Miscellaneous Manuscripts Research Articles

A popular text in eastern Turki: Isnad-i Nadi Ali

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the studies on Eastern Turki, as it is called in Western literature, which grew upon Chagatay under the improving influences of Kashgar and Yarkend dialects in the east at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. This written language (Eastern Turki) has been used particularly in manuscripts created by common people. Thus, a manuscript with the title Isnad-i Nadi Ali in the genre of attribution of supplications that has not been discussed in any other papers has been analyzed descriptively in this article. The mentioned manuscript, which is the essential material of this article, is between folios 66a and 71b of the miscellaneous manuscript held in the Bodleian Library under the number MS. Ind. Inst. Pers. This article consists of an introduction and five sections. The introduction provides general information about Eastern Turki and the popular texts in this literary language. The depiction of the manuscript, phonetic (vowel harmonies and phonetic changes), and morphologic (derivational and inflectional suffixes and other morphemes) aspects have been scrutinized in the initial three sections. The fourth section comprises the transcription of the manuscript. This paper's fifth section contains the grammatical index of the vocabulary of the text.

Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

Epistula Honorii: note esegetiche e riflessioni storico-giuridiche

Summary More than 430 fragments contained in the Theodosian Code can be traced back to laws by Honorius. The reason for this immense amount of costitutiones is to be found in the variety of issues he had to face during his rather long empire (395–423). Beyond those passed down in official Codes, a number of other laws issued under Honorius are attested by literary or historical sources. The purpose of this paper is to present, analyze and comment on the Epistula Honorii, a quite neglected rescript copied down in a Spanish volume of miscellaneous manuscripts from the end of the 10th century. The document, addressed to troops stationed in the city of Pamplona, grants certain benefits to these soldiers, namely an increase of their stipendium and the hospitium. After focusing on its dating and the problematic interpretation of its text, it will be compared to other laws by Honorius on similar topics.

박광선의 친필본 『보덕공 비망록』 한글 자료 연구

Bodeokgong Bimangnok is a miscellaneous manuscript, which includes both Hanja and Hangul texts and was written by Park Kwangseon (1569~1631) of Goryeong from 1605 to 1623. This study focuses on the texts written in Hangul to examine what they can tell us about the history of the Korean language. A particularly noteworthy feature of this manuscript is that it contains the first hypercorrected form ‘김채’ (kimchi) instead of ‘짐채’. While the manuscript does not contain as many Hangul texts as it does in Classical Chinese, the notation and phonological characteristics it reveals do reflect the language of the 17th-century Gyeongsang-do province and thus provide invaluable insights into the history of the Korean language, especially when compared with Hyeonpungkwakssieongan, a contemporary manuscript from a neighboring region.

The introductory Śloka to “the Treatise on Entering the Abhidharma” (T. 1554)

The fragment Mainz 857 (verso) of the Berlin Turfan Collection contains a parallel to text F of the miscellaneous manuscript U 5335 (edited Berliner Turfantexte 34). The vertical lines (columns), which comprise an Old Uyghur translation of the beginning of the prologue to the Abhidharmāvatāra (T. 1554: 入阿毘達磨論 ru apidamo lun), are arranged in such a way that they proceed from right to left, contrary to the usual left-right direction.

Women’s Work and Men’s Devotions: The Fabrics of the Passion in “O Vernicle”

