Palace Library Research Articles

Depictions of the Ark of Noah and the Giant Uj In Kulliyat-i Tarikhi of Hafız-i Abru (Style and Iconography)

In Islamic Art, the tradition of depicting texts of history took shape in Tabriz from the very beginning of the 14th century. In the 15th century, Herat School of illustration revived this tradition and continued the production of works of illustrated manuscripts. Having been written by the order of Shahrukh, included the general history of the world and prophets, Kulliyat-Tarikhi was compiled in Herat, one of the most productive centers of art in the Timurid period. The work of art is preserved in the library of Topkapı Palace Library (Baghdad 282). In this article, firstly codicological features of the book were defined and detailed information was given as to the content of the illustration program of the book. The depiction of Noah’s Ark and the ‘Uj’ in the book was compared with other illustrated manuscripts in the 14th-15th century. From this respect, this study is crucial for us in terms of seeing the formation of the illustration program of historical texts including Noah’s Ark and their influence on the development process in the 16th century. Gathering and studying images about Noah’s Flood in the works of Islamic art of painting including the history of prophets in the 14th and 15th centuries will contribute to the literature of History of Art, as it is an up-to-date study.

Rękopisy Dönhoffów z Drogoszy w Prusach Wschodnich przechowywane w Bibliotece Uniwersyteckiej w Toruniu

The University Library in Toruń was founded in 1945, along with the Nicolaus Copernicus University. In quite a short time, namely in the years 1945-1949, it gathered a large library collection of about 600 000 volumes of books, journals and special collection items. Thanks to Maria Strutyńska’s research, it is known that the Toruń collection of old prints gathered 418 library items in 844 volumes which were actually found in the palace library in Drogosze. These prints mainly include 18th century writings in French. This article analyses the manuscripts found in the Drogosze palace that are currently being held at the University Library in Toruń. It is a group of 16 in-ventory items in 24 volumes. One text regards the military and was written by Friedrich von Dönhoff (1639–1696), father of Bogusław Friedrich von Dönhoff, the builder of the Drogosze palace. All other items mainly consist of correspondence and journals of two generations of the Dönhoff family and one generation of the Stolberg-Wer-nigerode family.

Gülru Necipo?lu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds. Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4)

Reviewed by: Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. by Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer Konrad Hirschler Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds. Treasures of Knowledge: an Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Vol 1: xiv+1080 pp. Vol. 2: viii+242 pp. 181 pp. facs. pls. Cloth, $164. ISBN: 978-9004402485. In the early sixteenth century, Sultan Bayezid II ordered al-ʿAtufi, the librarian of his book collection in the Topkapı Palace’s treasury, to prepare an inventory. The resulting register lists over 7,000 titles, and it is the only large-scale inventory of an Ottoman palace library that we possess today. The importance of this inventory, especially for the fields of the history of ideas and library studies, has been known for a long time. It is preserved in Budapest (we do not know how it came to be there) and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall probably already saw it in the early nineteenth century. It comes as no surprise that the great doyen of Ottoman library studies, İsmail Erünsal, introduced it to modern scholarship. Yet, apart from an article by Miklós Maróth in 2003 it has failed to elicit sustained interest. After years of preparation we now have the book that finally gives the inventory its rightful place. Together with more than twenty colleagues, Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell Fleischer have worked for years to bring this collaborative project to fruition. The result is, to cut a long story short, a wonderful book that is a must-read for anyone interested in Ottoman studies or the history of ideas or libraries. The massive first volume of more than 1,000 pages consists of a series of essays on various aspects of the inventory, the library and its contents. The second volume has the facsimile and transliteration of this “Book of the Books” as the librarian called his inventory. Quite appropriately, this book on the “Book of the Books” is a work of beautiful craftsmanship with numerous high-quality illustrations of individual manuscripts that once sat on the shelves of the library of Bayezid II. [End Page 244] The first volume starts with a series of six essays of a general nature prior to twenty-two essays that discuss specific thematic sections of the inventory. Gülru Necipoğlu starts the general section with a formidably wide-ranging essay that opens up numerous fascinating angles to analyze this inventory. Making transregional comparisons and drawing on codicological evidence as well as her intimate knowledge of the palace’s history, Necipoğlu argues that this library was not just a storehouse and has to be seen as an active place of intellectual engagement. The library’s astonishingly diverse holdings reflect an imperial cosmopolitanism that was encyclopaedic in scope before cultural exchanges with the East diminished and before the process of Ottomanization set in under Sultan Süleyman I. The dominance of post-Mongol manuscripts from the eastern Islamic lands mirrors interconnected regional and transregional courtly-scholarly networks that were to diminish in the subsequent decades. She also shows that the inventory was used to record subsequent acquisitions but that the pristine condition of the inventory means that further documents must have been kept to register movements of books such as loans. Cemal Kafadar uses the inventory to build a much wider argument in order to restore a more complex and fine-grained image of Beyazid II. He does so by following the prince’s career from Amasya, the leading cultural and political center of Bilad al-Rum, to the throne. The inventory appears here as a post-expansion project after the sultan had cut his teeth and now turned to the order of the realm where education clearly featured highly. Kafadar devotes a second section to ʿAtufi and his organizational practices in the catalogue, showing the care that went into it and the problems the librarian faced when dealing, for instance, with multiple-text and composite manuscripts. An appendix backs up this section and discusses individual manuscripts...

