Common Medieval Pigments

This paper discusses the pigments used in medieval manuscripts. Specific types of pigments that are examined are earths, minerals, manufactured, and organics. It also focuses on both destructive and non-destructive methods for identifying medieval pigments

"The Butcher's Bill": Using the Schoenberg Database to Reverse-Engineer Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Books from Constituent Fragments

Medieval manuscripts are perishable objects. Whether they have degraded over time through constant use and exposure to the elements or been deliberately cut up to be reused in other fashions or sold on the collectors’ market, the fragments produced by these destructive circumstances still have much to tell modern scholars about the medieval codices of which they were once a part. Through a series of six case studies focusing on a disparate array of fragments, this essay demonstrates how scholars can use the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts to help recover the hidden histories of fragmentary manuscripts.Publisher does not allow open access until after publicatio

Proposal to encode nine Cyrillic characters for Slavonic

This is a proposal to add several Cyrillic characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode. These additions were published in Unicode Standard version 6.1 in January 2012. This proposal includes characters that occur in medieval Church Slavonic manuscripts from the 10/11c to 17c CE

The genealogy of the king of Scots as charter and panegyric

When we think of genealogies in medieval Scotland our minds might turn at once to Gaelic, the Celtic language that was spoken in the Middle Ages from the southern tip of Ireland to the northernmost coast of Scotland. This is not unnatural. Texts that trace the ancestry of a notable individual generation by generation survive in their hundreds from the medieval Gaelic world. They are found today almost exclusively in late-medieval Irish manuscripts. Some genealogies originated in collections made as early as the tenth century. Presumably there were once many Scottish manuscripts containing genealogies, too. A reason why they would not have survived is that, in the Scottish kingdom during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Gaelic learned orders who would have had a primary interest in writing and copying this material declined in significance and ceased to participate in Gaelic literate culture. This chapter will open with a brief survey of medieval genealogical texts relating to the Scottish kingdom, followed by a closer discussion of the limited number that are known to have existed between about 995 and 1250. Thanks to some recent insights about the physicality of texts, and the example of Bengali copper charters, a new approach to this material will be developed that offers a fresh perspective on the role of genealogy as a written expression of kingship and lordship

Mittelalterliche deutsche Handschriften in Rumänien : Erschließung, Katalogisierung und Verwertung für eine regional orientierte Literaturgeschichte (Eine Projektidee)

The present essay outlines a project, which aims to catalogue and tap the potential of medieval German manuscripts in the collections of both church and secular libraries and archives in Romania. The project complements current efforts to catalogue and explore medieval German manuscripts in Eastern European countries. At the same time, the project prepares the ground for a regionally oriented literary history of Transylvania. Here, too, the aim is to build on current trends in medieval German studies in particular. Instead of a concept of literary history based almost exclusively on individual authors and their work, these trends advocate a literary historiography that turns to regional factors and manuscript transmission in describing literary activity in a particular area

The Transmission of the \u3cem\u3eSomniale Danielis\u3c/em\u3e, from Latin to Vernacular Italian (Laurenziano Martelli 12 and Riccardiano 859)

The Somniale Danielis is a dream manual widely circulated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is structured through dream symbols and their concise explanation. Medieval manuscripts of the Somniale—from the ninth century to the end of the fifteenth century—generally bear the same dreams, but show changes in the structure of their entries. The coherence of its symbology throughout several centuries allows for a linguistic analysis across these dream manuals that situates them in specific cultural contexts. This article focuses on two manuscripts, each containing a Latin and an Italian version of the Somniale, and aims to show how the Italian versions develop, and vary from, the Latin texts, as the vernacular versions simplify the language of their source text in order to create shorter entries

Two Major Groups in the Older Manuscript Tradition of Nítíða saga

Overview of the relationships between the older manuscripts preserving the medieval Icelandic romance Nítíða saga, with a rough stemm

Researching the History of Rites

This chapter discusses the potential of liturgical rites as sources, some practical ways in which one can work with this material, some problems that are likely to be encountered, and some possible directions for future research. The focus is on how one can go about doing such research into medieval liturgical rituals

Technical Signs in Early Medieval Manuscripts Copied in Irish Minuscule

Besides glosses and other textual annotations, early medieval Latin manuscript commonly feature technical signs, annotation symbols and sigla that reflect readership or provide a framework for interpretation and use. The early medieval Insular book users were particularly keen on using such devices. This article maps the usage of technical signs in a corpus of early medieval Irish manuscripts produced on the Continent or preserved and used there early after the production. In the center of the inquiry are four manuscripts belonging to an Irish scholarly circle associated with Sedulius Scottus. The article concludes that: * Insular, and specifically Irish, annotators used a specific repertoire of technical signs; * This Insular/Irish repertoire is substantially distinct from the repertoire of technical signs used by Carolingian scribes and therefore allows for discerning books annotated by Insular/Irish users on the Continent; * A noticeable difference exists between various identifiable clusters of manuscripts annotated by Insular/Irish users, suggesting that different annotators and circles drew on different parts of the Insular repertoire; * The manuscripts from the Sedulius group stand out from among other Irish books produced on the Continent on account of the specific mode of annotation, which seems to have been particular to the circle of scholars that produced them; * The Greek Psalter of Sedulius, which contains the subscription of Sedulius Scottus, displays a pattern of sign use distinct from the one found in the manuscripts from the Sedulius group and therefore does not seem related to them; * One or two lightly-annotated manuscripts contain traces of annotation in the manner of the Sedulius circle and therefore may reflect activities of the scholars from this scholarly group

Digital Facsimiles and the Modern Viewer: Medieval Manuscripts and Archival Practice in the Age of New Media

Through an engagement with theory from the fields of art history, anthropology, and sociology, this article examines the archival existence of medieval manuscripts and facilitates an understanding of archival practice and its effects on user experience from the perspective of the researcher, rather than from that of the archivist or information professional. In an exploration of notions of materiality and virtuality, the author addresses the material and institutional existence of medieval manuscripts and traces the evolution of the facsimile as a solution to problems of access. Within this framework, the various altered engagements with manuscripts in physical and digital form are assessed in order to establish the costs and benefits of virtuality. The roles of new technologies that produce high-quality facsimiles are investigated through theories of (re)presentation with respect to visual materials, including images and historical text