SIMS Visiting Research Fellows

Seamus Dwyer, Smith College (15 July–16 August 2024)

Reading Hands:  Cultures of Script and Literature in Late Medieval English Manuscripts, 1370–1425

Building upon the work of his dissertation entitled, “Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425” (Yale University, May 2024), Seamus Dwyer will examine Middle English and French manuscripts  at Penn Libraries to build upon its premise that scripts—the handwritten precursors of typographical fonts—are interpretive media. The manuscripts include LJS 264, a 14th-century copy of the poem Ymage du Monde; Ms.Codex 902, a collection of French lyric poems possibly written in England; Ms. Codex 198 a finely written copy of the Myrour to lewde men and wymmen; and MS 201, a deluxe Wycliffite Bible In conversation with work in the fields of media studies and book history, Dwyer contends that medieval copyists, like graphic designers, chose from a variety of handwritten letterforms, and readers then received and understood those choices as a part of the meaning of the trilingual poetry and prose of late medieval England. He intends to show that this process of choice, production, and reception performs a literary criticism based on the visually expressive materiality of the manuscript grapheme. Departing from traditional paleography, which uses scripts primarily to pinpoint information about a manuscript’s historical context, his project uncovers a crucial connection between the visual traits of manuscript texts and their literary aesthetics.

Seamus Dwyer is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Smith College.

David Lines, University of Warwick

Traces of Aristotelian Teaching in Renaissance Books

During the period 1200–1700 Aristotle was the fundamental reference point for philosophical discussions across Europe and in the schools founded in overseas colonies and missionary outposts, including at Harvard College. The traditional narrative is that the scholastic method of teaching, which accorded a prominent place to philosophical questions (quaestiones), perpetuated a blind and anachronistic allegiance to Aristotle—something especially lamentable for the period ca. 1550–1750,when natural and moral philosophy in particular were undergoing significant changes due to the rise of currents such as Copernicanism, skepticism, atomism, the “scientific revolution,” and early modern philosophy (all of which developed outside the universities). A widespread assumption is that the method and format of the university quaestio led to a sterile repetition of Aristotle’s ideas, and that resistance to contemporary developments was especially strong in Catholic contexts, as witnessed by the Roman Inquisition and the perceived conflict between Christian orthodoxy and new understandings of physics and cosmology (cf. Galileo). A particularly under-researched area in this context is 17th-century university teaching. This research project proposes an exploration of 17th-century manuscript materials in the Kislak Center, including Catholic Aristotelian commentaries and lectures on natural philosophy. His aim is to show that philosophy teaching in the Catholic world was considerably more open to contemporary developments than is usually assumed, and that universities and colleges fully participated in the questioning of Aristotelian natural philosophy that took place in the period.

David Lines is the Professor of Renaissance Philosophy and Intellectual History and the Director of Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. He will be in residence in March or April 2025 (TBD).

Michael Zellman-Roher, Macquarie University

Pages of Stars:  Medieval Manuscripts on the Astral Sciences in Context

This project will focus on twenty manuscripts on the astral sciences (astronomy and astrology) in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania to bring these products of premodern science and their producers and users, who represent a plurality of languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew) and faiths (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), into interdisciplinary dialogue with the social history of medieval Europe and the Middle East and with the history of science. A close study of manuscripts offers a promising way to set texts on the astral sciences in their contemporary premodern context, as a complement to their study by historians through modern printed editions. This project considers two interrelated research questions: Who were the people behind these codices—copyists, commissioners, patrons, later owners—and what did the astral sciences mean to them? Dr. Zellman-Rohrer will seek answers to these questions, with attention to differences among cultures in western Europe, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), and the Islamicate world, in what the manuscripts tell us about their conditions of production and use, through text, paratext, and material features.

Michael Zellman-Rohrer is a Research Fellow in Papyrology in the Department of History and Archaelogy at Macquarie University. He will be in residence in April or May 2025 (TBD).

