Manuscript Studies Research Articles

Manuscript studies and the eighteenth century

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of recent contributions to the field of manuscript studies in the long eighteenth century. Although a number of early (and some contemporary) scholars have read print as the primary written form during the long eighteenth century, most researchers today acknowledge that manuscript traditions persisted despite the advent of print; recent scholarship reads them as complementary, where manuscript is no longer subsumed by print culture. This increased valuation of manuscript culture has shaped our understandings of literary and non‐literary genres and even the concept of authorship itself. This essay discusses the foundations and methodologies of manuscript studies of the eighteenth century, which arise out of the fields of bibliography and textual studies and corresponding developments in the early modern period. The latter part of the essay surveys some of the recent developments and directions of the field, including the intersecting disciplines of women's studies, genre theory, and readership and authorship practices.

Creative Practice and the Limits of Knowledge in Reconstructing Lost Songs from Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy

This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. Although a handful of neumations for Boethius’s thirty-nine poems have long been known, the almost complete absence of surviving pitched versions of the melodies has hindered the task of reconstruction. Following a systematic study of neumed manuscripts dating from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and identification of underlying principles of melodic design, it is now possible to attempt informed reconstructions. Even so, the leap from scholarship to modern performance remains substantial, involving a preliminary need to recreate melodies through experimentation. Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.

II Old English

Abstract This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 5, and 9 are by Simon Thomson and Eric Lacey; sections 2, 6, 7, and 8 are by Simon Thomson; sections 3, 4, 10, and 11 are by Eric Lacey.

Libro d’Uccelli in pictura. A study of manuscript 2 of the Alessandrina University Library of Rome

The manuscript 2 of the Alexandrine University Library in Rome, coming from the personal library of the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II Della Rovere, preserves inside about 300 color plates of birds and real and fantastic animals, all inserted in an extremely refined naturalistic context, in excellent condition. The sixteenth-century binding, richly adorned on the plates and on the back with allegorical and phytomorphic motifs inserted inside a geometric frame. The aim of the research was to reconstruct its history, starting from all those non-textual elements, of which the code is totally devoid, which identify the most properly physical-material aspect. Through the analysis of the paper and the watermark, of the binding and its ornamentation,and finally the opening coat of arms of the codex, it was possible not only to date it precisely but also to identify the workshop of origin and discover the one who orders its manufacture and that is the Bolognese natural scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi. A precious gift for the Duke Francesco Maria II who will become his patron, supporting him economically in the print of his scientific works.

III Middle English

AbstractDue to the resignation of its former editor, and a turnover of contributors, this chapter has fewer contributors than previously. It is hoped to catch up subsequently with missing areas and to include them retrospectively. The chapter has nine sections: 1. Theory; 2. Manuscript and Textual Studies; 3. Religious Prose; 4. Piers Plowman; 5. Romance: Metrical, Alliterative, Prose; 6. Gower; 7. Hoccleve and Lydgate; 8. Older Scots; 9. Drama. Section 1 is by R.D. Perry; section 2 is by Daniel Sawyer; section 3 is by Niamh Pattwell; section 4 is by Joel Grossman; section 5 is by Anna Dow; section 6 is by Yoshiko Kobayashi; section 7 is by Xiaoling Wu; section 8 is by Kate Ash-Irisarri; section 9 is by Daisy Black and Sarah Brazil.

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

English

The investigation of physical properties and chemical composition generates data important for answering cultural-historical questions that cannot be solved by historical and philological methods alone. Due to technological developments, technical diagnostics in art and culture are in ever-greater demand in such fields of transdisciplinary research. Natural sciences play auxiliary role in the studies of manuscripts. The success of their contribution depends strongly on the formulation of the question, the choice of the methods to obtain the requested answer, and appropriate reference databases. First, report was given on the measurements performed on local raw materials, such as, plants, minerals and animals, which constitute the reference session. Then, the first results of the scientific analysis of several fragments from the Malian manuscript collections were present. Key words: Manuscripts, inks, colorants, scientific investigation, non-destructive testing.

