goodness: An Islamic Medieval Bestseller, Copies at Penn, and Their Contexts

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.

  • Friday, December 5, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail of Islamic prayerbook with decorated headpiece in gold, blue, and red and arabic script in red and black inks.
Feb 20
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Grid as Ground: Ruled Lines and Manuscript Images

Hanna Vorholt (University of York) considers the layout lines and grids inscribed on manuscript pages as tools for cognition, creativity, and control.

  • Friday, February 20, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
On gold ground, three haloed angels in upper register. Central angel gestures to three shepherds below.

Past Events

Oct 17
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Trans Studies as Book Historical Method

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.

  • Friday, October 17, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail of a medieval illumination showing a figure holding a chalice and emerging from the crucified Christ's right side into the arms of God the Father. Four clerical figures are seated in a building with four compartments.
Sep 19
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Pages of Stars: Case Studies in the History of the Astral Sciences from the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection

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.

  • Friday, September 19, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Circular diagram of the lunar phases from an illuminated manuscript.
Mar 28
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Unfolding Concertina-Fold Almanacs: The Making of an Exhibition

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

  • Friday, March 28, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
A partially unfolded medieval almanac with snake weights. Medieval man shown digging.
Feb 28
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Computational Analysis of Visual Features from Digitized Manuscripts

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.

  • Friday, February 28, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail of visual analysis of two palm leaf manuscripts.
Dec 06
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Peculiar Paracontents from Thai Chanting Books: A Case Study of Manuscripts from Philadelphia

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.

  • Friday, December 6, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail from a Thai manuscript showing two seated buddhist monks holding fans and looking across the inscribed text.
Oct 25
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Modelling the Middle Ages: VisColl as a Digital Tool for Manuscript Research

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.

  • Friday, October 25, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Desk with opened manuscript book in foam cradle, pencil holder, box, and open laptop showing digitized version of the open manuscript.
Sep 20
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Artifice, Latinity, and the Social Lives of Medieval Books

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.

  • Friday, September 20, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Page from a 14th-century copy of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae
Apr 26
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Principles of Manuscript Poetics

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.

  • Friday, April 26, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail of a text page of UPenn MS Codex 257, a manuscript copy of the Teseide of Boccaccio.
Mar 22
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art), a New Digital Resource for Book History

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. 

  • Friday, March 22, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Medieval book in an ornate binding held by a gloved hand.
Feb 16
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Dioscorides Disordered: Penn's Persian Kitab-i Hashayish

Marianna Shreve Simpson explores the disordered folia of LJS 278, a 17th-century illustrated Persian copy of Dioscorides' De materia medica.

  • Friday, February 16, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
First folio of LJS 278, an incomplete copy of Dioscurides' Kitāb-i Ḥashāyish, showing two botanical illustrations of unidentified plants.
Dec 01
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

How to Transcribe a Million Manuscripts with eScriptorium

Peter Stokes discusses the possibilities and challenges of applying machine-learning technologies to transcription of potentially millions of images of digitized premodern manuscripts.

  • Friday, December 1, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail of manuscript leaf showing transcription markup.
Sep 15
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

The DS Catalog: Towards an Online National Union Catalog of Premodern Manuscripts

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.

  • Friday, September 15, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
three rows of shelves of medieval manuscripts
Feb 10
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Personal Names and Authority: The Achilles Heel of (Islamicate) Manuscript Description in the Context of Digital Humanities

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.

  • Friday, February 10, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
A page of a manuscript copy of Durr al-buḥūr (Jewels of the Seas), composed and written by J.L. Burckhardt during his residence in Aleppo in the year 1810. As stated in the colophon this is an abridged Arabic version of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the novel by Daniel Defoe.
Oct 28
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Hebrew Paleography Album: A New Tool for the Study of Hebrew Scripts in the Digital Age

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.

  • October 28, 2022
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Screenshot of landing page of HebrewPal (the Hebrew Palaeography Album) with inset showing graphic elements of Hebrew characters.
Sep 16
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Medieval Rolls in a Digital Environment

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.

  • September 16, 2022
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
View of a Digital Mappa screen showing side-by-side annotated images of Adam and Eve with the serpent wrapped around the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.
Apr 29
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Beyond the Page: Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England

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.

  • April 29, 2022
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Virtual
Detail from John Lydgate's Middle English version of Laurence Premierfait's French translation of Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium
Mar 18
  • Lecture
Open to the Public

Wars in the Workshop: Digitizing Manuscript Rolls

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.

  • Friday, March 18, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EST on Zoom
  • 1:00pm - 2:30pm
  • Virtual
Camera scanning unrolled manuscript of genealogical roll.
Oct 15
  • Lecture

Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History

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.

  • October 15, 2021
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Zoom
Hand holding a digital magnifying lens over opened manuscript with laptop visible in background.
Mar 05
  • Lecture

Translating Experience into Science in the Middle Ages

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.

  • March 5, 2021
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm
  • Zoom
Diagram of head with faculties and senses
Feb 05
  • Lecture

The Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai and its Manuscripts

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.

  • February 5, 2021
  • 1:00pm - 2:30pm
  • Zoom
The Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai.

Image above: Detail from LJS 242 Basis grammatice, fol. 9v

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