Dr. Suzette van Haaren, postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr University Bochum (April 8 to May 3, 2024)

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

For the duration of the SIMS fellowship, I seek to present a meta-analysis of VisColl, particularly its implementation software VCEditor, as a digital tool for studying medieval manuscripts. The research is embedded in an investigation of VCEditor in my postdoctoral project on the use of digital methods and techniques for representing, producing, and studying medieval history and heritage. Technological innovations undeniably change how manuscript research is conducted, and, consequently, cause a major shift in the way that we understand and interact with medieval manuscripts. The VisColl Data Model, now implemented through VCEditor, aids manuscript scholars in describing and visualizing the physical collation of medieval manuscripts. The project, led by Dot Porter (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies) and Alberto Campagnolo (University of Udine), in collaboration with multiple partners, has become a benchmark for digital tools in manuscript studies. Though practical possibilities and limitations of digital tools like VCEditor are often discussed, there is little reflection on what our reliance on digital methods means for the study and our understanding of these ancient objects. The translation of medieval material into data nodes and quantifiable models not only creates entirely new digital objects, but also establishes a wholly different material engagement between scholar and research object. Understanding exactly how and why VCEditor is used as a digital tool allows us to reflect on where manuscript studies stand today in a broader sense, and to gain a better grasp of what lies ahead for medievalist scholarship.

Dr. Peera Panarut, Universität Hamburg (February 2024)

Thai Royal Court Manuscripts in Philadelphia

The University of Pennsylvania houses more than fifty manuscripts from Thailand and Laos. This project will focus on three of these manuscripts that share features typical of 19th-century royal court manuscripts. The Siamese (Thai) royal court produced various kinds of manuscripts and archival records. The manuscripts represent three different genres of Thai royal court manuscripts, in which dynamics related to writing materials, texts, paratexts, and styles of handwritings offer a rich source for studying the writing culture and book history of the Siamese royal court. Building upon my project carried out at the Universität Hamburg “Royal Scribes and Written Artefacts: Writing Culture of Thai Royal Court through the Archives of the Royal Scribes,” I will focus on the royal scribes’ practices of record-keeping and record-making in the 19th-century Siamese royal court, one of the essential parts of the history of Thailand’s traditional archives.

Dr. Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Universities of Tours and Bordeaux-Montaigne (April 7 to May 7, 2024)

From Persecution to Plate: Uncovering the Culinary Practices of Sephardic Jews through Inquisition Trials

I plan to conduct a unique research project focused on using trial records as evidence to explore the culinary practices of Sephardic Jews during the Inquisition period. By examining manuscripts in the Penn Libraries, I aim to revisit the past and re-think the present, inviting the public to learn about Jewish food habits during this time in both theory and practice. To do so, Chef Michael Solomonov —recipient of five James Beard Awards, owner of such as Zahav, Laserwolf, Abe Fisher, K’Far in Philadelphia— will join me in this task.

My project aims to understand the significance of the official expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and its impact on the food and culinary practices of the people of Jewish origin, including those known as the conversos (forced converts to Christianity, and their descendants). Through the examination of Inquisition trial documents from the 15th and 16th centuries, I hope to shed light on how information about cooking was transmitted and how recipes and culinary practices were adapted and transposed into other contexts and territories while reflecting Jewish customs. Understanding the religious and cultural significance of food is essential for a comprehensive understanding of Sephardic Jewish history and identity. The Inquisition trials unintentionally recorded these practices, allowing us to study and reconstruct the dietary habits of Early-modern Hispanic Jews, while also casting light on the role of food in influencing patterns of persecution. Through my project, I aim to contribute to the field of Jewish culinary history and offer a deeper understanding of the role of food in shaping cultural identity. My research will demonstrate how food has played a crucial role in the formation and preservation of Jewish identity in Spain and Mexico. To achieve this goal, I have gathered a variety of sources and will be examining rare books at Penn. By taking a holistic approach that considers lifestyle, consumption, and culinary practices, I believe we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the culture of medieval Sephardic Jews.

