The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at Penn brings manuscript culture, modern technology and people together.


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Manuscript Monday: LJS 97 – Eis ta harmonika Ptolemaiou hypomnēma

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 97, Eis ta harmonika Ptolemaiou hypomnēma, byPorphyry . This manuscript was written in Spain or Italy, between 1560 and 1580, in Greek, and it contains Porphyry’s commentary on about half of Ptolemy’s treatise Harmonics, focusing on harmonics and acoustics.

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.

 


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Manuscript Monday: LJS 242 – Basis grammatice

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 242, Basis grammatice, by Guillaume Tardif. This manuscript was written in Paris in 1470 and it is a summary of Latin grammar arranged in 8 sections for 8 parts of speech, followed by conjugation tables for the 4 conjugations and a commentary on the summary.

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.

 


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Manuscript Monday: LJS 236 – Thesaurus pauperum…

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 236, by Arnaldus de Villanova. This manuscript, written in Italy, ca. 1450-1499, in Latin, is a medical miscellany with almost the first half of the volume devoted to a copy of Arnaldus de Villanova’s Thesaurus pauperum, a compilation of remedies for a variety of diseases. The remainder includes another work by Arnaldus de Villanova, works by other authors, and unattributed collections of remedies.

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.

 


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Manuscript Monday: LJS 483 – Questions on Aristotle’s Physics

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 484, Questions on Aristotle’s Physics. This manuscript was written in Ingolstadt, circa 1480, in Latin, and it is a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics in the form of questions and answers following the content of the 8 books of the Physics.

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.

 


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Adding to the story of Ms. Codex 615

Admont shelfmark

Last week we were delighted to receive an email from Dr. Christoph Egger of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung about Ms. Codex 615, a fourteenth-century manuscript from Bohemia of Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae.  Penn purchased this manuscript from Philadelphia bookdealer William H. Allen in 1951, but we knew nothing about its journeys before that.  Thanks to our digital facsimile available online, Dr. Egger identified Ms. Codex 615 as formerly MS 478 in the library of Stift Admont, the Benedictine monastery in the town of Admont, in central Austria.  The monastery’s library still owns more than 1,400 manuscripts.  Our manuscript has the Admont shelfmark on a label on its spine, shown here, and is described in a catalog of the monastery’s manuscripts, itself a manuscript compiled by Jakob Wichner in 1888, which is also fully available online thanks to manuscripta.at.  The entry for MS 478 has a note added in pencil recording the sale of this manuscript in 1938 to Brecher, who, according to Dr. Egger, was an antiquarian bookdealer in Brno.  For the source of this excellent information, details on more manuscripts from Admont now in other libraries, and a reunion of Ms. Codex 615 with some of its old friends, please see Dr. Egger’s post, “olim Admont,” on the Iter Austriacum blog.


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Manuscript Monday: LJS 497 – Canones vel operationes…

Aylin Malcolm, PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 497, Canones vel operationes in operando quadrante. This manuscript was written in Italy, ca. 1502, in Latin, and it is an illustrated treatise on the use of the astrolabe quadrant, including locating and predicting the positions of stars; computing the 12 houses of the horoscope; and measuring altitude, latitude, and time. .

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.