Manuscript Pages Research Articles

Identification of a small fragment of Mani's Living Gospel (Turfan Collection, Berlin, M5439)

AbstractHeretofore three fragments of Maniʼs Living Gospel – the most important work of Mani – have been recognized in Middle Persian and in Manichaean script: M17, M172/I/ and M644. This article, with a codicological and textological approach, shows that M17 and the new fragment M5439 are two separate pieces of a single manuscript page. The verso-side of M5439 has a new text. Now, after the identification and reading of this damaged fragment, we are able to correct the previous reconstructions and comment on a few Middle Persian words. The text contains a part of the exordium and of the chapter Aleph of the Living Gospel.

Speculations on Spectacles: Jane Austen’s Eyeglasses, Mrs. Bates’s Spectacles, and John Saunders in Emma

Speculations on Spectacles: Jane Austen’s Eyeglasses, Mrs. Bates’s Spectacles, and John Saunders in <i>Emma</i>

Bibliometric Analysis of Female Authorship Trends and Collaboration Dynamics Over JBMR's 30-Year History.

In academia, authorship is considered a currency and is important for career advancement. As the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (JBMR) is the highest-ranked journal in the field of bone, muscle, and mineral metabolism and is the official publication of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, we sought to examine authorship changes over JBMR's 30-year history. Two bibliometric methods were used to collect the data. The "decade method" included all published manuscripts throughout 1 year in each decade over the past 30 years starting with the inaugural year, yielding 746 manuscripts for analysis. The "random method" examined 10% of published manuscripts from each of the 30 years, yielding 652 manuscripts for analysis. Using both methods, the average number of authors per manuscript, numerical location of the corresponding author, number of collaborating institutions, number of collaborating countries, number of printed manuscript pages, and the number of times each manuscript was cited all significantly increased between 1986 and 2015 (p < 10-4 ). Using the decade method, there was a significant increase in the percentage of female first authors over time from 35.8% in 1986 to 47.7% in 2015 (p = 0.02), and this trend was confirmed using the random method. The highest percentage of female first authors in 2015 was in Europe (60.0%), and Europe also had the most dramatic increase in female first authors over time (more than double in 2015 compared with 1986). Likewise, the overall number of female corresponding authors significantly increased during the past 30 years. With the increasing demands of publishing in academic medicine, understanding changes in publishing characteristics over time and by geographical region is important. These findings highlight JBMR's authorship trends over the past 30 years and demonstrate those countries having the most changes and where challenges still exist. © 2017 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

News from the Field

The American Philosophical Society (APS) recently launched PAL (People Also Liked), a circulation data-driven recommendation tool designed specifically for archives and manuscript repositories. Similar to the customer recommendation tools used by major online commerce sites, like Amazon and Netflix, PAL helps scholars discover relevant manuscript collections based on request history and user interests. Researchers at APS use it to sift through the 13 million pages of manuscripts held at the APS Library, including the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, the Journals of Lewis and Clark, and the papers of seven Nobel Laureates.

Temporal dimensions in Notes on Manuscripts and Old Books in Moldavia, I–IV, a corpus edited by I. Caproșu and E. Chiaburu

This article is part of a broader research regarding the evolution of mentalities in the period starting with the 16th century, the aim of the present research being to identify and discuss the ways in which people in those days perceived time. Our research focused on the material provided by the marginal notes—with a value of their own—made by readers on the pages of manuscripts from Moldavia over the span of more than 400 years. The main instruments we have employed are analysis and synthesis, from a diachronic perspective, from particular to general, by means of the inductive method. As a result, an image has been shaped of the means by which the event, as an element of time, was perceived and rendered, and of the way in which time becomes the fundamental landmark of life, the one that comprises, marks, and generates the entire reality.

