Medieval Manuscripts Research Articles

Is medieval distant viewing possible? : Extending and enriching annotation of legacy image collections using visual analytics

Abstract Distant viewing approaches have typically used image datasets close to the contemporary image data used to train machine learning models. To work with images from other historical periods requires expert annotated data, and the quality of labels is crucial for the quality of results. Especially when working with cultural heritage collections that contain myriad uncertainties, annotating data, or re-annotating, legacy data is an arduous task. In this paper, we describe working with two pre-annotated sets of medieval manuscript images that exhibit conflicting and overlapping metadata. Since a manual reconciliation of the two legacy ontologies would be very expensive, we aim (1) to create a more uniform set of descriptive labels to serve as a “bridge” in the combined dataset, and (2) to establish a high-quality hierarchical classification that can be used as a valuable input for subsequent supervised machine learning. To achieve these goals, we developed visualization and interaction mechanisms, enabling medievalists to combine, regularize and extend the vocabulary used to describe these, and other cognate, image datasets. The visual interfaces provide experts an overview of relationships in the data going beyond the sum total of the metadata. Word and image embeddings as well as co-occurrences of labels across the datasets enable batch re-annotation of images, recommendation of label candidates, and support composing a hierarchical classification of labels.

Displaced materials of German origin in Tomsk State University Library

The article explores available data on displaced materials from Germany in the Research Library of Tomsk State University (TSU), one of the largest academic libraries in Russia. It provides a summary on where and how German books were transported to TSU. The paper also explores what do they represent and where they originate from. Among other sources, the author uses unpublished documents related to negotiations between Russia and Germany on the displaced art in the 1990s. He concludes that the materials mostly have library provenance and arrived to the USSR by train No. 176/8037 Berlin – Leningrad in August 1946. Most probably, the library materials were delivered from Leningrad to Moscow, and later, in 1980, from Moscow to Tomsk. Most of the books belonged to the libraries of Magdeburg, Bremen and Berlin. Some part of the Tomsk collection might have been transported by another train from Berlin to Moscow. However, since these books were stored at the same storage facility at Berlin-Rummelsburg station as those dispatched to Leningrad, we might admit some sorting mistakes. Relatively modern printed books make the core of the collection though there is a small number of medieval manuscripts and archival documents. Possibly, the latter ended up in Tomsk by accident.The article is prepared in the State Public Library of Scientific Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the of the Russian Academy of Sciences, project No. 122041100088-9 “Transformation of the book culture in the social communications in the 19th-21st centuries”. 

Why is the language of the <i>Freising Fragments</i> Early Slovene?

The article presents various hypotheses on the origin of the language of the so-called Freising Fragments (Slovene Brižinski/Freisinški spomeniki, Latin Monumenta Frisingensia = MF), three Slavic texts written c. 972–1039, which are critically assessed from the viewpoint of the theory and methodology of historical linguistics. In fact, the arguments in favour of the various genealogical linguistic attributions of the Slavic language of these High Medieval manuscript texts are very heterogeneous, i.e. historical, palaeographic, textual, and historical linguistic. However, the genealogical linguistic or dialectological attribution of any linguistic system is possible only on the basis of historical linguistic analysis of the latter. In doing this, linguistic criteria are prioritized following a “bottom-up” principle, i.e. phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary.

Spears and Spikes: Illness, Emotion and Bodily Invasion in Old Norse Abscess Narratives

Abstract The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates understandings of the body and of the relationship between sickness, somatic emotion and the perceived integrity of the individual self in Viking and medieval Scandinavia. This essay argues that Old Norse medical texts and charms understand illness not only as an imbalance of humours but also as an invasive, anthropomorphised agent that seeks to breach the boundaries of the human body. Falling victim to illness is understood as a zero-sum power exchange, visualised through images of martial defeat and sexualised submission. Strong emotion can be rendered as physical illness in Old Norse literature because both forces threaten the integrity of the contained and individualised self. As a thematic case study, this essay examines runic healing charms, late medieval medical manuscripts and saga episodes dealing with boils and abscesses, which are attributed both to the surging of vital spirits and to the action of supernatural disease agents, to examine the way these texts understand the embodied self.

