SIMS is pleased to announce the 2019-2020 Graduate Student Fellowship recipient:
Christine Bachmann, University of Delaware
LJS 101, a copy of Boethius’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s De interpretatione dated to ca. 850 with eleventh-century additions and believed to have been made at the monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (the Abbaye de Fleury) in north central France, is a stunning example of Carolingian manuscript production held in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection. It offers insights on the decoration of Carolingian manuscripts, on the reception of Boethuis and Aristotle in the early Middle Ages, and on the production and use of manuscripts in early medieval monastic writing centers. For these reasons, LJS 101 offers a wealth of information that will provide insight into the making and intellectual environment of early medieval manuscripts. My research will focus on LJS 101’s material aspects and the historical, intellectual, and artistic context in which it was made. I will examine the manuscript for the physical evidence of its construction, such as its quire structure and patterns of pricking and ruling. I will also research the decoration of other Carolingian manuscripts containing similar secular and Classical texts to place LJS 101 in its artistic context. These comparable manuscripts include a copy of Apicius De re coquinaria from Tours and dated to the mid-ninth century (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Urb.lat.1146) and also a copy of texts by Cicero similarly dated to the mid-ninth century and likely from the monastery of Corbie (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, S. Marco 257).
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 