Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 472, Ḥeshbon mahalkhot ha-kokhavim, by Abraham bar Hiyya Savasorda. This manuscript was written in Spain during the 15th century, in Hebrew, and it is a copy of the second part of a 12th-century two-part treatise. This second part, on astronomy, includes computations for solar and lunar eclipses between 1135 and 1136.

See the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand and you can download all of the images and metadata at OPenn.

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 267, De ludo scacchorum seu de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium … [etc.]. This manuscript was written in Italy in 1409, in Latin, with a few poems in Italian. It is a compilation, mostly in Latin, of religious, literary, historical, and natural-historical works, including classical and contemporary selections, as well as letters by humanist writers Francesco Petrarca and Donatus Albanzani. Over a quarter of the manuscript is devoted to the De ludo scachorum of Jacobus de Cessolis, a collection of sermons about the proper relationships between a king and various classes of subjects, compared to the rules of chess.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand and you can download all of the images and metadata at OPenn.

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 37, Euclid’s Elements (in Arabic). This manuscript was written in Egypt, Iraq, or Syria, A.H. 502-504 (1108-1111), and it is Epitome or abridgement in Arabic of Euclid’s Elements, written on paper.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work at Penn in Hand and you can download all of the images and metadata at OPenn.