\u2018Why \xfeat yee meeued been / can I nat knowe\u2019: Autobiography, Convention, and Discerning Doublenesse in Thomas Hoccleve\u2019s The Series

The secretary script of the Privy Seal looms large in the holographs of fifteenth-century clerk, Thomas Hoccleve—both in the written hand on the manuscript page, and the written-ness of his extraordinary quasi-autobiographical poetic productions. Most captivating, if little known, is Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. iii. 9: witness to the verse collection known as The Series, in which disparate exemplary, confessional, and didactic texts are organised as the purported compositions of the ‘Thomas’ of the frame narrative. The stage seems set for an insight into medieval authorial anxiety, patronage, and even mental infirmity, of apparently unprecedented candour. Yet for all his disarming claims to ineloquence, insignificance, and (famously) ‘meetrynge amis’, Hoccleve is a poet creatively alive to the possibilities, and dangers, of self-identification. He adopts in his poetry the double visage of laureate, yet servant; public man, yet ostracised clerk. Though his speakers may really report autobiographical truths of the poet, the poet may frequently refer only to a namesake of himself—mediated through literary convention—in his speakers. Such is the focus of this article, which considers—adopting a narratologist vocabulary—Cosin V. iii. 9 as an example of a work, and artefact, that bears an almost Renaissance sense of the individual’s propensity to self-fashioning, but that is better encapsulated in a term of a distinctly medieval flavour, doublenesse. The discernment of such doublenesse, I suggest, offers a means of ascribing value to Hoccleve’s still neglected corpus that extends beyond historicism alone, and a pathway, perhaps, for an alternative view of literary authority in late medieval literature. In The Series, emotion is concealed behind convention, the maker behind his text; but despite Hoccleve’s diligent control over the words on the page, as for their interpretation by his audience, that, he must finally concede, ‘can I nat knowe’.

Automatic Layout Analysis and Storage of Digitized Medieval Books

With almost twenty years of expertise in the field of computer methods in the humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Trier has recently been partner in two projects in the field of medieval manuscript studies: Virtuelles Skriptorium St. Matthias reconstructed the stock of medieval texts in the abbey of St Matthias in Trier by digitizing and publishing more than 450 manuscripts. eCodicology aimed to develop, test, and optimize new algorithms that automatically detect the macro- and microstructural layout elements on manuscript pages. This article discusses the workflows and technologies of both projects with a focus on the potential and limits of machine-reading technologies.

The Visual Text: Bibliographic Codes as Pragmatic Markers on a Manuscript Page

Abstract1 This paper explores the dynamics of the textual-visual interface of a medieval manuscript page within the frameworks of historical pragmatics and pragmaphilological approaches to the study of historical texts. Whilst the former focuses on the contexts in which historical utterances, manifested as texts, occur (Jacobs &amp; Jucker 1995: 11), the latter involves a context-based perspective in the study of individual historical texts (Jucker 2000: 91). Combining the two approaches allows for a more comprehensive study of the “visual text” (cf. Machan 2011) than has been possible for paleographic, codicological, or linguistic analyses of medieval manuscripts. The present paper adopts the “pragmatics-on-the-page” approach (cf. Carroll et al. 2013, Peikola et al. 2014) in its analysis of bibliographic codes in British Library Royal MS 18 D II, which contains the texts of Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes. Such visual elements of the manuscript page as mise en page, ink colour, as well as type and size of script will be examined as pragmatic markers, functioning on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional, and metalinguistic (cf. Erman 2001, Carroll et al. 2013), and providing (visual) contexts for interpreting the linguistic message of the text.

