Medieval Manuscripts Research Articles

Medieval Romances Across European Borders ed. by Miriam Edlich-Muth

Reviewed by: Medieval Romances Across European Borders ed. by Miriam Edlich-Muth Leah Haught miriam edlich-muth, ed., Medieval Romances Across European Borders. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018. Pp. 228. isbn: 978–2–503–57716–6. €75. As the first volume in a new series dedicated to ‘medieval narratives in transmission,’ this collection will likely serve as a model for subsequent contributions to the series, which ‘aims to provide a forum for publications on the relationships between the content, form, and media of medieval narratives as they intersect with social, cultural, and linguistic contexts’ (back cover). Throughout her introduction, Miriam Edlich-Muth emphasizes the ways in which the included essays consider these relationships and contexts as continuously dismantling and reconstructing any conception of European literature by reading texts and themes that cross traditional geographic, cultural, and historical ‘borders.’ Instead of attempting to identify ‘linear generations of descent,’ the scholarship assembled within this volume ‘remains open to moments of similarity and difference,’ thereby illuminating ‘the rich variety of methodological approaches available to comparative scholars of medieval texts’ (p. 5). The ten essays are split into three sections that reflect the foundational questions motivating the collection. The first section, ‘Genre and Context,’ consists of three chapters that explore the relationships between genre and reception history. Bart Besamusca opens this section with an analysis of the placement of romances within three Middle Dutch multi-text codices. While Besamusca acknowledges the complications that genre classifications entail, he nevertheless asserts that genre can be a useful tool for beginning to understand how a given text relates to others within a single manuscript, allowing for a ‘more comprehensive view of these manuscripts and their text collections’ (p. 29). Elizabeth Dearnley turns our attention to ‘narrative, generic and thematic’ [End Page 78] similarities between ‘Bisclavret and its analogues, and the numerous tales written about Slender Man’ in order to explore what the transmission patterns of materials in online, collaborative forums might tell us about medieval manuscript culture as well as the continued popularity of specific types of supernatural narratives (p. 34). Miriam Edlich-Muth discusses two distinct yet related versions of the Floire et Blanchefleur story: an Italian hagiographic rendering and an Icelandic rimur based on the Old Norse version of the romance. Parallels between the accounts ‘illustrate how relatively small changes in emphasis can refocus the generic overtones of the whole narrative’ (p. 73), lending credence to the suggestion that the hagiographic version of the tale is a long-standing component of the legend that contributed to its early development across Europe. The four chapters that make up the second section, ‘Translation as Adaptation,’ are all focused on how the work of translators and adaptors reconstruct narratives for new reading communities in ways that speak to the many perceived meanings of a single story. This section begins with Virgile Reiter’s exploration of what the Scandinavian translators’ decision to give Blanzeflor a more active role in the narrative might tell us about how Flores och Blanzeflor speaks to medieval Scandinavian perceptions of aristocratic gender roles. Reiter concludes that although the narrative contains misogynistic elements, it ultimately depicts men and women as complementing one another with their unique attributes, thereby offering ‘models of conduct and entertainment’ for both (p. 92). Sofia Lodén also discusses a Scandinavian reinterpretation of femininity, focusing on the characters of Laudine and Lunete in Herr Ivan, whom she sees as representing ‘female ideals rather than sophisticated literary characters’ (p. 104). Venetia Bridges compares two important twelfth-century manuscripts containing romans antiques, arguing that both ‘emphasize the triumph of translatio studii over translatio imperii’ and that ‘this thematic triumph occurs in both collections despite their different social and political origins’ (p. 127). Sif Rikhardsdottir traces the connections between Clári saga, its purported Latin source, and other maiden king romances, many of which were indigenous to Iceland, in order to suggest that ‘questions of origin’ should perhaps be secondary to ‘those of originality and its function within the diffusion of the romance as a genre across Europe’ (p. 149). The final section, ‘Continuities,’ contains three essays that trace the development of central themes from well-known French Arthurian romances as they are retold in...