Federico Botana, Institute of English Studies, University of London (November 2022)

The Card Indices of Leo Olschki and Giuseppe Martini and the Manuscript Collection at the University of Pennsylvania

The card indices of the Italian rare book and manuscript dealers Leo S. Olschki (1861- 1940) and Giuseppe Martini (1870-1944) contain a wealth of information about manuscripts that are now to be found in American collections, including that of the University of Pennsylvania. These cards have the potential to shed new light on the movements of particular manuscripts, but also to provide insights into the workings of the rare book trade.

The central aim of this project is to improve our understanding of the provenance history of manuscripts that are now in Philadelphia which passed through the hands of Olschki or Martini. In order to do this I will: create Sources in the Schoenberg Database for each card index and add entries for individual cards; use the cards and local archives to conduct research to identify manuscripts in Philadelphia that passed through the hands of Olschki or Martini and document their provenance; and work towards a digital platform to make available online photographs of cards from bookdealers’ indices.

Kathryn Rudy, University of St. Andrews (mid-January – mid-February 2023)

Making the Case for Modular Production of Books of Hours in the 15th Century

From ca. 1390 until ca.1520, makers of books of hours moved increasingly toward a production method I call “modular” in which textual units were made separately, sometimes by separate people, and only brought together in the final stage of binding. Adopting this system implies a separation of labor, whereby illuminators worked in separate ateliers from copyists. Other scholars have also written about this trend. I would like to make two further contributions. The first will be to study a selection of books of hours from the collections of Penn Libraries, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Walters Art Museum to consider regional differences in production. These manuscripts were produced in and around Delft, Bruges, and Paris. Using VCEditor, I will approach this study from the perspective of their quire structures. I posit that book makers in these three regions came up with distinct methods to improve efficiency in book production and that they took quite different lessons from the new print technology in the second part of the century.

The second contribution involves modeling an unfinished 15th-century unfinished book of hours from Provence (New York, Morgan Library & Museum, M. 358). Robert Calkins wrote in 1978 a compelling article on M. 358, demonstrating that the bifolia were passed from one craftsperson to the next, who each added their bit: first ruling, then writing, then drawing the marginalia, then gold leaf, then acanthus, and so forth, revealing the stark division of labor within the atelier. I will revisit his article, not to challenge its findings, but to present them in video form for a broad audience, in such a way that the ideas are easier to grasp. My goal here is to combine existing knowledge (Calkins) with new technology (VisCol and video).

Riccardo Saccenti, Università degli studi di Bergamo (October 2022)

From Ethics to Philology: The Fortune of Taddeo Alderotti Liber Ethicorum between the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics plays a crucial role in the intellectual history of Latin Europe. Translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century, it became the major starting point for a philosophical analysis of moral discourse, particularly within scholastic circles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The impact of the Nicomachean Ethics on medieval culture was not limited, however, to the universities. Already in the 1260s and writing in Italian, Brunetto Latini, Dante’s teacher, further spread the elements of  Aristotelian ethics in the vernacular language in his work Li Livres dou Trésor, which, offered a model for the education of the political elites of his time.

Latini inserted in his text an abridgment of Aristotle’s Ethics, the so-called Summa Alexandrinorum, which was translated from Arabic into Latin by Hermann the German ca. 1240. This short text, probably written in the 4th century, played a major role in providing a comprehensive and effective presentation of the Aristotelian ethics outside the universities. After Latini, the Florentine physician Taddeo Alderotti translated the Summa into Italian under the title Liber ethicorum. This translation became as important as Latini’s Tresor in spreading Aristotelian ethics within the urban culture of Italy. Penn Libraries preserves several copies of the Liber ethicorum, namely three manuscripts and a printed copy: Ms. Codex 273, an Italian manuscript composed before 1356; Ms. Codex 255, containing a version of the text in Venetian vernacular language (1456); Ms. Codex 243 (around 1500); and LJS 325, an edition of the text printed in France in 1568, with the addition of a handwritten collation of the text with another copy of it. Using these three books as a foundation, this project will begin a comprehensive study on the nature and fortune of this text in the European framework between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Jennifer Borland, Oklahoma State University (June 2022)