Unearthing Bulgakov's trace proteome from the Master i Margarita manuscript

Ten pages, selected from a total of 127, of the last manuscript of Master i Margarita, written by Bulgakov in the last four years of his life, have been analysed in order to harvest and identify any trace proteome left on the margin by the novelist, in the hope of finding biomarkers of his fatal nephrotic syndrome. To that aim, we prepared a special ethyl-vinyl acetate film as binder of ground AG 501 Bio-Rad mix-bed strong cation/strong anion exchange resins for adsorbing any protein left on the margins of the pages via saliva and/or sweat. After eluting, digesting and interrogating the peptides by LC-MS/MS, we could identify three proteins, periostin, N-acetyl-β-glucosaminidase and nephrin, reported as biomarkers of renal pathologies. Additionally a further 29 unique gene products, of saliva and skin origin, have been identified, together with two bacterial proteins. The novel method here reported could be safely applied to any other research on manuscripts stored in public libraries and repositories of the World Cultural Heritage. SignificanceThe present manuscript aims at finding proteomics traces in a 75-year old manuscript in order to confirm the health state of the author. In the case of Bulgakov it was known that he died of renal disease, possibly leaving traces and/or biomarkers of this pathology on the margins of the pages analysed. Three proteins, stated to be biomarkers of nephrotic syndrome, could be identified. In order not to contaminate the manuscript pages with resin particles, we have devised a novel harvesting film, by which strong cation and anion exchangers are embedded in ethyl-vinyl acetate foils. It is felt that this technology could be safely applied to other specimens belonging to the Word Heritage.

Umwelt und Umweltgestaltung: Leibniz’ politisches Denken in seiner Zeit, ed. Friedrich Beiderbeck, Irene Dingel and Wenchao Li

Emperor Leopold I confided in the Elector Georg Ludwig of Hannover on 17 May 1700 that Leibniz was a ‘highly experienced, discreet and qualified man’. The remark referred to Leibniz’s political experience and it was testimony to the remarkable recognition he achieved as a non-noble even from the highest authority in the Holy Roman Empire. He was also the most extraordinary polymath. And he was one of the international intellectuals of his day who exchanged letters with some 1,100 individuals scattered across the whole of Europe; indeed, in 2007, his correspondence alone was recognised as part of the world documentary heritage and added to the register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Even gaining an overview of his prolific output is difficult and the sheer volume of writing in virtually every category is daunting. The Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften started publishing his complete works in 1923 and the work is still ongoing under the management of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, with offices in Berlin, Hanover, Münster and Potsdam. The challenge is Herculean: the project will ultimately include some 60,000 items. Roughly 200,000 pages of manuscript are preserved in Hanover alone.

Communing with the Past

I Spent Muggy Chicago Summers Indoors, Tapping at my Keyboard, Churning Out Pages of My Book Manuscript, Following the paths of people's lives, obsessing over the right turn of phrase. When I grew lonely (which I always inevitably did), I'd head out to the Starbucks on Wilson and Magnolia, comforting myself with the sounds of people around me. I wrote better late at night, when night had descended and lulled everyone to sleep. I felt then a great sense of relief, tranquility, buoyed by nothing else but the swirl of ideas, because everyone around me in my world had settled down for the night. It was then that I was not distracted by the world of the living. Summer in Chicago, after all, was an exuberantly social season. The city exploded with life; throngs of runners would peel their shirts off in the humid heat as they sprinted along Lakefront Trail. But for me, invitations to barbecues, beach parties, and weekend getaways to Saugatuck were left unanswered: I had my book to write.

Gendering Dark Age Jesus

Jesus's body was visualised in strikingly gendered ways in the Carolingian world. The Jesus of the Carolingian Empire could move deftly between gendered styles, from feminised victim to hyper‐masculinised victor; at the same time, he could delicately dance between these two modes of gendered existence and do so within the space of one manuscript page. Three manuscripts produced in the ninth century contain bold images of a fleshly Jesus: the Stuttgart Psalter (c.820s), the Sacramentary of Gellone (c.800) and the acrostic poem produced at the abbey of Fulda, In Honour of the Holy Cross (c.810/830s). These codices are associated with a period of cultural flourishing known as the Carolingian renovatio, or the renewal of classical and patristic culture within the reforming agenda of the Frankish church. Each manuscript presents a Dark Age Jesus within distinct, interpretative backdrops – tortured, fecund and imperial – a divergence in style underscoring how the evangelical portrait of Jesus's body and its fluctuating gender were staged in the pastoral North for different audiences. The Carolingians did impart a series of images that defy the stereotypes of early medieval Christianity, including the idea that intimacy with a human saviour is the spiritual legacy of subsequent eras.