Les manuscrits médiévaux occidentaux dans la collection du Louvre Abu Dhabi: 2009-2017

Between 2009 ‒ the year of the first acquisition ‒ and 2017, the year the museum opened to the public, the Louvre Abu Dhabi acquired twenty-one manuscripts or manuscript leaves. Among them are six western medieval manuscripts, representative of the religious, courteous, literary and scientific culture of the end of the Middle Ages, instruments of the dissemination of knowledge and faith. These objects having been previously kept in private hand and some of them being new or little known, this paper aims to make them accessible to the scientific community by presenting for each of them the codicological elements, the content, the decoration, their history as well as bibliographic references.

Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs by Éric Rebillard, and: The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translations, and Commentaries by Michael Lapidge

Reviewed by: Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs by Éric Rebillard, and: The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translations, and Commentaries by Michael Lapidge Scott G. Bruce Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs Éric Rebillard Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 403. ISBN 978-0-19-873957-9 The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translations, and Commentaries Michael Lapidge Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 733. ISBN 978-0-19-881136-7 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s three Book Review Editors: Sabine Huebner (sabine.huebner@unibas.ch); Jason Moralee (moralee.jason@gmail.com); and Kristina Sessa (sessa.3@osu.edu). Late ancient and early medieval accounts of the trials and deaths of the Christian martyrs (passiones) enjoyed immense popularity thoughout the Middle Ages, but these texts have not received as much critical attention in the past century as the biographies of Christian saints (vitae) for a number of reasons. First, historians have debated for ages about the authenticity of martyr narratives as sources for the history of the early church, which has led them to privilege some accounts deemed to be authentic over others deemed to be forgeries. As a result, the importance of the passiones as historical sources not only for the age of persecutions, but also for the early medieval church, was not fully realized. Second, the appeal of these stories to premodern readers led to their widespread dissemination and their subsequent survival in hundreds of medieval manuscripts. Ironically, this bounty of evidence has prevented scholars from producing critical editions of these sources necessary for serious historical inquiry and translations based on them for a general readership. Instead, many of the passiones have languished unedited and largely unread in the obscurity of early modern compendia of saints’ lives. Fortunately, the tide is now turning. In the past few decades, early Christian scholars have recognized the value of martyr narratives from Rome and elsewhere, which provide unparalleled evidence for early medieval pilgrimage, the cult of the saints, and the titular churches of the Eternal City. Moreover, scholars have edited and studied an increasing number of these Greek and Latin stories with attention to their overlooked literary and historical significance. The two books under review by Éric Rebillard and Michael Lapidge both take important strides in making the martyr narratives of Late Antiquity available to new audiences, though they do so in very different ways. Rebillard’s Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs presents a selection of over a dozen stories about Christian witnesses to their faith who were executed before 260 ce. New facing-page English translations accompany the original Greek and Latin texts, which Rebillard has reprinted from the [End Page 256] best available editions. This book departs significantly from previous modern collections of martyr stories—from T. Ruinart, Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta (1689) to H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (1972)—in that Rebillard does not exclude those stories whose historical authenticity cannot be proven definitively. Instead, he adopts as his primary criterion for inclusion whether there was “external attestation to the existence of a narrative about a martyr or group of martyrs” (p. 21), in particular, whether narratives of this kind were known to Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) or Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). The result is a learned florilegium of texts written before the early fifth century related to the cults of the following saints: Apollonius, Carpus and his companions, Pionius, Polycarp, and the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne (in Greek); and Marian and James, Cyprian, Fructuosus, Perpetua and her companions, and the Scilitan martyrs (in Latin). Lapidge’s The Roman Martyrs complements Rebillard’s book in useful ways. This massive volume provides translations and commentaries on forty Latin narratives of ancient Roman martyrs composed between c. 425 and c. 675 ce. Like Rebillard, Lapidge is not overly concerned about the authenticity of these texts, most of which are anonymous and replete with historical inconsistencies that betray the fact that they were written centuries after the persecutions. Instead, he strives to make available for readers of English a compendium...