This article explores how male Cistercians producing an early fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript made devotional use of images representing women’s textile labor. An early manuscript copy of “O Vernicle,” a Middle English arma Christi poem, appears in Royal 17 A. xxvii, likely produced at Bordesley Abbey. The Royal version of “O Vernicle” features a unique marginal illumination of two women of Bethlehem and Jerusalem wearing green and red dresses. The woman in green holds a baby swaddled in a green and blue cloth with red stripes, similar to a Scottish tartan. Three other examples demonstrate the illuminator’s careful attention to fabric’s texture and encourage the user to imagine touching Christ’s clothing. These include the Veronica; the translucent white blindfold before Christ’s eyes; and his two tunics, one of which “hade sem none.” The Royal manuscript’s illuminations incorporate multiple textiles and human figures both to customize the poem to the local Cistercian, Worcestershire context and the abbey’s and region’s role in cloth production and also to create scripts for readers’ affective devotions. These female figures and their fabrics fashion a tactile-affective devotional approach to the Passion story. In the Royal manuscript’s text and images, women’s textile work functions as a hermeneutic lens and sensorial-affective prompt within both male monastic and lay devotional culture.

Orientaciones para el estudio del contenido del Vat. gr. 1196

Vat. gr. 1196 is a miscellaneous manuscript that contains canonical, synodal and heresiological texts from different authors. These adnotationes offer its own foliation and contents.

Zelenka, Palestrina and the Art of Arrangement: A New Manuscript Fragment

A set of miscellaneous eighteenth-century manuscripts held in the music collection of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB) has recently yielded several exciting new finds. Previously wrongly catalogued under the name of the castrato Ventura Rochetti, much of its contents have now been recognized as the work of Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745). One of the most interesting items in the set is a single leaf (D-Dl Mus. 1271-E-1,4), in Zelenka’s hand, that belongs to a hitherto unidentified sacred work. It contains only a figured basso seguente part, of which the beginning (and probably the end) is now missing. This paper examines this manuscript fragment in detail for the first time and conclusively establishes that it represents a previously unknown copy by Zelenka of the Credo from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli. This makes it the first and only surviving source for a continuo part for a Palestrina mass known to have originated with Zelenka. Several crossings-out and corrections suggest that it functioned as a rough working document. Through an exhaustive analysis of the fragment’s idiosyncratic presentation of clefs and sketch-like material, I argue that it represents an arrangement of this work, probably for four or five voices with instruments, made to suit the requirements of the Dresden Kapellknaben ensemble. Drawing on additional source evidence, including a full score copy of the mass from Zelenka’s music collection and Dresden manuscripts of other Palestrina works, I also seek to date the fragment and discuss its likely historical and performance contexts.

Códices misceláneos de agronomía andalusí

La mayoría de los tratados agrícolas andalusíes se encuentran en códices de carácter misceláneo que, en gran parte, se atribuyen a un solo autor. Esto ha originado una serie de falsas autorías cuyas causas analizamos en este trabajo. Tras esto, procedemos a un breve estudio de los distintos manuscritos misceláneos, incidiendo en el hecho de las diferentes atribuciones de que han sido objeto y tratando de delimitar cada una de ellas. Este estudio se resume a continuación en un cuadro y, para finalizar, comentamos los datos más significativos que se desprenden de toda la información anterior, añadiendo algunas referencias a la proyección que tuvieron las obras de la escuela agronómica andalusí.

Epifanio de Salamina en Barb. gr. 441

Barb. gr. 441 is a miscellaneous manuscript that contains fragments of different Fathers of the Church (Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Epiphanius of Salamis). The scope of these adnotationes is to delimit the folios belonging to each author and offer a more detailed information on Epiphanius’ passages.

Bulghaith al-Darawi and Barthélemy d'Herbelot: Readers of the Qur'an in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century Florence. Through the analysis of a very short and fascinating miscellaneous manuscript (BNCF, MS Magliabechi XXXIV.31), this article aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European orientalism, Italian intellectual history, and Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in the seventeenth century. Despite its fragmentary nature, the material, linguistic, and doctrinal features of this miscellaneous manuscript shed new light on the study of Oriental languages in seventeenth-century Florence and, especially, on Barthélemy d'Herbelot's (1625–1695) stay in Tuscany between 1666 and 1671, and the Muslim scholars he worked with and learned from during this time.