The National and University Library of Iceland 200th Anniversary

The National and University Library of Iceland (Landsbókasafn Íslands — Háskólabókasafn) celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2018. The purpose of the review is to acquaint Russian library specialists with the history of this institution and to show its role in the preservation and promotion of the national cultural heritage. The author considers the main stages of development of the National and University Library of Iceland (NULI): from the establishment of the Icelandic Provincial Library in Reykjavík in 1818 (in 1881 it was renamed to the National Library of Iceland) to its merger with the University Library in 1994. The main sources of the study are the articles of foreign, primarily Icelandic, researchers on the activities, holdings and electronic collections of NULI, published in the late 1990s — 2010s. The author notes the contribution of Jón Árnason (1819—1898), the famous Icelandic researcher-folklorist and the first national librarian, who headed the library for about 40 years, in the development of the institution’s structure and stocks. The paper characterizes the modern organizational and management structure of NULI, composition of collections (including the Manuscript Department and the Icelandic Department), the system of library and bibliographic services. The author emphasizes the role of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík as the main repository and centre for the study of Icelandic manuscripts. The institute conducts the intensive work on search for medieval Icelandic documents in the libraries and archives of other states and the digital reconstruction of scattered collections. The article reveals the work of NULI on opening of its holdings and creation of digital collections (“Collection of historical maps of Iceland”, “Digital library of medieval Icelandic manuscripts”, “Digital library of Icelandic Newspapers and magazines”, “Collection of old books of Iceland”, etc.). The author draws particular attention to the activities of the Consortium of Icelandic Libraries led by NULI to create a Unified Information and Library Space for the country and concludes on the significant contribution of NULI to the promotion and popularization of the national cultural heritage of the Northern state.

Sennacherib’s Successor: Titus and Anti-Roman Rhetoric in TgJon to Isa. 10:32

Abstract As recent research in the study of manuscripts has demonstrated, variations in the phrasing of a text not only reveal scribal error or play but also indicate how changes to a given passage in different manuscripts convey important interpretive traditions. In this article, I explore one such case in TgJon to Isa. 10:32. First, I examine how key features (or the lack thereof) in the biblical text of Isa. 10:32 led to certain lines of rabbinic interpretation as found in b. Sanh. 95b, which contains a midrashic story based on the biblical text. Second, I analyse a parallel account of this story as found in TgJon to Isa. 10:32, and I argue that a particular manuscript of this Targum (B. M. 2211) contains added layers of anti-Roman rhetoric through an allusion to Abraham and Nimrod. In this fashion, the variation in wording in this manuscript is indicative of a distinct interpretation from that found in the Talmud.

Automatic Dating of Medieval Charters from Denmark

Dating of medieval text sources is a central task common to the field of manuscript studies. It is a difficult process requiring expert philological and historical knowledge. We investigate the issue of automatic dating of a collection of about 300 charters from medieval Denmark, in particular how n-gram models based on different transcription levels of the charters can be used to assign the manuscripts to a specific temporal interval. We frame the problem as a classification task by dividing the period into bins of 50 years and using these as classes in a supervised learning setting to develop SVM classifiers. We show that the more detailed facsimile transcription, which captures palaeographic characteristics of a text, provides better results than the diplomatic level, where such distinctions are normalised. Furthermore, both character and word n-grams show promising results, the highest accuracy reaching 74.96 %. This level of classification accuracy corresponds to being able to date almost 75 % of the charters with a 25-year error margin, which philologists use as a standard of the precision with which medieval texts can be dated manually.