To the Procedure of Dating Greek Manuscripts of 960s (on the Examples of Vat. gr. 1164. Paris. gr. 2442 & Barb. gr. 276)

The article is concerned to the paleography and codicology of two collections of polemiological works of Vat. gr. 1164 and Paris. gr. 2442 & Barb. gr. 276 written in Perlschrift. The collections are identical in composition of Ancient and Byzantine texts. According to their paleographic characteristics, both codices should be dated the second half of the 10th century. The three scribes of these two manuscripts worked in the writing style of the famous Constantinople scribe of the middle of the 10th century monk Ephraim. The perfect codicology of manuscripts and the “businesslike” but refined design, including complicated illustrations, finally confirm their Constantinople elitist origin. Judging by the content of the manuscripts, they were created in the Palace library in Constantinople, where there was every opportunity to compile such a collection, which included rare ancient texts and the most modern for the middle of the 10th century Byzantine tactics. The dating of the final work in both collections the treatise De velitatione bellica of the autumn—winter of 969 allows determining the date of the work on manuscripts to this time. It is possible that the manuscripts were commissioned by Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas and his brothers Leo and Constantine.

Introduction: The Manuscript Copy and the Printed Original in the Digital Present

Introduction: The Manuscript Copy and the Printed Original in the Digital Present1 Sonja Drimmer On April 1, 2007, Google altered the login page of Gmail to announce a new analogue service (fig. 1).2 The service, Gmail Paper, promised users print-on-demand copies of their emails, stacked in archive boxes and shipped directly to their homes or work-places. Three photos of cheerful laborers and a satisfied customer lined the top of the webpage, with captions hailing the ease of service relations in a digital economy: “You click. We stack. You get.” Testimonials from beta users included advocacy from crafty types such as Anna-Christina D., life coach (“Gmail [Paper is a scrapbooker’s dream. I paper archive all of my son’s emails, cut them out in creative shapes, and paste them in my binders”), and endorsements from Luddites such as Kevin S., CEO of AdventaStar, Inc. (“I’ve always felt uneasy about the whole internet thing. With the help of Gmail Paper, now I’m taking matters into my own hands, literally”).3 Readers attentive to the release date of this service will have guessed that this was an April Fool’s hoax. And if we assume that Twitter—even in its nascent days—was a reliable barometer of immediate response, it is clear that few were fooled and many amused.4 But why was this so amusing? Why should it be funny or ridiculous that someone might want copies, in paper, of something they have typed into or read from a digital format? To inquire into the nature of the prank requires that we estrange the assumptions on which its success as a prank depends. A different set of assumptions governs a manuscript of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers produced in 1477. A collection of aphorisms culled from ancient wise men, originally composed in Arabic by Abū al-Wafā’ Al-Mubaššir ibn Fātik in the middle of the eleventh century, the Dictes and Sayings was subsequently translated into Spanish, Latin, and French. From the last of those versions Anthony Woodville, the second Earl Rivers (d.1483), produced this English translation. The [End Page 93] manuscript is a handsome volume, with a prologue introduced by a vine-stem initial, a Janus-faced ornament plucked from the modish Italian books that revived them under the (mistaken) belief that they were ancient Roman forms (fig. 2). Across the page, a presentation miniature depicts Woodville kneeling before Edward IV to present a luscious book in an emerald-green binding and shimmering gold foredges, the hub around which the main actors of the scene congregate. The text beneath the miniature iterates in words the personalization of the social interaction in image, referring ambiguously to the book in the picture and to the very book in which the words appear: Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Screenshot of the Gmail Paper Announcement Archived online at: <<arquivo.pt/wayback/20080315144610/http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html>>, accessed March 20, 2020. This boke late translate here in sightBy Anthony Erle [Woodville] that vertueux knyghtPlease it to accepte to youre noble graceAnd at youre convienient leysoure and spaceIt to see reede and understondA precious jewell for alle youre lond (Lambeth Palace Library MS 265, fol. vi verso) Everything about the appearance of this manuscript and the intimate address it contains suggests that it emerges wholly from the world of the scriptorium and the small trade in bespoke books. Yet as the scribe who signs himself Hayward alerts us in its colophon (fig. 3), “Here endeth the book namede the dictes or sayinges of philosophres emprinted by me William Caxton at Westmynster the yere of our lorde MCCCC [End Page 94] lxxvij” (Lambeth Palace Library MS 265, fol. 102r). What this colophon makes evident is that this is a handwritten copy of a printed book. And while the text of this manuscript closely follows its printed source, its appearance, including elaborate decorated initials and, not least, the presentation miniature, rejects the printed book’s aesthetic. Just as the Gmail Paper prank depends on its electronic origins only to reject...