The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 2, July 1831–January 1833 ed. by Matthew C. Godfrey et al. (review)

Reviewed by: The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 2, July 1831–January 1833 ed. by Matthew C. Godfrey et al. David E. Speich The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 2, July 1831–January 1833. Edited by Matthew C. Godfrey, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley ( Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2013. 550 pp. Cloth $54.95, isbn 978-1-60907-598-9.) This volume of historical documents is organized chronologically and geographically into five parts, with various types of documents transcribed and organized according to stages in Smith’s work. This volume covers the period when a portion of the Church of Christ (precursor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) migrated from Ohio to Missouri. The front matter includes a time line of Smith’s life arranged, arbitrarily, in a two-dimensional graph format, facing a useful map showing Smith’s five residences during this period. The scope of this edition is different from the The Papers of Joseph Smith (1989), which was edited by Dean C. Jessee, the general editor of the current larger multivolume edition. The Documents series of the current edition includes various kinds of documents that depict the logistical and organizational challenges faced by the church, the development of doctrine in the church through Smith’s revelations and visions, and details of Smith’s personal and family life. The editors sought to publish as many extant original documents as possible, but used their judgment in selecting the best version of a text when original documents were not available. Although histories are also published separately for the current edition, the 1832 history appears in this volume, perhaps because it “provides the most personal, intimate account of JS’s early visions available and preserves details of those visions not recorded elsewhere” (279). Because the 1832 history appears in both editions (pp. 1–10 in the 1989 edition; pp. 275–85 in the 2013 edition), I chose to use it as the basis for evaluating the current edition. [End Page 91] Each document represented in the Document series includes a source note, a historical introduction, and a document transcript, along with explanatory footnotes. This edition uses a variety of font sizes to distinguish the transcripts, the historical introduction, the footnotes, and the source notes (in decreasing order of size); in addition, the title and citation of the selected document are italicized, and Smith’s own handwriting is presented in boldface. On any given page spread the reader may find three or four of these font styles, giving the already sprawling pages a somewhat disjointed look. The source note gives an extensive history of the text using physical evidence of the source documents and additional collated documents. The historical introduction gives even more detail based on other sources, and includes informed speculation about the circumstances of composition and the transmission of the text. Compared to the previous edition, the document transcript in the current edition includes more details about alterations in the holograph manuscript. The footnotes in the current edition are more numerous and include many cross-references to doctrinal sources as well as historical sources, whereas the previous edition footnoted primarily historical sources. The transcriptions and the footnotes indicate that the editors are doing substantially original work. The previous edition included, for the 1832 history, a photograph of the first page of the holograph manuscript and a 1907 photograph of the town where Smith was born. The current edition does not include illustrations for this selection, but overall seems to include more illustrations than the previous edition. The back matter contains many items of historical interest, such as maps, a pedigree (genealogical) chart, and a biographical directory; organizational charts; cross-references in doctrinal documents; an index; and material relating to the work of documentary editing, such as the “Calendar of Documents,” “Source Notes for Multiple-Entry Documents,” and the “Essay on Sources.” In summary, this volume demonstrates close attention to principles of documentary editing while also carefully placing the documents in question within historical and doctrinal context. [End Page 92] David E. Speich Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Copyright © 2016 The Kent State University Press

Database Review: Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture, 1790–1920, by Gale Digital Collections