Traducciones bíblicas en lenguas indoamericanas. El Evangeliario náhuatl de la biblioteca capitular de Toledo (Mss 35-22)

Between the walls of the Chapter Library of Toledo, a valuable miscellaneous manuscript is preserved among other priceless pieces, such as Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's Manual del Christiano, one of the first Epistles and Gospels translations into the Nahuatl Language. The Mesoamerican language evangeliaries, barely studied, were of fundamental importance for the process of evangelisation of New Spain, even though they were prohibited by the Council of Trent (1545 - 1563). This article presents the hitherto unknown manuscript 35-22 from Toledo Chapter's Library, which will be edited and translated in the current Project, « Mesoamerican Biblical Philology (c. XVI‒XVII) ».

Reading Family in the Rate Manuscript's Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras

Abstract A close resemblance between Sir Isumbras and Saint Eustace has long been recognized. Indeed, they appear together in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, a miscellaneous manuscript copied sometime around 1500 by a single scribe who signs the name Rate. Rate places the two narratives first and fifth in the Ashmole manuscript, with intervening poems that provide instruction for the community and household. Bringing together four different genres from three different centuries, Rate's initial scribal activity domesticates these aristocratic narratives for a bourgeois audience by highlighting the affective family already visible in both Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras. This article argues that the first five poems in Ashmole 61 constitute the nuclear family with a strong patriarch as the foundation of Christian society.

Unterweisung in Vers und Prosa

Abstract The article discusses a number of Middle High German versions of Bertold of Regensburg's sermon on the mass as specifically vernacular adaptations of his Latin, authorised sermons. The adaptations in the miscellaneous manuscript Stadtbibliothek Mainz, HS I 221, Annaberg-Buchholz, St Anna 329 and in the fragment 221 of the StB Berlin are compared with the rendering in the corpus represented by the manuscript ÖNB Vienna, Codex 2829. The analysis of the textual variants and the different layout shows how the versions are adapted for specific use: as private reading matter, as instruction to meditate on the passion of Christ, or as rhymed catechetical lesson on the mass.

Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas

Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas Francesco Marco Aresu Introduction MS Riccardiano 1088 is a paper codex of seventy folios, dated between the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, and conserved in Florence in the Biblioteca Riccardiana.1 It is a miscellaneous manuscript that preserves a redaction of Francesco Petrarca's canzoniere (in the Malatesta form).2 The copyist starts transcribing Petrarch's poems in two columns, the odd lines on the left and the even lines on the right, with the significant exception of the sestinas, which are copied in a single column on folios 17r, 20r-v, and 25v. After folio 26v, a sudden change of pen, ink, and layout occurs. Halfway through his transcription of the canzoniere, the copyist leaves a dramatic testimony of his scribal resolutions. From now on, as he tells the readers on folio 27r, he will discontinue the practice of following different layouts for different metrical genres, distancing himself from Petrarch's conventions as we know them from his partially autograph manuscript of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (henceforth RVF): MS Vat. Lat. 3195.3 Instead, the copyist will uniformly transcribe poems of any type in the same format, one verse per line, proceeding vertically: "Non mi piace di piu seguire discriuere nel modo cheo tenuto da quinci adietro cioe di passare daluno colonello alaltro, ançi intendo di seguire giu p(er) lo cholonello tanto che si co(m)pia la chançone o sonetto chesia [I don't wish to continue writing the same way I have done so far, that is, switching from one column to the other. Instead, I plan on writing down one column until either the canzone or sonnet is complete]."4 An urge for standardization and simplicity here replaces a more philological approach to the mise-en-page of the exemplar and Petrarch's authorial (and authoritative) editorial decisions.5 In this essay, I explore Petrarch's material treatment of the poetic genre of the sestina (with the exclusion of the sestina doppia, RVF 332)6 in the autograph of the RVF: the aforementioned MS Vat. Lat. 3195.7 I outline how [End Page 185] Petrarch's material choices isolate the sestinas from both the poetic experiments of his precursors in developing the form (Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Arnaut Daniel, Dante Alighieri) and the other metrical genres in the autograph of the RVF (sonnets, canzoni, ballate, madrigali). Then, I study how the mise-en-page of the sestinas interacts with their metrical form and subject matter. Finally, I focus on this interaction and how it relates to the other lyrical forms and their layouts in the autograph in terms of their semantic contribution to the structure of the canzoniere as an organic book of poems. I intend to show how the sestinas work as material and poetic loci for the progressive synthesis and assessment of the narrative of the songbook, or as niches for metaliterary considerations. Toward a History of the Sestina Often referred to as the lyrical sestina (in order to distinguish it from the narrative sestina or sesta rima), the sestina is a form that, in Aurelio Roncaglia's words: consta di sei strofe esastiche, più una tornada di tre versi. Le parole che terminano i versi non soggiacciono, entro la singola strofa, a vincolo di rima, ma si ripetono identiche in ogni strofa, combinando all'insistenza lessicale il dispositivo dei rims dissolutz…. Da una strofa all'altra varia soltanto l'ordine di successione, che risulta a ciascuna ripresa diverso, governato però da una legge di permutazione rigorosa.8 [consists of six stanzas of six lines each and a tornada of three lines. Within each strophe, words at the end of the lines are not subject to any rhyme scheme, but are repeated identically in all strophes, combining lexical insistence with the device of rims dissolutz…. From strophe to strophe, only the order of presentation varies: it is different at every round, though it still complies with a rigorous law of permutation.] Roncaglia's succinct definition requires some expansion. The notion of rims dissolutz (or rimas dissolutas; also rims estramps or rimas estrampas, literally "rhymes with a limp") refers to a rhyme...

