Dot Porter, SIMS Curator of Digital Humanities, presents a Video Orientation to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s LJS 439, one of two known manuscripts of the Arabic original of the Book on the configuration of the orb, otherwise known through its use by Maimonides and through Latin translations, which are often attributed to the Abbasid court astrologer Māshāʼallāh. 14th-century copy of a 10th-century cosmological treatise with discussion of the theory of the four elements, meterology, geology, and astronomy, with the material on natural philosophy presented from an Aristotelian perspective. Manuscript is incomplete (25 chapters and parts of 4 additional chapters out of 39 in the complete work) and misbound; the correct order of pages is: p. 21-23, 1-2, 27-30, 23-26, 35-48, 11-12, 9-10, 13-14, 17-19, 7-8, 3-6, 15-16, 19-20, 31-34, and 49-50 (Taro Mimura). Likely copied in Andalusia, possibly in Seville, in the 14th century.
Digital copies and a full record are available through Franklin. Record on Internet Archive with link to PDF.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 