Kelly Tuttle, cataloger for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project, has written a great post about Penn’s Ms. Codex 1904 on the Special Collections Processing at Penn blog. Working from outside to inside and front to back, she begins,
Penn has an eclectic mix of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts that are now being cataloged as part of the Manuscripts of the Muslim World (MMW) project. The project is cataloging and digitizing previously ‘hidden’ materials from Penn and other Philadelphia area repositories. Along the way, lots of fun discoveries are being made about items that have been sitting, uncatalogued, on the shelves for years.
One of the first discoveries we made as part of the MMW project is Ms. Codex 1904, a small format Qurʾān. It measures only 87 mm square and from the outside, it looks much like any other pocket-sized Qurʾān with a blind tooled cover and a flap-style binding. A binding with a flap on the left side that goes over the fore-edge and under the upper cover is quite common for codices produced in the Islamicate world.
Check out the whole post, A Small, Maltese Qurʾān. The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Penn Libraries are thrilled to be participating in this project!
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 