Between the Man’s Hands and God’s Eyes: The Psalter Of 1437 from the Collection of the Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine

The Gavril Uric’s Psalter, created in 1437, remains one of the important manuscripts from the Neamț Monastery and South Slavic Cyrillic heritage. Involving the late medieval religious source into research, especially then it is a common text as Psalter, inspires to see this codex as the material object that was used by several generations. The system how the scribe organized the page, how he solved the mistakes, how he decorated the text is the way of interacts with his readers ; behind the sacred text he put eyes of God, shown by his calligraphy. The Psalter of 1437 became a memorial of the scribe Gavril Uric, Leon the monk, and other people, who signed the codex with their names at different times. Until the 19th century, this Psalter remained the physical mediator between the person and God. From the end of the 19th century, the book was an object for scientific research and closed to the public. Nowadays, the digital version gives a new breath for the Psalter and new opportunity to revise our perception and the way in which we study medieval manuscripts.

Sagesse biblique et sagesse philosophique dans laConsolation de Philosophieet dans quelques commentaires latins du Moyen Âge au chef-d’oeuvre de Boèce

It is well known that Boethius, commentator of Aristotle and Plato, also authored theological tractates, such as the De trinitate and De fide catholica. Yet, it is not toward theology, but philosophical wisdom that he seems to turn at the end of his life. When accused of high treason, he loses his position at the head of government and writes his masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy, at Pavia, in the prisons of Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king. The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how biblical wisdom and philosophical wisdom are operating together in the work of this bridging figure, who has been called “the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics.” To this aim, this article will scrutinise the passages of Boethius’s prosimetrum susceptible to echoing biblical quotes, as well as biblical citations or books which may have influenced Boethius. Furthermore, focus will be given to the status of the figure of Philosophy in the Consolation itself, then in the iconography, and finally, in the commentaries found in some medieval manuscripts of this masterpiece of world literature.

The use of abbreviations by superscript letter in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Wycliffite Bible

The use of scribal abbreviations in medieval manuscripts was mainly dictated by the need to save space and time as the creation of a medieval book was both extremely costly and time-consuming. One of the types of scribal abbreviations used in medieval manuscripts is abbreviation by superscript letter. In this type of abbreviations one superscript letter indicates the ending of a given word, or, in some cases, a medial position. Both vowels and consonants were used as abbreviations by superscript. They usually denoted, apart from the actual letter written in superscript, the preceding vowel or the letter <r>. According to Cappelli (1929/1982), superscript letters in Latin were used mainly in word-final positions; however, it was not uncommon for a superscript vowel to appear word-medially.
 The main objective of this paper is to investigate the use of superscript letters in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Wycliffite Bible (Mscr.Dresd.Od.83) on the basis of the Gospel of Matthew. Within the manuscript there are both superscript consonants and vowels. However, in some cases these abbreviations seem to appear in very specific contexts, whereas in other cases the contexts allowing the abbreviations to appear are much broader. The possible reasons behind this situation will be discussed within this paper along with the correspondence between the superscript letter and the spelling conventions used within the manuscript.

Women’s Spaces —Real and Imagined— in the Illustrated Beatus Commentaries

The medieval Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liebana, with twenty-nine surviving examples that extend from a single page to over 300 folios, is an illustrated genre spanning more than three centuries. Although the color-filled manuscripts have been well studied by scholars from a range of fields, the Beatus tradition has never been analyzed from a gendered perspective. In the present article, therefore, the authors investigate this apocalyptic genre as a whole in order to recover the memory of women’s involvement with the Beatus Commentaries. To do so, we apply a spatial analysis to female patronage and practices, and to the most telling examples of female representations within, demonstrating that a gendered lens brings to the fore evidence of originality in medieval manuscripts while restoring a more complete and balanced understanding of the Beatus tradition overall.

Espacios de mujeres —auténticos e imaginados— en los Beatos ilustrados

El Comentario al Apocalipsis de Beato de Liébana representado por veintinueve conocidos ejemplares, desde un solo folio hasta más de 300, es un género ilustrado cuya vigencia superó los tres siglos. Aunque los coloridos manuscritos han sido estudiado por especialistas en una gama amplia de campos, la tradición de los Beatos jamás se había analizado desde una perspectiva de género. Por lo tanto, en el presente artículo los autores investigan esta tradición apocalíptica como un conjunto para poder recuperar la memoria de la participación de las mujeres. Para tal fin, se aplica una analítica espacial al matronazgo y a las prácticas de las religiosas así como a las imágenes más parlantes de las representaciones femeninas para demostrar que a través de una aproximación de género se revelan evidencias de originalidad en los manuscritos medievales. De la misma manera se recobra una comprensión más completa y equilibrada de la tradición de los Beatos en sí.