Turkic Ethnic Realities in the Medieval Manuscript of Kipchak Origin

The purpose of our work was to analyze the ethnic realities of the Kipchak language in order to
 establish its similarities and differences with modern Turkic languages for which this medieval
 language was a proto-language. The written medieval manuscript in Arabic “Al-Tuhfa al-Zakiyya fi al-
 Lugha al-Turkiyyah” (Genuine wonder about the Turkish language) was one of the most important and
 most valuable source for studying the Kipchak language. The main feature of the work was that the
 original version was written in the Kipchak, as the anonymous author pointed out on the first page of
 the manuscript, stored in Istanbul, in the Beyazit state library. When studying objects that were far
 apart from each other in a temporary sense, such as medieval and modern languages, we used the
 comparative-historical method, and as a result concluded that in some cases there were only phonetic
 differences, while the syntactic and semantic commonality of lexical and phraseological units persisted.
 To classify ethnic realities, the statistical method of analysis was used. Ethnographic, cultural and
 mental realities testified to direct kinship and a single nomadic culture of the speakers of the languages
 of this group and provided an opportunity to restore the historical stages of the development of the
 Turkic languages from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Out of Sight, Out of Catalogue: The Neglected Grey Collection Medical MS G.4.c.14, Its Problematic Provenance, and Its Colonial Context

Cape Town National Library of South Africa’s Grey Collection MS G.4.c.14 is a fifteenth-century paper manuscript that contains three medical works and a series of recipes. This article briefly explores MS G.4.c.14’s contents before examining the story of the manuscript itself. Containing commentaries on Book IV, fen 4 of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine by well-known instructor of surgery Leonardo di Bertipaglia (d. 1448), and by the more obscure Maffeus di Laudi (fl. 1392–1417), and a summary of Benevenutus de Grassus’s De oculis (ca. 11–13th c.), MS G.4.c.14 has the potential to add greatly to our understanding of medieval medicine. However, medieval manuscripts also have histories outside the texts they contain. An exploration of the provenance and history of MS G.4.c.14 brought to light how it moved from Rome to Cape Town, through the antics of an infamous book thief, Guglielmo Libri (1802–69), and its purchase by Sir George Grey, colonial governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa between 1854 and 1861. Although neither British in origin nor explicitly Christian in content, like many other European manuscripts, MS G.4.c.14 played an important role in informal processes of colonialism and cultural imperialism. We examine why MS G.4.c.14 had been ignored in research and catalogues of medieval medical and ophthalmological works for decades, despite being digitized and available at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in 1990 and being included in a modern catalogue of the Grey Collection since 2002. We suggest that looking outside Europe to find manuscripts like MS G.4.c.14 requires scholars to confront the colonialist history in the disciplines of medieval and manuscript studies. This has become even more important as technologies of digitization have made it possible to examine a manuscript without any recognition of its history or provenance.

The internal structure of medieval Latin legendaries: a computational analysis

Abstract Since the middle of the 17th century, scholars have been systematically describing numerous medieval manuscripts preserved in libraries and religious institutions that contain hagiographic texts, that is texts recounting the lives of saints. In this article, we apply quantitative tools to the resulting database to consider these codices from a new point of view. As such, we study their internal organization, that is the order in which their texts are arranged. We first present a visualization tool that allows to grasp this structure at a glance. Then, we describe a model to automatically classify manuscripts according to their internal organization, based on a constrained spline regression. The results of this classification task make it possible to identify the manuscripts that have a particular internal organization, called per circulum anni (following the course of the year), and thus to study their properties. Furthermore, they open the possibility to obtain clues regarding the origin of some codices and potential kinship links between them.

The Colors in Medieval Illuminations through the Magnificent Scriptorium of Alfonso X, the Learned

This pioneering work studied the medieval color palette of four manuscripts produced in the scriptorium of Alfonso X, king of the Crown of Castile (r. 1252-84), including the Songs of Holy Mary (Cantigas de Santa Maria, in Rich Codex and Musicians’ Codex), Lapidary (Lapidario), and Book of Games (Libro de los juegos). Scientific analysis based on fiber-optics reflectance spectroscopy in the visible and Raman spectroscopy showed a color palette based on lapis lazuli, indigo, azurite, vermilion, red lead, orpiment, yellow ochre, two different greens (bottle green and vergaut), lead white, carbon-based black, and most importantly, brazilwood pinks, reds, and purples. So, it is now the first reported use of this lake pigment in European medieval manuscript illumination. The painting technique is also discussed. The diversity of colors and techniques, with the presence of lapis lazuli, brazilwood lake pigments, purple, and gold, demonstrates Alfonso X’s desire to produce sumptuous manuscripts.