Ingenious Materiality: The Intersections of Medicine, Food, and Art in Medieval Life

Professor Borland’s work for the SIMS Visiting Research Fellowship involves a focused, manuscript-based component of a new research project. Among the manuscripts she will be consulting are a variety of health-related texts including LJS 55 and MS Coll. 591, Folder 19, two holdings that include portions of the Régime du corps; LJS 195 (medical miscellany); LJS 195 (medical miscellany); LJS 220 (Recueil de diverses recettes médécinales); LJS 449 (medical and astronomical miscellany); LJS 46 (Herbal); LJS 479 (moral and medical miscellany); LJS 236 (Arnaldus de Villanova and additional remedies); and LJS 198 (De simplicibus, by Arnaldus, de Villanova). LJS 195, a medical miscellany with information on making pigments and inks, is especially promising for this project, which aims to explore the multifaceted nature of substances—spices, for example, or domestic animals—to argue for the interconnected nature of visual culture, household living, traded goods, and wellness during the later Middle Ages.

Johanna Green, Information Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland (May 15-June 15, 2020)

Digitally Communicating the Medieval Book: An Examination of the Potential and Impact of Social Media Content for Public Engagement with the Materiality of Medieval Written Heritage

This project proposes to work with staff at Penn Libraries who are engaged in creating public points of access to the materiality of their medieval manuscripts collection via social media, to evaluate their best practice as a leader in this area, and to examine future opportunities for public meaning-making with new social media content. This fellowship will be informed by the production of a public survey into public manuscript access and the effectiveness of current social media content to communicate written heritage collections. The results of this survey will be used to inform the development of new social media content that aims to further communicate the materiality of the codex in new ways; this new social media content will then be evaluated by the public. The project’s results will be submitted for publication to Manuscript Studies.

Anna Corrias, UQ Development Fellow, University of Queensland (March 2020)

Reading Ficino’s Pythagoras: A Study of LJS 438

The principle focus of Dr. Corrias’ fellowship is an examination of LJS 438, an important source for my research project ”Late Antiquity after Antiquity: The Last of the Ancient Platonists in the Early Modern Period”. This project, which has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the University of Toronto (September 2019-August 2021) and the University of Cambridge (September 2021- August 2022), excavates the rich and complex legacy of late ancient Platonism in the preservation, transmission, and transformation of ancient philosophical texts, especially Plato’s dialogues and the works traditionally attributed to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.

Catherine Innes-Parker, University of Prince Edward Island (September 17-30 2018 & March 6-20, 2019)

The Middle English Meditation  A Talkyng of the Loue of God: Its Cultural and Manuscript Context

The principal focus of Prof. Innes-Parker’s current research is a study of the fourteenth-century Middle English meditation A Talkyng of the Loue of God (hereafter Talkyng) in its cultural and manuscript context. Talkyng is a late-14th/early-15th century text that survives in two of the most significant manuscript collections of Middle English literature: the large and lavish Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian MS Eng. poet. a. 1, V), which appears to have been produced for an aristocratic household with connections to the West Midlands and London; and the Simeon manuscript (BL Additional MS 22283, S), now missing leaves but once nearly as large as V, which shared a scribe and many of the same texts with V. Talkyng is found in Part IV of the Vernon manuscript, and its counterpart in Simeon. While many of the individual texts in the manuscripts have been the subject of a great deal of study, their context in V and S has been largely ignored.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Innes-Parker will focus on the context of V Part IV. For example, Part IV contains texts by Rolle and Hilton, texts including meditations of the Five Wits, and other Middle English devotional writings: for example, Ms. Codex 218 (Rolle, Hilton and a Middle English texts based on St. Anselm of Canterbury’s “Deploratio male amissae virginitatis”; Ms. Codex 1559 (Hilton); Ms. Codex 196 (Rolle); and Ms. Codex 197, (attr. Rolle). MSS 218 and 197 contain A Talkyng of the Dread and Love of God, a text which does not occur in V but which is also connected to the West Midlands and occurs in similar manuscript contexts. These last two manuscripts in particular will contribute to her research into the fact that so many vernacular texts found in V and S either originate from the West Midlands or, as in the case with Rolle and Hilton, migrated there to be collected by an institution large enough and wealthy enough to produce the two largest extant collections of Middle English devotional material.