"Liber registri Didaci secundi". Sobre la tradición manuscrita medieval de la "Historia Compostelana"

This paper analyzes the previous proposals concerning the genealogical links between the different medieval manuscripts of the Historia Compostelana , in particular as regards the relationship between the S codex (Library of the University of Salamanca) and P (Pontevedra Museum). Through a contrastive analysis of these testimonies, which also includes manuscript A (Archive of the Cathedral of Santiago), we have come to infer with some certainty that the P codex is a copy of S . This conclusion, based on a copious set of data, diverges from a hypothesis that deemed them independent in their relationship with a common previous testimony and has an important meaning for the critical establishment of the text of the work in question.

Welsh Traitors in a Scottish Chronicle: Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Penwyn and the Transmission of National Memory

The focus of this article is the capture and execution of Dafydd ap Gruffudd of Gwynedd in 1283. Various texts found in medieval and Early Modern manuscripts (including a notable example from Scotland) show a continuing interest in these events, including the identification of an individual blamed for Dafydd's betrayal. The article will consider the veracity of these texts and also the repeated tendency to relate Dafydd's execution to the events of the Glyndŵr rebellion of the early fifteenth century. It will argue that poetry that lies outside the 'mainstream' bardic tradition played a crucial role in the transmission and reinterpretation of national memory.

NOTES ON SUETONIUS’ GRAECA

After the notable editions of Suetonius by Roth, Preud'homme, Ihm and Ailloud, the De uita Caesarum edited by R.A. Kaster in the Oxford Classical Texts has made available to scholars a critical text which rests on the firm foundations of a thorough exploration of the tradition and the scholarship on the subject. The relationship of the eighteen medieval manuscripts, placed in a time-frame between the ninth century, the age of the oldest copy, Par. Lat. 6115, and the beginning of the thirteenth century, has been extensively and carefully examined and schematized in a complex stemma codicum, which illustrates the network of copying and contamination. Moreover, the editor has revised the dating of the manuscripts, in the light of the most recent studies, and brought order to the sigla assigned to them by previous editors.

The Liber de existencia riveriarum (c.1200) and the Birth of Nautical Cartography

ABSTRACTThe earliest known historical clue to what might be a primitive nautical chart is in a medieval manuscript of c.1200, the Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri mediterranei, which describes the Mediterranean Sea. The body of the manuscript consists of an account of the Mediterranean and Black seas and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and northern Africa organized in 45 regional sections, each introduced by a short text setting out the orientation and size of the region, followed by a portolan-like listing of contiguous coastal localities with the distances between them. These are complemented by additional tracks across the open sea (pelagic tracks) for which both distances and directions are provided. Two distinct types of directions can be distinguished: those not affected by magnetic declination, which indicates that they were probably determined by astronomical methods, and those affected by systematic errors that could only have originated in observations made with a marine compass. It is suggested that some of the pelagic courses in the Liber were compiled from an existing chart or sketch based on astronomical directions, which may have been used as a general reference for the work. The implication is that the genesis and technical evolution of the medieval portolan chart were more complex than has hitherto been thought by map historians, who have based their analyses on the few extant exemplars from the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, all based on compass directions.

Connecting Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Collections

This article examines issues affecting the reuse of data relating to collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in libraries, museums and archives. These manuscripts are increasingly being made available in digital formats, although the extent is perhaps less than expected; a recent report on the situation in Germany estimated that only about 7.5% of the country’s 60,000 manuscripts had been digitized. Discovering these manuscripts is heavily dependent on the quality and consistency of descriptive data about them, but the current situation is very mixed and inconsistent, despite several national programmes (such as Manuscriptorium in the Czech Republic, e-codices in Switzerland, and Biblissima in France) and a major international effort by Europeana. This article reports on recent work in manuscript studies, drawing on two major international projects. The first, funded by the European Union between 2014 and 2016, focused on the manuscript collection assembled in the nineteenth century by Sir Thomas Phillipps. It investigated ways of reconstructing the history of this vast, but now-dispersed collection, by bringing together data from a range of digital and non-digital sources. The second project, Mapping Manuscript Migrations, funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform under its Digging into Data Challenge from 2017 to 2019, extends the earlier work to a much larger scale, and implements a Linked Open Data framework for combining and managing data related to medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. It enables large-scale analysis and visualization of their history and movements over the centuries.