New Findings of Medieval Manuscripts from the Hanseatic Cities and Halberstadt in St. Petersburg and Yerevan

New Findings of Medieval Manuscripts from the Hanseatic Cities and Halberstadt in St. Petersburg and Yerevan

Finding the Prior Leaf

Fragments of Latin-script medieval manuscript books evoke the whole to which they once belonged, encouraging us to build a mental model of the now-broken whole. Discussing fragments thus requires a way to describe not just the surviving objects and how they relate to their current context, but also how they related to the original. At the most basic level, relating individual pieces to an original codex requires identifying the fragment’s physical role and orientation in the codex. Then, if the text of the fragment is known, extrapolation can be used to reconstruct leaves, gatherings, and codicological units. An extrapolative method is documented and validated using experimental data and examples from the Fragmentarium web platform.

La reconnaissance de l'écriture pour les manuscrits documentaires du Moyen Âge

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) techniques aim to accurately recognize sequences of characters in input manuscript images by training artificial intelligence models to capture historical writing features. Efficient HTR models can transform digitized manuscript collections into indexed and quotable corpora, providing valuable research insight for various historical inquiries. However, several challenges must be addressed, including the scarcity of relevant training corpora, the consequential variability introduced by different scribal hands and writing scripts, and the complexity of page layouts. This paper presents two models and one cross-model approach for automatic transcription of Latin and French medieval documentary manuscripts, particularly charters and registers, written between the 12th and 15th centuries and classified into two major writing scripts: Textualis (from the late-11th to 13th century) and Cursiva (from the 13th to the 15th century). The architecture of the models is based on a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) coupled with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. The training and evaluation of the models, involving 120k lines of text and almost 1M tokens, were conducted using three available ground-truth corpora : The e-NDP corpus, the Alcar-HOME database and the Himanis project. This paper describes the training architecture and corpora used, while discussing the main training challenges, results, and potential applications of HTR techniques on medieval documentary manuscripts.

Causes, Methods, and Manifestations of the Destruction of Hebrew Manuscripts

This study explores the diverse causes behind the destruction and scarcity of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. Factors include their extensive use for study and prayer, the absence of scriptoria in the Jewish world, precarious preservation conditions, systematic destruction by the Church and Inquisition, market circuits of reused parchment codices, and the influence of Genizah legislation. The reuse of medieval Hebrew manuscripts is situated within the epochal printing press phenomenon. The Jewish experience is unique in featuring the persecution and burning of Hebrew books, exemplified by the Talmud’s burning ordered by Pope Julius III in 1553 and the Church’s policy shift under Pope Paul IV, leading to the deliberate destruction of sacred texts. This context resulted in a severe scarcity of Talmud copies, prompting rabbis to halt teachings. The study delves into the intricate interplay of historical events shaping the fate of Hebrew manuscripts.

Analyses for graphical records for a total solar eclipse in May 1230: a possible reference for the “Medieval Grand Maximum”

Abstract Datable graphical records of total solar eclipses allow us to assess contemporaneous variability of Earth's rotation speed, solar coronal structure, and solar-wind conditions. Such records are known back to the early 18th century. Here, we examine Matthew Paris’ medieval manuscript, an eyewitness account of a total solar eclipse just after local sunrise, and analyse his eclipse drawings on 14 May 1230. We philologically identify his observational site as St. Albans and compute local eclipse visibility. To locate St. Albans in the totality path, our analysis requires ΔT in 555 s < ΔT < 923 s (loose scenario), consistent with the latest published ΔT spline curve, which indicates that only the upper part of the eclipsed Sun should have been visible in this case. The eclipsed Sun sould have been entirely visible over the local horizon if we set the ΔT margins to 555 s < ΔT < 571 s (strict scenario), which requires slightly modifying the latest ΔT spline curve. Matthew Paris’ drawing of the total solar eclipse showed streamer-like structures similar to solar-minimum-type coronal streamers, consistent with the local tilt of the apparent solar equator. This is morphologically consistent with the minimum-type solar coronal streamers predicted from the open solar flux reconstructed from the 14C dataset. This record potentially demonstrates a similarity in solar cycles between the ‘Medieval Grand Maximum’ and modern solar cycles. Collectively, historical eclipse records could be used to assess Earth's rotation speed, solar coronal dynamics, and background solar dynamo activity on a millennial timescale.

