Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 64, Illustrations to Georg von Peurbach’s Novae theoricae planetarum. This manuscript was written in Italy between 1525 and 1575, in Latin, and it includes diagrams, many with moving parts, designed to accompany the work Theoricae novae planetarum by 15th-century Austrian astronomer Georg von Peurbach, who taught at the universities in Padua and Ferrara.

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.

Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 359, Liber canonis, by Avicenna. This manuscript includes sections from Books 1 and 2 of Avicenna’s 11th-century comprehensive medical work, as translated into Latin in the 12th century by Gherardo da Cremona. Book 1 addresses medicine generally; the section in the manuscript is from the first treatise and concerns the four elements. Book 2 is devoted to materia medica.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand. and you can download all its images and metadata at OPenn. You can also download a copy of this video and an eBook version of the manuscript (epub format) from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.

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. You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.

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. You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.

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. You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.