The Zhoujiatai Occult Manuscripts (周家臺的數術簡)

Bamboo-slip manuscripts from Zhoujiatai tomb 30, Hubei (burial dated ca. 209 b.c.e.), provide important evidence of ancient Chinese occult manuscripts belonging to a man of modest status. One manuscript, identified as a rishu “day book” by the modern editors of the Zhoujiatai manuscripts, treats of hemerology and astrology and is the focus of this study. The bamboo slips of a calendar for years corresponding to 211–210 b.c.e. can be associated with the rishu and may have formed one manuscript unit. The contents of the rishu include two large-size diagrams related to hemerological and astro-calendrical systems. The first diagram involves calculations based on the position of the handle of the Dipper constellation and the second diagram is notable for reference to one of the years (211 b.c.e.) of the associated calendar. A third diagram, for which the title rong liri “rong calendar day [divination]” is written on the manuscript, has a slightly different form in a second occurrence on the manuscript. Both forms of the diagram show thirty lines arranged in a vertical column, corresponding to the thirty days of the ideal month, with some lines enclosed in boxes. Days of the month are counted in the sequence of lines on the diagram in order to determine the lucky and unlucky aspects of a given day. A related hemerological system is attested in a manuscript from Mawangdui tomb 3, Hunan (burial dated 168 b.c.e.), and in medieval occult manuscripts from Dunhuang. 湖北省周家臺30號墓簡(約公元前209年)提供了關於古代中國一名低級官吏所擁有的數術簡的寶貴資料。本文主要研究其中由整理者认定为《日書》的簡文及其涉及的擇日、星象等內容。同墓出土的暦譜(公元前211–210年)與《日書》相關,可能本來屬於同一卷簡冊。《日書》包括兩幅大圖,一個與擇日有關,一個與星象曆法體系有關。第一圖講基於北斗七星斗柄指向的算法,第二圖因爲涉及到暦譜記載公元前211年的內容而受到矚目。另外第三幅圖簡文記述其名曰“戎磿日”,存在兩個稍微不同的版本。兩個版本的圖都是由縱向排列的三十條橫綫構成,代表一个月的理想天数三十,並和周圍的綫條組成方框。按照圖中橫綫的順序判斷每個月中相應的那一天是否吉利。與此相關的擇日法也在湖南馬王堆3號墓(約公元前168年)與中古時期敦煌的數術文獻中出現。

Recovering illegible writings in fire-damaged medieval manuscripts through data treatment of UV-fluorescence photography

Abstract When faced with legibility issues on a historical document, several approaches can be explored to recover the degraded contents, such as hyperspectral imaging, XRF scanning or X-ray tomography. Unfortunately due to the time, costs and technical skills required, these imaging techniques cannot be applied to the numerous faded/altered documents present in library collections. Hence, there is a need for a simple imaging procedure that could be applied on a large scale, in the same way libraries and archives are being digitized. The great sensitivity of modern digital camera sensors used for digitization campaigns added to the development of simple image post-treatment tools offer new potentialities regarding this issue. This paper presents a fast and low-cost methodology to archive current aspect and reveal hidden contents of documents: UV-fluorescence photography used in combination with contrast enhancement treatments (principal component analysis, color space conversion and decorrelation stretch). The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated on the fire-damaged medieval manuscripts collection from Chartres in France.

The Scenes of the Fall in the Bibles moralisées

In this article, I deal with the early four Bibles moralisées; the illustrated Bibles produced for the French royal family in the thirteenth century, and analyze the compositional changes evident between Bible images and moralization images in the scene of the Fall through the examination of texts and images, as well as poring through available manuscripts including the historical background. Every Bible image of the scene fundamentally places the serpent and the Tree of Wisdom between Adam and Eve. However, in moralization images, the first two manuscripts describe homosexual scenes, while the next two manuscripts depict idolatry and lust. There is no example of medieval manuscripts depicting homosexuality other than Bibles moralisées. Homosexuality was linked to "others", the targets of condemnation, especially to heretics, from the latter half of the twelfth century to the thirteenth century when the penalty for the sin of homosexuality came to be accepted as death. In addition, the subtle changes of Bible images, and the drastic change of moralization images can be explained from the circumstances of the recipients and the wedding of Louis IX.

