SIMS is pleased to announce the following Visiting Research Fellows for the 2015-2016 academic year:
Tekla Bude, Newnham College, Cambridge University (August 2015)
Mathematical Theologies : Rethinking Mathematical Pedagogy in Europe 1100-1500
Dr. Bude’s project considers the ways in which medieval mathematical thought found its way into devotional, theological, and philosophical texts from 1200-1500, and argues that we can better understand not only medieval mathematics, but also the origins of Renaissance and Enlightenment mathematics, if we recognize the importance of the medieval theological-mathematical ideas which influenced the work of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. Dr. Bude will focus her research on manuscripts from the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, including 13th-century copies of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera (UPenn LJS 26), a 14th-century copy of Alexander de Villa Dei’s Algorismus (UPenn LJS 462) and William of Conches, Philosophia mundi (LJS 384) among many other texts.
Angelo Piacentini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan (January 2016)
Italian Humanistic Manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Dr. Piacentini’s project focuses on the codicological analysis of two important manuscript witnesses of Italian humanistic texts manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries: UPenn LJS 267, an anthology of humanistic texts copied in 1409; and UPenn MS Codex 693, which contains one of the three witnesses of the Moralis philosophie dyalogus by the humanist Uberto Decembrio (ca. 1360-1427). UPenn LJS 267 is the only witness of four letters and a Latin oration by Donato Albanzani, a humanist from Ravenna, and contains a copy of the anonymous Lamentatio Medee, of which Dr. Piacentini is preparing a critical edition.
Jeffrey C. Witt, Loyola University Maryland (May 2016)
The Abbreviatio of William of Rothwell: Integrating UPenn MS Codex 686 into the Sentences Commentary Text Archive and SCTA Image Viewer
As a SIMS fellow, Dr. Witt will examine manuscripts in Penn Libraries’ collections that are in some way connected to the medieval tradition of commenting on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. He will focus on UPenn MS Codex 686 which contains a witness to William of Rothwell’s commentary, which itself is an abbreviation of a commentary by Peter of Tarantaise, later Pope Innocent V. In the course of his study, he will encode the structural divisions of this text and map them to the folio divisions within MS Codex 686 and will make a selection of TEI encoded transcriptions of the contents of the manuscript. These encoding practices will make it possible to enter MS Codex 686 and the Rothwell commentary into the Sentences Commentary Text Archive <http://scta.info>. This inclusion will then allow MS Codex 686 to be viewed on the web alongside sister witnesses deposited on other images servers throughout the world. Moreover, thoughtful encoding of the text itself will permit the mapping of connections between the commentary of Peter of Tarantaise and the abbreviation made by William of Rothwell. For the first time, readers will be able to explore the connections between these two texts and their historical witnesses as they read them on the web.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 