Mark Crosby, ed., “William Blake’s Manuscripts,” <i>Huntington Library Quarterly</i> 80.3 (autumn 2017)

The autumn 2017 special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, edited by Mark Crosby, is devoted to manuscript studies of the works of William Blake. Several of these studies were originally presented at a 2013 symposium at the Huntington Library, which, as Blake scholars know, houses one of the world’s finest Blake collections. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the variety of ways in which the close study of Blake’s manuscripts and prints can yield significant new discoveries about his engraving techniques, his working habits, and his influences. Or, as Crosby puts it in his introduction, “the eight essays … range in methodological approach from considering the materiality of Blake’s manuscripts to more conceptual concerns, with particular attention given to discussing the instability of long-term preservation” (363).

Application of Stabilized Nano Zero Valent Iron Particles for Immobilization of Available Cd2+, Cu2+, Ni2+, and Pb2+ Ions in Soil

The present manuscript studies the effectiveness of commercial nano zero valent iron (nZVI) particles in decreasing the availability of Cd, Cu, Ni, and Pb in spiked soil samples and to remove the same heavy metals from aqueous solutions. The difference of nZVI efficiency between single and multi-metal contamination was evaluated. The application of nZVI in water samples showed higher effectiveness in the cases of single metal contamination. The effectiveness of single- and multi-metal (mixtures of Cu, Ni, Pb and Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb) immobilization in soil using different doses (0%, 0.85%, 1.7%, 2.55%, and 5.1%) of nZVI was determined. Immobilization efficiency was assessed using the leaching procedure and depended on a particular metal and the dose of nZVI. In all cases, it was determined that an increasing amount of nZVI resulted in decrease in the leaching of analysed metals. In cases, where higher nZVI doses were used, higher immobilization efficiency was observed for heavy metals in multi-metal contamination. The application of nZVI significantly reduced leaching of all heavy metals and this strategy can be successfully used for heavy metals stabilization in soils.

Combining Environmental Monitoring and Remote Sensing Technologies to Evaluate Cropping System Nitrogen Dynamics at the Field-Scale

Nitrogen (N) losses from cropping systems in the U.S. Midwest represent a major environmental and economic concern, negatively impacting water and air quality. While considerable research has investigated processes and controls of N losses in this region, significant knowledge gaps still exist, particularly related to the temporal and spatial variability of crop N uptake and environmental losses at the field-scale. The objectives of this manuscript study were (i) to describe the unique application of environmental monitoring and remote sensing technologies to quantify and evaluate relationships between artificial subsurface drainage nitrate (NO3-N) losses, soil nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, soil N concentrations, corn (Zea mays L.) yield, and remote sensing vegetation indices, and (ii) to discuss the benefits and limitations of using recent developments in technology to monitor cropping system N dynamics at field-scale. Preliminary results showed important insights regarding temporal (when N losses primarily occurred) and spatial (measurement footprint) considerations when trying to link N2O and NO3-N leaching losses within a single study to assess relationship between crop productivity and environmental N losses. Remote sensing vegetation indices were significantly correlated with N2O emissions, indicating that new technologies (e.g. unmanned aerial vehicle platform) could represent an integrative tool for linking sustainability outcomes with improved agronomic efficiencies, with lower vegetation index values associated with poor crop performance and higher N2O emissions. However, the potential for unmanned aerial vehicle to evaluate water quality appears much more limited because NO3-N losses happened prior to early-season crop growth and image collection. Building on this work, we encourage future research to test the usefulness of remote sensing technologies for monitoring environmental quality, with the goal of providing timely and accurate information to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of food production.

Communities of Practice and Incipient Standardization in Middle English Written Culture

ABSTRACTThe model of the community of practice is a recent theoretical approach in the field of sociolinguistics that is beginning to be applied to historical English language studies. This methodological investigation pursues the applicability of community-of-practice frameworks to networks of scribes and textwriters in late Middle English. The analysis then moves on to consider the relevance of the model for early processes of standardisation in English. Relating sociolinguistics and manuscript studies, this research suggests that the emergence of incipient standards in late Middle English occurs as part of the development of shared repertoire for communities of writers.

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.