Das mãos aos cofres: reflexões sobre transformações materiais e transferência de propriedade de livros devocionais do tardo-medievo

RESUMO Códices iluminados medievais de coleções públicas são apresentados na perspectiva do colecionismo próprio à era moderna a partir de uma abordagem material baseada na análise de catálogos descritivos de diversas bibliotecas nacionais, em especial o catálogo elaborado pelo bibliotecário Frei João de Santa Ana entre 1809 e 1821 para o acervo da Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional de Mafra, em Portugal. O interesse do artigo é refletir sobre a transferência de propriedade dos livros de devoção privada, de uso reservado e individualizado, e sua presença em bibliotecas reais e as consequentes transformações na forma material e nas apropriações simbólicas e funcionais dadas a esses objetos. Para tanto, é apresentado um breve exame sobre as práticas de produção, uso, circulação, colecionismo e preservação de livros iluminados em geral, por meio do estudo de casos emblemáticos sobre circulação e transformação material. Quanto à produção, fórmulas de representação pictórica propagadas pelos ateliers da região da península itálica, dos Andes, de Flandres e da França são, por um lado, classificadas comparativamente e identificadas em códices específicos. Por outro lado, as a alterações impostas aos códices para atender ao gosto dos novos proprietários são usadas como indícios materiais que revelam práticas de colecionismo e preservação.

La traducción de Lucrecio del presbítero Matías Sánchez (ms. II 646 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real)

Este artículo estudia el ms. II 646 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real de Madrid, debido al presbítero Matías Sánchez, quien vertió en verso el De rerum natura de Tito Lucrecio el año 1832. El manuscrito contiene, como se ha puesto de manifiesto recientemente, la misma traducción que la del manuscrito 287, conservado en la Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo de Santander. Este último supuestamente ha preservado la traducción del abate Marchena, hecha cuarenta y un años antes (1791). Tras hacer una pequeña collatio de estos dos manuscritos, la conclusión más plausible es que el sacerdote Matías Sánchez fuera el verdadero autor de la traducción y no el “abate Marchena”.

Elizabeth I’s Translation of Tacitus: Lambeth Palace Library, MS 683

Abstract Preserved at Lambeth Palace Library is a manuscript translation of Tacitus’s Annales, completed in the late sixteenth century. The translation was undertaken, this essay argues, by Elizabeth I. The article makes the case for the queen’s authorship with an appeal to paper stock, provenance, style of translation, and, above all, to the handwriting preserved in the manuscript. The queen’s late hand was strikingly idiosyncratic and the same features which characterize her autograph works are also to be found in the Lambeth translation of Tacitus. The manuscript’s transmission is traced from the Elizabethan court to Lambeth via the collection of Archbishop Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), whose acquisition of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) manuscripts helped to make Lambeth Palace Library one of the largest collections of State Papers from the Elizabethan era. The article then compares the authorial corrections made to the Lambeth Tacitus with those which Elizabeth made to her other translations with a special focus on the idiosyncrasies of the queen’s late hand. Finally, Elizabeth’s translation is compared with Richard Greenway’s translation of the Annales (1598), highlighting the methods of translation adopted by either translator. While Greenway expands for the sake of clarity, reworking Tacitus’s remarkably terse prose, Elizabeth preserves something of the historian’s celebrated brevity, closely reproducing the syntax of the original. By examining both the material aspects of the manuscript and the stylistic qualities of the translation itself, this article offers the first study of Elizabeth I’s translation of Tacitus.