Dominique Stutzmann, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes – CNRS (May 2019)

Books of Hours and their Calendars

Dr. Stutzmann’s project will use digital and computational tools to investigate the composition, content, and liturgical use of medieval books of hours and their calendars. The research will specifically target Penn Libraries’ manuscript collections and includes applying (a) Computer Vision to digital images thereof, (b) linguistic computing, esp. natural language processing with named entity recognition, for content identification, and (c) data modelling to correctly exploit and publish the results of the project. It is related to and will capitalize on the results of the broader project HORAE Hours – Recognition, Analysis, Editions, that is funded by the French National Research Agency and led by the applicant, but explicitly excludes calendars of its scope. It also comprises knowledge transfer and expertise exchange.

Alberto Campagnolo, Independent Scholar (May 15-June 15, 2019)

VisColl 2.0: A Collation Modelling and Visualization Project

In collaboration with Dot Porter, SIMS Curator of Digital Research Services, Dr. Campagnolo will spend the duration of the fellowship developing and implementing the collation modeler VisColl 2.0. Conceived as a tool to analyze and reconstruct gathering structures and building upon the success of the first implementation, VisColl 2.0 will include a new schema to accommodate complex modelling characteristics, turning the project more into a model rather than just a way to visualize collation information. In collaboration with Dot Porter, the fellow will work towards the new model allowing for very complex structures with sub-quires and single leaves, attachment methods, and uncertainties to be flagged at any step of the model. New features will include modelling and visualizing flaps and fold-outs, synoptic charts, page-level semantic tagging, and the use of the automated collation diagrams as data validation during modelling to secure better data being recorded.

Stefano Dall’Aglio, The University of Edinburgh (November 2017)

Preachers’ Lost Voice: The Roman Inquisition and Oral Sermons in Early Modern Italy

Using the manuscript collections of the Henry Charles Lea Library (Inquisition Collection, MS Coll 729), this project will support my ongoing research on Italian preachers and the Roman Inquisition in the broader context of the work I am doing for my book Reading the Preacher’s Voice, which focuses on the orality of early modern Italian preachers and on the relationship between their spoken and written words. By means of Inquisition sources and other sources, I am analyzing and comparing the various written traces that survive for spoken sermons, and I am demonstrating that it is not impossible to reconstruct a great deal of early modern orality. I also aim to challenge the widespread assumption that a sermon coincides with its printed version. I am very interested in exploring the reasons for the differences between orality and writing in terms of content, language and reception.

Toby Burrows, University of Oxford and University of Western Australia (May 2018)

Manuscripts of Sir Thomas Phillipps in Philadelphia

My research focuses on the 19th-century English collector Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), and the fate of his vast and important collection of more than 40,000 manuscripts. At least 200 of these are now in Philadelphia, most of them in the University of Pennsylvania Library. During my SIMS Fellowship, I will be studying these Phillipps manuscripts to reconstruct their history and provenance. My work will be recorded in my own database of Phillipps manuscripts, in the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, and in the relevant library catalogues. I will be making a particular study of his Persian and Indian manuscripts, since there are three of these in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, and this aspect of Phillipps’s collecting has never been studied.

Jack Hartnell, University of East Anglia (June 2018)

The Mathematics of Everyday Life: Calculation, Illustration, and Social Formation

This project proposes to examine the mathematical world of late medieval and early renaissance Europe through the lens of the Schoenberg Institute’s MS LJS 27, a rare surviving algebraic manual. The project aims to think historically and historiographically about LJS 27, considering both the manuscript’s extremely unusual illustrated contents and the place of mathematical objects like it within the discipline of art history.