Database ReviewCrime, Punishment and Popular Culture, 1790–1920, by Gale Digital Collections Grace Beekman (bio) Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture, 1790–1920, the forthcoming archive from Gale Digital Collections, boasts more than two million pages of manuscripts, books, periodicals, photographs, and other materials that document the legal and criminal changes taking place during the long nineteenth century. From political and technological developments to calls for social and legal reform, this archive offers users a wealth of material that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines. A number of well-known source libraries have contributed to this archive, notably the British Library, the University of Cambridge Library, the Library of Congress, and the Harvard University Law Library, making materials that were once dispersed now easily accessible in one online collection. Trial transcripts, police reports, personal notebooks, criminal case files, and other printed materials are now digitally accessible and will no doubt inspire exciting new research on the relationship between law, crime, and society during the nineteenth century. While users of the Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture archive can explore these digitized materials using common search tools and keywords, the archive’s compilers have also organized many of the materials into carefully curated “collections.” For example, the “Law, Crime, and Society in Hanoverian England: The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1714–1820” collection is comprised of records of criminal proceedings brought before the King’s Commission of the Peace from 1714 to 1834. Court records detailing crimes from sedition to mutinies at sea can be found in this collection, along with witness testimonies, cross-examinations, and even advertisements [End Page 362] for services such as midwives or tooth-cleaners. Another collection, the “Crime and the Criminal Justice System: Records from the U.K. National Archive,” emphasizes the inner workings of UK courts, prisons, and policing from 1780 to 1926. This collection includes prison ledgers, court records, and detailed letters to court officers recommending prison sentences and addressing other related topics. Users can even browse a drill manual for the constabulary force of Ireland and read detailed instructions about squad formations and a proper officer’s salute. Digitizing these primary source manuscripts has enhanced the legibility of many handwritten documents. For example, the Pelham Papers, found in the “Crime and Justice in Europe: Manuscripts from the British Library” collection, give scholars the opportunity to read handwritten notes describing how to best defend London against rioters, the state and purpose of prisons, ways to architecturally improve prison conditions, and the debate over whether labor or solitary confinement was the best form of prisoner punishment. Users can browse instruction books for the London Metropolitan Police and digitally flip through a “scrapbook” of prisoners who served time at the Oxford Gaol. Readers of VPR will be interested to know that many of these digitized materials will complement and enhance current research being done on crime and punishment in print culture during the Victorian era. The newspapers and journals offered by the archive, such as the Howard League for Penal Reform’s Journal, provide accounts of nineteenth-century prison conditions and street crime. The “Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, 1845–1920” collection contains the records of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, later known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which counted both Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush among its members. Scholars can read their Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, which informed the public about Pennsylvania’s harsh prison conditions and the suffering of the city jail inmates. Readers of VPR will also be interested in the archive’s police newspapers. The National Police Gazette highlights the crimes of nineteenth-century New York and offers sensationalist crime columns like “Lives of the Poisoners: How They Killed and What They Killed With” and “Lives of the Felons.” Users can easily browse newspapers by article title, some of which are particularly attention grabbing—for instance, articles such as “Never Kick a Shark” and “He Wants His False Teeth Back” published in the Illustrated Police News. While exploring the archive, I found myself drawn to the fascinating advertisements scattered throughout these police newspapers, particularly the multitude of ads promising male readers their “perfect manhood...

A Lacquered History of the Kings of Pagan from an Illustrated Glass Palace Chronicle