Los manuscritos aljamiados

En las últimas dos décadas se ha estudiado a fondo el origen de la escritura aljamiada en la época mudejar, y su desarrollo posterior en la época morisca. Han proliferado las ediciones de manuscritos aljamiados, y se han propuesto nuevas interpretaciones de su contenido y significado. El presente artículo contiene una bibliografía actualizada de todos los estudios sobre manuscritos aljamiados (incluyendo las tesis inéditas) aparecidos en los últimos diez años y/o no citados en A. Vespertino Rodríguez, «Una aproximación a la datación de los manuscritos aljamiado-moriscos», Homenaje al profesor Luis Rubio, 2 (Murcia: Universidad, 1989), 1419-39.

PRAKTEK TERAPI PENGOBATAN TRADISIONAL MELAYU: SEBUAH SKETSA AWAL

This paper discusses traditional medicine practiced by Malays. Basically, traditional medicine is indeed inseparable from its environment where humans interact with nature, even their lives depend on basic ingredients found in the surrounding environment. Therefore, to understand the healthy way of life of the community, the study of Malay manuscripts is important because it is a primary source, as found in the texts. For this reason, this paper seeks to present the prescriptions contained in the views of Islam as seen in the Tibb al-Nabawi genre as the right thing in the context of the contribution of the Natural Malay-Archipelago civilization to the outside world, especially in traditional medicine, especially in the text 19th or 20th century Malay texts based on existing texts.

Digital Tools for Working with New Testament Manuscripts

Abstract This article critically examines the functionalities and significance of three prominent digital tools that have become central to the study of Greek New Testament manuscripts. The design, functionalities, and significance of the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR), the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) digital library, and the Pinakes database have a hand in shaping the research questions of the field. As such, it is important to understand what these tools do, how they function, and how they might develop further to address the needs of the field. The analysis of these tools leads to fundamental questions about using digital representations as proxies for primary sources, challenges for managing the materiality of artefactual and digital objects, the collaborative nature of digital scholarship, and the implicit interpretations of the Greek New Testament tradition inherent in digital workspaces.

Співпраця академіків В.М. Перетца та М.С. Возняка у світлі епістолярних документів

The article analyses the letters of the prominent Ukrainian and Russian philologist V. M. Peretts to the famous Ukrainian literary critic and folklorist M. S. Vozniak. Epistolary documents are stored in the manuscripts department of the V. Stefanyk National Library of Science of Ukraine. The article deals with the professional relations between V. M. Peretts and M. S. Vozniak in the context of the activity of scientists in the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv and the Commission of the Ancient Ukrainian Writing of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Attention is drawn to the cooperation of scientists in the field of Ukrainian studies. The cooperation between V. M. Peretts and M. S. Vozniak started from the study of manuscripts from collections stored in Lviv. The article deals with the Ukrainian studies of V. M. Peretеs, which were written by the scientist before the death and have not been published. The negative influence of totalitarian power on the cooperation of Ukrainian scientists is shown. This is the first publication of V. M. Peretts’s letters to M. S. Vozniak. Epistolary documents are a valuable source for the study of the cooperation of Ukrainian philologists in the field of Ukrainian studies in the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis of the letters allows to expand the science philologists circle, to identify the scientists with whom V. M. Peretsz and M. S. Voznsіak collaborated in the field of Ukrainian studies. This creates good prospects for future research.

The STROBE guidelines.

An observational study is a type of epidemiological study design, which can take the form of a cohort, a case–control, or a cross-sectional study. When presenting observational studies in manuscripts, an author needs to ascertain a clear presentation of the work and provide the reader with appropriate information to enable critical appraisal of the research. The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines were created to aid the author in ensuring high-quality presentation of the conducted observational study. The original articles publishing the STROBE guidelines together with their bibliographies were identified and thoroughly reviewed. These guidelines consist of 22 checklist items that the author needs to fulfil before submitting the manuscript to a journal. The STROBE guidelines were created to aid the authors in presenting their work and not to act as a validation tool for the conducted study or as a framework to conduct an observational study on. The authors complying with these guidelines are more likely to succeed in publishing their observational study work in a journal.