Powojenne losy rękopisów z Kamienia Pomorskiego

The Post-War Fate of the Manuscripts from Kamień Pomorski In the 12th c., Kamień Pomorski became the capital of the diocese and the most important religious center in Western Pomerania. For centuries, within the cathedral walls, there was a library created by the canons, which was the foundation of their workshop and everyday pastoral work. In 1818, a significant part of the book collection came to Szczecin, and in 1822 it became the property of St. Mary’s Gymnasium in Szczecin (Marienstiftsgymnasium). As a consequence of World War II – despite efforts to secure the book collections – some of the books from Kamień Pomorski were dispersed among various institutions or were stolen. As a result, under unknown circumstances, they ended up in private hands and later in various libraries in Poland and abroad. The article presents the previously unknown post-war fate of several medieval manuscripts from the cathedral chapter in Kamień Pomorski, the history of which is closely connected to the famous foreign exchange smuggling scandal of the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of confiscation, these manuscripts were the property of Leon Dygas, one of the ten defendants and people sentenced in the trial.

The Frontispiece as Patron’s Statement

Abstract The Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khullān al-wafāʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and Loyal Friends), copied in Baghdad in 686/1287 and kept in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, is known for its double page frontispiece, headed by the names of the authors and the book title, and painted with an image of debating scholars surrounded by luxurious architecture [Fig. 1]. The copy features diagrams and tables and is of interest for the study of medieval manuscript traditions of the Rasāʾil. This article re-examines the codex, expanding observations and insights into its history. It discusses the function of the frontispiece, which has been perceived as an authors’ portrait in the succession of pre-Mongol Arab book painting, but is unique among known Rasāʾil copies. Reviewing the text on the double page and considering that the Rasāʾil was an anonymous book, we argue that the frontispiece advertised a particular opinion and reference regarding the authorship, visualized and emphasised through the medium of the figural image. Situating the copy in the scholarly book production of early Ilkhanid Baghdad under the Persian Juwaynī governors from early Ilkhanid Iran, the article examines how that time and place are referenced in the painting. Extending the question to the unknown patron and his milieu, it discusses figures with portrait-like faces presenting a book as possible references to the Juwaynīs. We suggest to see the novelty of the painting not only in its style and close text-image relation, but in its function as editorial statement and in the layered references. These evidence a concept of visual commentary on both history and present, that has been argued for Ilkhanid painting of northwest Iran, but was used here several decades earlier in Baghdad.

‘How to make a ring jump in the manner of a locust’: recipes to animate small objects in late medieval European manuscripts

Abstract In his late thirteenth-century collection of playful and amusing recipes, which this article calls magic tricks, Richard de Grimhill, a low-ranking Worcester noble, collected a trick ‘to make a ring jump in the manner of a locust’, alongside other instructions to animate domestic objects such as eggs, loaves of bread and spit-roasting chickens. Using a source base of 100 late medieval manuscripts, this article demonstrates that rings and other domestic objects were animated in various ways: through sleight of hand, by exploiting the chemical properties of mercury, or with a mixture of mercury, sulphur, and saltpetre. Placing these three methods in their manuscript and cultural contexts, I underscore that late medieval European people experienced magic tricks as a form of both cognitive play and playful experimentation with chemical knowledge. They thus have broader implications for late medieval European approaches to the possibilities and limitations of the human mind and physical matter.

Kakui’s Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto in Modern English Translation