Mohamad Reza Ghiasian. Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru’s “Assembly of Chronicles”

This book is the sixteenth volume of an interdisciplinary series in Persian studies, Studies in Persian Cultural History, published by Brill since 2011. Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru’s “Assembly of Chronicles” intends to re-examine two extant copies of the Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh produced for the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405-1447). The first manuscript is kept in the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul, whereas the second ma...

Rice Policy in Java from Traditional Kingdoms to Dutch Colonial Time

Rice is main food for Indonesian people nowadays. Rice is consumed by all people in Indonesian society and planted in several places in Indonesia. Based on the historical data, rice was dominantly planted in Java, Due to the importance of rice, any political rulerinIndonesiapaidattentiontoricetostabilizehisauthority.Thisarticlewillconduct historical analysis about the policy of rice from traditional ruler in Java Dutch Colonial. For analyzed it used historical method by using historical sources which searched fromNationalLibraryJakarta,NationalarchiveJakarta,andKITLcollectionfromLeiden University Library, and Mangkunegaran Palace Library. The research finding show that rice was the main food from Traditional Javanese kingdom to Dutch Colonial time. The Ruler take special policy to made rice availability for people prosperity.

The Raja of Mahmudabad Palace Library Project

The Raja of Mahmudabad Palace Library Project

“The Prophet Muhammad and his Companions” and “Musa va ‘UJ”: A Comparison of Two Paintings

ABSTRACTThis study compares two paintings: one is the third in an undated illustrated manuscript of Kalila va Dimna in the Gulestan Palace Library in Tehran, and the other, often called “Musa va ‘Uj”, is in the Khalili Collection in London. These two paintings share so many similarities that they have long been thought to be the work of the same hand, painted at about the same time. The aim of this article is to examine the proposition by considering some relevant historical and aesthetic aspects. The study of the differences and similarities between the two paintings should be helpful in suggesting a resolution to this interesting problem.

Recent Books

Patient Reading / Reading Patience: Oxford Essays on Medieval English Literature. By Ralph Hanna. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2017. xii + 370 pp. £100. isbn 978 1 78694 055 1. This is a collection of selected essays by Ralph Hanna. Ten chapters are reprinted from elsewhere with some updated references, three others are new productions, and the final fifth of the book is a new extended study, a monograph in miniature, with its own bibliography. The first section of the book gathers writings on the poly-lingual state of medieval English books and texts, recording and studying the inter-penetration of what modern scholarship might see as separate languages. Its chapters are: ‘Literacy, Schooling, Universities’, ‘Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England?’ (first published here), ‘Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260 and the Problem of English Vernacularity’, ‘Editing “Middle English Lyrics”: The Case of Candet nudatum pectus’, and ‘Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26’ (first published here). The essays of the second section all revolve around manuscripts which contain disjunctions and messy evi dence of production and use. Its chapters are: ‘Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission’, ‘Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93’, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited’, and ‘Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66’. The third section contains pieces which bring local history to bear on specific book-historical case studies. Its chapters are: ‘Yorkshire Writers’, ‘Some North Yorkshire Scribes and their Context’, ‘Dr Peter Partridge and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 98’, and ‘John of Wales and “Classicising Friars”’ (first published here). The fourth section, the miniature monograph, is a literary-critical study of the figure of Patience in Piers Plowman, and a sustained argument for the value of direct and precise reading in approaching Langland's poetry. The book as a whole models, inculcates, and implicitly argues for a type of scholarship which attends to the very immediate details of specific situations in books and texts from the past.

Masraf Defterleri Işığında Topkapı Sarayı III. Ahmed (Enderun) Kütüphanesi

Libraries are information sources for societies. In past times, these buildings - where both written and visual resources are collectively stored - were sheltered and ostentatious . The III. Ahmed (Enderun) Library is one of these buildings. From the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry (BOA), the three journals which document the construction cost of the III. Ahmed Library are the main source of this paper. These cost journals have been studied as a master’s thesis in the Social Sciences Institute, Department of Art History of Istanbul University. From these journals that were transcribed from Ottoman Turkish in to modern Turkish, we obtained multiple pieces of useful information such as; the building period of the III. Ahmed Library, the work groups involved in the construction, the wages paid to the workers’ groups, the materials used, the places where the materials were brought and the total cost of the library. The aim of this article was to describe in detail the 32-week construction processes of the III. Ahmed Library - one of the most important structures of the 18th century and the first independent palace library.