Turkic Ethnic Realities in the Medieval Manuscript of Kipchak Origin

<p>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.</p>

TECHNOLOGY OF MEDICINES AND GALENICAL PREPARATIONS: THE CASE OF PRESCRIPTION FORMULASFROM “ANTIDOTARIUM” NICOLAI BY NICHOLAS OF SALERNO

Introduction. This study deals with the problem of similarity of the principles and approaches of drug technologies in the medieval manuscript “Antidotarium Nicolai” by Nicholas of Salerno with modern pharmaceutical technologies.The aim of study is a textual investigation of “Antidotarium Nicolai”, a detailed research of the content of the manuscript, recipes and technologies for making medicines.Materials and methods. In order to achieve this goal, eighty-five recipes of “Antidotarium Nicolai” have been identified, systematized and analyzed in a documentary translation from medieval French. An interdisciplinary study of the content of the manuscript was carried out with the help of factor analysis of the historical source and modern scientific literature.Results and discussion. Having described the content and aspects of the prescriptions of “Antidotarium Nicolai”, the authors note the similarity of the technologies of drugs and galenical preparations with modern pharmaceutical technology, in particular, with the technology of pharmacy production. In “Antidotarium Nicolai” it is stated that preparations based on herbal medicinal raw materials may be second-line therapy agents for completing treatment after the application of basic pharmacological preparations.Conclusion. The results of this work reveal the potential for the use of herbal medicines in the conditions of modern evidence-based medicine, in particular, in the organization of long-term treatment and secondary prevention of chronic diseases in patients who need to maintain their ability to work, and provide them with a sufficiently high level of quality of life. A detailed translation of the full text of the manuscript, the analysis of its content in accordance with the requirements of rational pharmacotherapy and phytotherapy, further favors to identify the prospects for the development of new drugs, multi-component in their chemical composition with a wide range of therapeutic effects.

Improved Recognition Results of Medieval Handwritten Gurmukhi Manuscripts Using Boosting and Bagging Methodologies

Recognition of medieval handwritten Gurmukhi manuscripts is an essential process for resourceful contents exploitation of the priceless information contained in them. There are numerous Gurmukhi script ancient manuscripts from fifteenth to twentieth century’s. In this paper, we have considered, work written by various persons from 18th to 20th centuries. For recognition, we have used various feature extraction techniques like zoning, discrete cosine transformations, and gradient features and different combinations of these features. For classification, four classifiers, namely, k-NN, SVM, Decision Tree, Random Forest individual and combinations of these four classifiers with voting scheme have been considered. Adaptive boosting and bagging have been explored for improving the recognition results and achieves the new state of the art for recognition of medieval handwritten Gurmukhi manuscripts recognition. Using this proposed framework, maximum recognition accuracy of 95.91% has been achieved using adaptive boosting technique and a combination of four different classifiers considered in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the successful attempt towards recognition of medieval handwritten Gurmukhi manuscripts and it can lead towards the development of optical character recognition systems for recognizing medieval handwritten documents in other Indic and non-Indic scripts as well.

Trans textuality: Dysphoria in the depths of medieval skin

This article proposes a theoretical method of approaching manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, through transgender theory, called trans textuality. Beyond looking for transgender identities in medieval texts, such a method asks, ‘what is a trans way of reading?’ and ‘how might non-human objects function in trans ways?’ The study is informed by foundational texts in trans psychoanalysis concerning the processes that trans skin undergoes during transition, texts which are put in conversation with medieval manuscript studies and new materialisms. The resulting response focuses on the threefold work of trans textual skins: depth, duration, and dysphoria. Whether the object is the organ of a transgender body or a medieval manuscript, such trans texts are skin constructs which relate through materiality and metaphor the ongoing narrative of bodies in transition. The article concludes with a twofold study of Fragment VI of the Ellesmere manuscript where the images and writing of the Physician and Pardoner demonstrate the principles of trans textuality: the depth of meanings from other times and genders, the duration of a body through transitions in form, and a dysphoric soul striving in the deeps of medieval skin.