The present work is a modern English-language translation and annotation of Kakui’s (1237-?)Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto, the earliest dated medieval Japanese manuscript to give specific detailsregarding the design and function of the go-in bakase, itself a system of diastematic neumes prevalentin Shingon-sect Japanese esoteric Buddhist circles from as early as the thirteenth century usedfor recording, as well as recalling, their hymnody. Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto has the secondary distinctionof being the earliest dated treatise on Shingon-sect Shōmyō oral transmission of any kind,and it has the tertiary distinction of being, to the translator’s knowledge, the only extant medievalJapanese manuscript to provide a comprehensive table of medieval Japanese neumes. The treatisehas been preserved in a manuscript in the hand of the eighteenth-century Shingon priest Reizui(ca. 1756). Rezui’s copy is currently housed at the Koyasan University Library in Wakayama prefecture,and it is upon this version of Kakui’s text that the current translation is based. This translationis intended to provide both a point of entry into the world of Japanese, and indeed East Asian,neume studies for musicologists, and a point of reference in the necessarily collaborative endeavorof internationalizing the field of comparative liturgy. With that in mind, the footnotes include referencesto neumes from the notational systems of the Latin and Byzantine Christian churches oflate antiquity and medieval times that are, to the translator, obvious graphic equivalents to neumesgiven by Kakui. This is done not to suggest any particular historical interpretation, but rather toidentify phenomenological similarities that beckon to be explored for their historico-musicologicalsignificance.

About the Miscellany of Charms from the Collection of V. M. Undolsky

The article deals with a collection of handwritten charms of the second half of the 17th century from the collection of V. M. Undolsky (Russian State Library. F. 310. No. 1179). The manuscript was published twice by L. I. Sazonova and A. L. Toporkov (in 2000 and 2002) with a commentary, but it has not yet been the subject of textual and linguistic investigations, which are necessary in the study of texts circulating in the handwritten sphere. These purposes make possible to draw conclusions about the origin of the collection, the pecularities of its creation and sources. The article presents the results of the study manuscript de visu. The special attention is paid to the peculiarities of handwriting, scribe’s mistakes and reflections of live pronunciation which is considered in the context of the handwritten culture of Old Rus’. In present article the observations is based on the textual, linguistic and comparative research methods that are relevant in the study of medieval manuscripts. The investigation allowed to propose several commented refinements to the edition based on a detailed study of paleography, textual features, and language, as well as the involvement of other manuscript and printed texts, historical and dialect dictionaries. The scribe’s errors in the manuscript from the collection of V. M. Undolsky are related to the existence of the antigraph, which does not allow us to agree with the publishers’ assumption that the collection was recorded from an oral source. The dialectal features of the charms leads to the conclusion about the Central or Middle Russian dialect of the scribe. It is possible that the owner of the manuscript, Vasily Volotsky, is the podyachy Vasily Volotsky, who is mentioned in the documents of 1699 and 1701 years of the Arzamas clerk’s izba.

Ritratti di mercanti armeni nelle miniature dei Vangeli medievali (secoli IX-XIV) Preview di una ricerca

This article aims to present part of the research I conducted within the ERC project, Armenia Entangled: Connectivity and Cultural Encounters in Medieval Eurasia 9th - 14th Centuries at the University of Florence. My topic of investigation for the ArmEn project is to analyse the portraits of Armenian merchants in the miniatures of medieval manuscripts and to place them in a broader Eurasian context.  A focal point of the research is devoted to the analysis of the clothes worn by these merchants, which are investigated through an iconographic study and comparison with Byzantine and Arab illuminations with the same subject. The aim of the article will therefore be to outline the ongoing research by showing some examples of manuscripts containing fascinating portraits of Armenian merchants.

Roman Catholic Church and Cautious Embrace of Modern Communication Media

The Catholic Church has a complex history in its appropriation and use of modern means of communication. It has at various times sought to adapt and pushed back. Almost with equal measure, it has variously churned out instructions and guidelines and even condemnations on the heels of inventions and innovations that pushed the boundaries of traditional means of communication. For instance, the church transitioned from colourful medieval manuscripts to printed books with the invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. Interestingly, whenever the church has been able to embrace any invention, it has almost always done so through the purviews of its mission of evangelisation. In contemporary times, Inter Mirifica (promulgated on 4 December 1963 by the Second Vatican Council) and Communio et progressio (23 May 1971) are two documents that signalled the church’s preparedness to accept the reality and phenomenon of the new frontiers ushered in by contemporary means of communication. The objective of this article is firstly to make a historical excursus of the Catholic Church’s embrace of the means of communication, characterised by caution and wariness, eagerness and enthusiasm. Secondly, it apportions a space to the Catholic Church in some African countries. It also highlights the importance attached to means of communication, especially the radio apostolate, by the local churches in those places. It does so by situating the media consciousness among local church hierarchies on the continent within the injunction of Pope John Paul II in Ecclesia in Africa.