A little known gem in the Spencer collection of Rare Books in the New York Public Library is a unique Burmese manuscript composed of fifteen pages made from heavily lacquered cloth. The pages of this manuscript have been cleverly joined together in the style of a Western book which is unusual for Burmese art. Compiled in 1906 by Hsaya Saing, a well-known master craftsman of the colonial period with a workshop in the Hmangyo Quarter Pagan, this manuscript based on The Glass Palace Chronicle is an illustrated account of a history of twenty-five of Pagan’s most eminent kings beginning with Popa Sawrahan (c. CE 613) and concluding with Zeyatheinka (Hti-lo-min) (r. 1210–34/35). The illustrations have been executed in the prevalent Burmese yun incised lacquer technique in a traditional palette of five colors. Although illustrated narratives are a well-known staple in Burmese art as far as wall paintings, wood-carving, and lacquer are concerned, depictions of such scenes tend to heavily rely on time-hallowed conventions largely derived from 8th- to 12th-century Pala art of eastern India. In this manuscript Indian conventions are followed when the subject matter is familiar. However, when unfamiliar subject matter presented itself, artisans rose to the challenge and created imaginative new settings in which to place an historic cast of characters resulting in some very original and appealing illustrations in the lacquer medium.

En amont de la découverte de Nag Hammadi. Nouvelles traduction française et concordance de la Pistis Sophia du codex Askew (British Library Additional 5114)

This paper presents a project undertaken in 2013 at Universite Laval (Quebec), whose goal is to produce a concordance, an introduction and a translation of the Gnostic treatise preserved in the Askew Codex (British Library Additional 5114) known as the Pistis Sophia. Acquired in the middle of the 18th century, the Pistis Sophia was the first direct source of Gnosticism known to scholars, yet it is today one of the most underused sources in this field of research. This project brings its share of problems, mostly raised by the quantity of text to be studied. The length of the Pistis Sophia, which is 356 pages of manuscript long, forces scholars who are interested in the treatise as a whole to identify the principal questions posed by the text, and on which such a project should focus. What is the state of the research on the Pistis Sophia? What is known of the manuscript and does it raise any material problems? Just how reliable is the Coptic text of Carl Schmidt (1925) and is it necessary to make a new cr...

Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It by Travis McDade

Reviewed by: Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It by Travis McDade Thomas D. Beal Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It. By Travis McDade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 240 pages, $19.95 Paper. For two years, I spent three days a week in the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room or in the Reading Room of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. The Library's vast collection of rare books and manuscripts from the nineteenth century introduced me to New York City's history. In this, I am not alone; many young scholars have been inspired by the intellectual treasures kept safe in the library's closed stacks or in its manuscript vaults. Eager to learn something from their contents, I never considered the monetary value of those printed volumes or manuscript pages spread before me. In the 1930s, the library attracted a very different type of patron: the book thief. Today's libraries have observation cameras and electronic sensors to protect their collections, but these are recent developments. In the past, a patron could visit a library, request a book, secret it away in a coat pocket, and stroll out the entrance. More often than not, the successful thief's journey ended at the door of a dealer in used or rare books. Part book retailer, part fence for stolen goods, these men purchased stolen books at a steep discount, removed all library markings and offered them for sale to collectors. In New York City, this was a profitable enterprise. Travis McDade's The Thieves of Book Row details the activities of one group of thieves who stole hundreds of books from the New York Public Library. McDade begins his study of the stolen book trade with a brief history of two institutions that made it possible: "book row" and the New York [End Page 103] Public Library (NYPL). In the first half of the twentieth century, book row stretched along Fourth Avenue from Astor Place to Union Square. Visitors to this part of the city found, McDade writes, "books everywhere—stacked in the windows, painted on the awnings, in the very air people breathed" (7). The sellers offered new books, used books, pornographic books and rare books. By the late 1920s, everyone knew that they could find great bargains in Fourth Avenue bookshops. When the Great Depression took hold of the city's economy after 1929, this cluster of retailers had to employ new strategies to keep their doors open and their businesses profitable. McDade's research demonstrates that many of them hired men to purloin books from the NYPL. Opened in 1911, the library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (often referred to as the Main Branch) was immediately a target for book thieves. In 1913, the director, Edwin Anderson, told the library's board the branch library simply could not protect its collection. Extra security patrols, better methods used to mark each book, and rewards to book sellers who helped apprehend book thieves had failed to keep the library's books safe; as a result, Anderson called on the state legislature to provide funds for a "special investigator." The investigator would work in and outside the library to track down thieves and reclaim stolen items. The NYPL's first investigator, Edwin White Gaillard, helped stop employees and patrons from stealing books. For instance, one Italian newspaper correspondent, Franco Frusci, had over 400 of the library's books in his private collection; Gaillard called this the "most serious case of book stealing in the history of the Library" (51). The second half of McDade's study is a carefully researched and engagingly written examination of the notorious book thief Samuel Raynor Dupree. Driven from North Carolina by poverty in 1930, Dupree landed in New York City and soon fell in with a small gang of book thieves. Outfitted in a shabby overcoat, with several pockets sewn into its lining, he stole hundreds of books from libraries and book stores across the city. After the group developed a working relationship...

