Manuscript Monday: LJS 226 – Certain astrological and astronomical figures

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 226, certain astrological and astronomical figures: cut out of a manuscript book dated 1410. This manuscript, written in Latin, is a collection of astrological and astronomical diagrams gathered from 3 earlier manuscripts.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand and you can download all of the images and metadata from OPenn.  You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.

 

2 Comments

  1. The two circular diagrams on ff. 4v-5r are not from any astrological or astronomical work at all, but from a work of ceremonial magic, the Liber Juratus attributed to one (otherwise unknown) Honorius of Thebes. You can find a critical edition of one form of the Latin text, edited by Gösta Hedegård in “Liber Juratus Honorii” (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002). The figure on f. 3v may be from an astrological work, but the same astrological chart of the twelve houses is also used in a kind of divination called Geomantia. Since ff.3-5 clearly come from the same (otherwise lost) manuscript, it is far more likely to have been a manuscript of magic than a manuscript of astrology and astronomy.

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