A Survey of the Gaster Collection at the John Rylands Library, Manchester

In 1954 and 1958 the John Rylands Library acquired a significant portion of the library of Dr Moses Gaster (1856–1939). As a scholar and bibliophile, Gaster collected manuscripts, printed books, pamphlets and amulets. His collection reflects his wide ranging interests: philology (including Romanian language, folklore and literature), Judaica, magic and mysticism, and Samaritan studies. This article presents a survey of the varied Rylands Gaster collection. It includes an inventory of the miscellaneous manuscript sequence, a complete handlist of Gaster‘s German manuscripts and an introduction to the archival material.

Characteristics and Typologies of Medieval Astronomical Tables

INTRODUCTIONIn his Histoire generale et particuliere de l'astronomie (Paris, 1755), Pierre Esteve, member of the Royal Society of Sciences at Montpellier, reported:Alphonse X, Roi de Castille , employa beaucoup de richesses & de soins pour avancer cette science [l'astronomie]. Il fit assembler les plus habiles astronomes que le siecle avait produit ; leurs observations particulieres & celles de l'antiquite qui leur etoient connues , leur servirent a corriger les tables de Ptolomee : ils en construisirent de nouvelles , qui representoient plus exactement les mouvements du ciel. Ces tables furent nommees Alphonsines , du nom du Roi qui avait preside a tout l'ouvrage.1In this passage Esteve made a crucial remark. As was the case with many other sets of tables before them, the Alfonsine Tables compiled in Castile under King Alfonso (thirteenth century) had a dual origin: they were the result of new observations and they were built on previous material, mostly in tabular form.Because they present information in a condensed form, tables also played a fundamental role in the transmission of scientific knowledge. In the particular case mentioned above, the Castilian Alfonsine Tables contributed decisively to the dissemination in Christian Europe of a long tradition of Arabic astronomy. As a matter of fact, during the Middle Ages astronomical tables were probably the most efficient way to transmit mathematical astronomy whose goal was the computation of astronomical events.Astronomical tables are very frequently found in scientific miscellaneous manuscripts, many of which are entirely made up of tables. Despite their apparent uniformity, and for some the perception is that they all look alike, tables respond to a great variety of astronomical issues. In principle, they are intended to be 'user-friendly', that is, astronomical phenomena can be precisely computed without requiring the user to solve problems in trigonometry. In general, the tables include a selection of values arranged in columns for various astronomically significant functions, and all that is needed is interpolation between entries in the table and arithmetic rules for combining entries from different columns in the table. In many cases, astronomical tables were grouped in consistent sets allowing astronomers to solve most of the problems of medieval astronomy.The astronomical tables considered in this paper were compiled from about the tenth century to the early sixteenth century in the Latin West, as was the case with those reviewed in A survey of European astronomical tables in the late Middle Ages.2 Tables in Arabic and Greek are excluded, although many of the tables considered here have their origin in tables in those languages, or were simply adaptations of them into Latin. The period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries is a consistent span of time for astronomical tables because all those concerning the movements and positions of the Sun