An Uncatalogued Piece by Fernando Sor?

This article discusses a page of music manuscript, shelf no. MD-C-90 (4), preserved in a royal monastery situated in Madrid: the Convent of the Descalzas Reales. It contains three works for guitar, including two attributed to the Catalan composer and guitarist Fernando Sor (1778–1839). The first, entitled Minué de Sors, is known as Sor's Op. 23, No. 6, while the second short composition, Alemanda desors [sic], is not yet officially attributed to Sor. While recent research has revealed that Salvador Castro de Gistau (ca. 1770–?), a publisher originally from Madrid, issued this same piece in his Op. 6 with the title Allegretto, the version found in the manuscript of the Convent of the Descalzas Reales provides a new perspective on this work, potentially by Fernando Sor. The third piece is a minuet (Minué) without attribution.

Prototyping an Electronic Edition of William Blake’s Manuscript of &lt;i&gt;Vala, or the Four Zoas&lt;/i&gt;: A Progress Report

This article describes the recent experiments undertaken by the William Blake Archive in preparing a digital edition of Vala, or the Four Zoas , one of Blake’s most materially challenging works. The aim is to provide users with multiple tools for analysing Blake’s messy and mysterious manuscript: a high-quality image of the manuscript page paired with a dynamic transcription that allows readers to choose the level of detail they want for understanding what it is, precisely, they are looking at. However, the existing encoding standards and display were revealed to be totally inadequate by the complexity of The Four Zoas , and early models were almost impossible to read and understand. The article traces the journey towards the latest prototype as the team try to strike a balance between detail and accessibility, description and interpretation, readability and reliability, and established conventions and new approaches.

Maestro, Marguerite, morphine: The last years in the life of Mikhail Bulgakov

The manuscript pages of the final draft of Master i Margarita, the masterpiece by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the last four years of his life (1936–1940), have been treated with a mixture of chromatographic beads, namely a strong cation exchanger and a C8 resin. Potential substances captured by the beads, after harvesting them, were eluted with a mixture of isopropyl alcohol, dichloromethane and ammonium hydroxide and the eluate subjected to GC–MS analysis in order to detect the presence, if any, of drugs, due to the fact that the writer suffered intense pains caused by an inherited nephrotic syndrome. Indeed all the pages under investigation (a total of ten, taken at random among 127 foils) contained traces of morphine, from as little as 5 up to 100ng/cm2. In addition to the intact drug, we could detect one of its metabolites, namely 6-O-acetyl morphine. The significance of these findings in terms of a possible improvement of the novel and in terms of drug use (or abuse) in the modern world is discussed and evaluated. Biological significanceThe extraction of metabolites/proteins from the surface of the original manuscript pages of Bulgakov masterpiece Master i Margarita has permitted to monitor his health state and intake of medicaments over the last four years of his life. We have ascertained that: (1) he was assuming large doses of morphine as pain killers; (2) he was affected by a nephrotic syndrome, since we could identify three proteins known as biomarkers of this pathology. The double extraction procedure here reported could open up a novel field of investigation of (relatively) ancient manuscripts for metabolome/proteome analysis on the health status of the writer/artist.