Aleksandra Bunčić, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (October 2016)

Illuminating the Skies: Jews, Science and an Astronomical Anthology (LJS 57) in Medieval Catalonia

This project explores the dissemination of scientific knowledge in medieval Spain through the lens of an extraordinary illuminated manuscript that is housed at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and catalogued as an astronomical anthology (LJS 57). Produced in the second half of the fourteenth century (c. 1361) in Catalonia, in Hebrew, this manuscript contains a collection of astronomical texts, a copy of a treatise on the calendar compiled for King Pedro IV of Aragon, works by the twelfth-century scientist Abraham Ibn Ezra, an introduction to astrology, and a Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest. By considering this manuscript’s art historical, cultural and local contexts, this project aims to shed light on developments in book production, astronomical iconography, and the identities and roles of Jewish scientists in late medieval Spain.

Justine Walden, University of Toronto (May 2017)

Europe’s Roots: Religious Others in Late Medieval Christian Europe

This project will complete the conversion of 19th-century Florentine manuscript catalogs containing many hundreds of descriptions of medieval and renaissance manuscripts into digitally manipulable records, and will interface these records with the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. As these records are elsewhere uncatalogued, the project will vastly expand knowledge of and access to important manuscripts that span the gamut of scholarly disciplines. My project will also apply bibliometric and traditional humanistic analysis to these records to gain a clearer portrait of the book- and thought- world of fifteenth- century Florence, particularly as it relates to questions of linguistic and religious diversity and evidence of hostility toward religious ‘others’.

Tekla Bude, Newnham College, Cambridge University (August 2015)

Mathematical Theologies : Rethinking Mathematical Pedagogy in Europe 1100-1500

Dr. Bude’s project considers the ways in which medieval mathematical thought found its way into devotional, theological, and philosophical texts from 1200-1500, and argues that we can better understand not only medieval mathematics, but also the origins of Renaissance and Enlightenment mathematics, if we recognize the importance of the medieval theological-mathematical ideas which influenced the work of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. Dr. Bude will focus her research on manuscripts from the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, including 13th-century copies of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera (UPenn LJS 26), a 14th-century copy of Alexander de Villa Dei’s Algorismus (UPenn LJS 462) and William of Conches, Philosophia mundi (LJS 384) among many other texts.

Angelo Piacentini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan (January 2016)

Italian Humanistic Manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Dr. Piacentini’s project focuses on the codicological analysis of two important manuscript witnesses of Italian humanistic texts manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries: UPenn LJS 267, an anthology of humanistic texts copied in 1409; and UPenn MS Codex 693, which contains one of the three witnesses of the Moralis philosophie dyalogus by the humanist Uberto Decembrio (ca. 1360-1427). UPenn LJS 267 is the only witness of four letters and a Latin oration by Donato Albanzani, a humanist from Ravenna, and contains a copy of the anonymous Lamentatio Medee, of which Dr. Piacentini is preparing a critical edition.

Jeffrey C. Witt, Loyola University Maryland (May 2016)

The Abbreviatio of William of Rothwell: Integrating UPenn MS Codex 686 into the Sentences Commentary Text Archive and SCTA Image Viewer

As a SIMS fellow, Dr. Witt will examine manuscripts in Penn Libraries’ collections that are in some way connected to the medieval tradition of commenting on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. He will focus on UPenn MS Codex 686 which contains a witness to William of Rothwell’s commentary, which itself is an abbreviation of a commentary by Peter of Tarantaise, later Pope Innocent V. In the course of his study, he will encode the structural divisions of this text and map them to the folio divisions within MS Codex 686 and will make a selection of TEI encoded transcriptions of the contents of the manuscript. These encoding practices will make it possible to enter MS Codex 686 and the Rothwell commentary into the Sentences Commentary Text Archive <http://scta.info>. This inclusion will then allow MS Codex 686 to be viewed on the web alongside sister witnesses deposited on other images servers throughout the world. Moreover, thoughtful encoding of the text itself will permit the mapping of connections between the commentary of Peter of Tarantaise and the abbreviation made by William of Rothwell. For the first time, readers will be able to explore the connections between these two texts and their historical witnesses as they read them on the web.