and the Moon and the five known planets were ultimately based on the geometrical models described by Ptolemy (second century), thus allowing for few modifications.In this paper the main elements characterizing astronomical tables are defined and typologies of them are proposed according to their content and internal structure, as a contribution to their analysis, which has become a crucial way for understanding the computational methods and the transmission of astronomical knowledge.A THEMATIC CLASSIFICATIONAstronomical tables, in their huge variety, can be classified according to different criteria. From the point of view of their content, it is possible to group tables into several categories, each one with a variety of types. The categorization proposed here follows in many ways the patterns established by several modern authors who have surveyed specific sets of tables such as Islamic tables, the Toledan Tables (eleventh century), and others.3 The thematic classification below works very well even though in a few cases it has been difficult to assign to a single category certain tables that contain varied information. …

The Byzantine Alexander Poem in MS Marcianus graecus 408*

AbstractAmong the many versions of the Alexander Romance, originating from Alexandria, 3rd century AD, the long Byzantine Alexander Poem (BAP) takes a special place. It is by far the longest item in the miscellaneous manuscript, Marcianus 408, numbering 6130 ‘political’ (fifteen-syllable) verses. Smaller pieces deal with the capture of Constantinople by the Western Crusaders in 1204 and the recapture by the Byzantines in 1261 and genealogies of the Palaeologues; other items are e.g. on special plants, on verses of the poetess Kasia, on a snake bite, etc. The colophon in the last verses of BAP mentions the year 1388, which - as will be argued in this article - can hardly be the date of composition, both on textual and historical grounds. This argument is underpinned with a number of examples.

To compose, read, and use a Byzantine text: aspects of the chronicle of Constantine Manasses

Constantine Manasses’ Synopsis Chronike is a twelfth-century verse chronicle, recasting Byzantine history in a specifically Comnenian, romantic and poetic vein. The chronicle has been preserved in many manuscripts, but it has also come down to us in a number of different collections of excerpts. This article wishes to draw attention to the readers! excerptors of the Synopsis Chronike, to consider the use and usefulness of the text in relation to the composition itself. Some collections of excerpts are compared and discussed, with special focus on the excerpts included in a fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript (Codex Upsaliensis Graecus 8).

On the Date and Contents of a Portuguese Medieval Technical Book on Illumination

The book this article discusses is a late medieval Portuguese technical text on illumination written with Hebraic characters. It belongs to a miscellaneous manuscript at Parma's Biblioteca Palatina. Discovered in 1803, it was attributed to Abraham ben Judah Ibn Hayyim and dated to 1262. Soon some authors assigned it to the fifteenth century. The paper's water-marks, recently observed, confirmed the fifteenth century date. Yet, the possibility that this text could be a copy of an older original remains. However, the discussion of the historical context and the content also suggests that the original dates more probably from the fifteenth than the thirteenth century. In terms of structure and content this text should not be considered a treatise but a heterogeneous compilation which, besides the Hebraic marks, presents significantly alchemic, Castilian and Arabic influences.