Singers without borders: a performer’s rotulus and the transmission of jeux partis

ABSTRACTThe jeu parti – a debate in song weighing questions of love, sex, wealth, ethical behaviour – enjoyed popular acclaim across social classes in thirteenth-century France. Despite the appeal of these texts as historical sources, suggestive of the mentalité of a medieval community through frank discussion of taboo subjects, jeux partis have received sporadic scholarly attention. A rare scroll, copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1681) supplies new evidence of the genre’s transmission outside the pages of a codex and outside northern France. The only known document of its kind to contain jeux partis, it has been overlooked by scholars for a century, yet it suggests that the transmission of music and culture could be achieved textually, borne along the performance circuits of medieval Europe. This study investigates how jeux partis were composed, transmitted and refashioned for new audiences with the aid of text and improvisation.

Religious Change and Print: 1450–1700(Chicago, The Newberry Library, 14 September – 27 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://www.newberry.org/religious-change-and-printRemembering the Reformation(London, Lambeth Palace Library, 28 September – 23 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/.

Religious Change and Print: 1450–1700(Chicago, The Newberry Library, 14 September – 27 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://www.newberry.org/religious-change-and-printRemembering the Reformation(London, Lambeth Palace Library, 28 September – 23 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/.

Victoria Eugenia de Battenberg

La biblioteca particular de la reina Victoria Eugenia de Battenberg fue trasladada a la Real Biblioteca después de que la familia real abandonara España en 1931. En el presente artículo se reconstruye la historia de esta colección, se identifican sus marcas de propiedad y se ofrece unaprimera aproximación sobre sus gustos literarios y lecturas, con especial atención a la literatura de entretenimiento, que constituye la parte más significativa de la colección, la historia, el arte y las obras de carácter religioso.

Satire in the Paintings of “Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam”

A considerable amount of scholarship has been produced on just over sixty paintings of humans and demons, many of which bear ascriptions to the unidentified artist Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam, and which are now mostly housed in albums H.2153 and H.2160 in the Topkapı Palace Library. Although methods of formal comparison have led to general agreement that the paintings can be dated to either the fourteenth century or the fifteenth, strikingly little attention has been paid to the question of what these images depict. This paper studies the paintings within the context of documentary, legal and literary material in Persian and Arabic, and identifies a set of common motifs shared between the Siāh Qalam paintings and a number of later images. While it has been supposed by several scholars that the paintings document life in a marginal geographical environment and faithfully reflect the practices of a syncretic culture, this paper suggests that they engage with a field of satirical ideas which were widespread in the Islamic world in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which parodied common types of behavior that were deemed by some observers to be illicit or absurd.

Великий князь Николай Павлович — карикатурист: кто такой “Ouf” на шарже из коллекции его рисунков библиотеки Зимнего дворца

One of the most significant spheres of Emperor Nicholas I’s activity was his policy in the sphere of culture and art. It used to be traditionally characterized as an influence of the “unenlightened” absolutism. The characterization of Nicholas I as a person and his attitude to art can not be complete without the study of his drawings, which are kept in the archives, for the most part in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. They testify to his high level of professionalism as a graphic artist and cartoonist. The collection of Nicholas I’s drawings has recently become the subject of examination. Now the attribution of historical figures depicted by the crowned artist is one of important problems. Normally Nicholas I did not name the prototypes of his drawings. Sometimes they are intently encoded. Parallel study of writing (especially the “Notebooks” of the Grand Duke Nicholas) and visual sources enables us to make well-grounded conclusions. Thus, as M. V. Sidorova, M. N. Silaeva and A. A. Litvin determined, one of the cartoons with an original signature “Ouf” and another one “A Reserve Army Officer” (from the collection of drawings of the Winter Palace library) depicts the commander of the Guards Corps — General Fedor Petrovich Uvarov (1769-1824). The critical attitude of Nicholas I towards Uvarov was defined by his participation in a Palace coup d’etat March 11, 1801 and tensions in time when Nicholas Pavlovich was the commander of the brigade. The available iconography of General Uvarov gives additional material for the attribution of the drawing. Lifetime images of Uvarov (the portraits by Janosh Rombauer and George Dawe and the engraving by Francesco Vendramini) depicted General with his distinctive hairdo and recognizable curls as in Nicholas’ drawing. Analyzed material allows us to make more exact the number of satirical drawings, the time of their making and to conclude that Nicholas I was a talented painter who managed to express his attitude to nature and to rise to the abilities of artistic generalization in his satirical drawings.

Two Unexamined Witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371

This article draws attention to two unexplored witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371, which are important evidence for the reception of the Chronicon in medieval England and its role in shaping monastic interpretations of Richard I's reign, particularly his crusading career.