Lisa Fagin Davis

Lol teenage me would be ALL OVER this story.

Tomorrow is the deadline to register at this link: tinyurl.com/4b92e2j6 to participate as a mentor or mentee for the MAA Annual Meeting! Keep an eye out for mentorship opportunities at other upcoming conferences, as well!

#MAA2026 #medievalists #kzooicms #ICMS #IMC2026

Before I got to the wargames part I was thinking wow, that is a deep cut will anyone get it other than us olds

Today, this theater-kid-turned-medievalist turns 60. It's a big number, but it feels pretty good so far.

Watch this to learn how to find the pre-modern manuscripts in your city or state and hear about some creative ways you can use them in your teaching! With myself, @cebenes.bsky.social and Lea Frost.

YouTube video by Rare Book School A Fractured Inheritance:The Problems, Challenges, & Opportunities of Collecting Manuscript Fragments

You bet! www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDad...

True love is when you run out of rye the night before a blizzard and your husband runs out to the neighborhood liquor store to make sure you've got what you need to get through said blizzard.

Because Larry was interested in the history of science, his collection includes a lot of ratty books!

So fun!

Let's hear it for USA Women's and Men's hockey! Love these amazing athletes! 🏒🥇🥇

Or on the roof, dodging those spires and careening down the gables!

I keep imagining Belle da Costa Greene being offered some ratty sermon collection and responding with a simple and dismissive "meh" (and I guarantee you that was her response when Wilfrid tried to sell her the Voynich Manuscript...I'm sure she thought it was interesting, but artistically "meh")

btw, I'm giving a lecture at Lewis & Clark next month in conjunction with their "Mss in the Curriculum" exhibit. Looking forward to seeing it!

And it explains the success of LE's "Mss in the Curriculum" program, which brilliantly leverages the observation that most N. American collections don't have many medieval codices, if any at all.

So I guess I should refine my original comment to note that I was really referring to older, established collections. Any collection that was founded in the mid-20th-century or later would struggle to acquire a sparkly codex, which is why there are so many leaf collections which they COULD afford.

And definitely the market is different now than a century ago, when most American collections were founded and starting to grow. Today, no one can afford fancy Books of Hours, but a hundred years ago they were much more within reach. Newer collections don't have access to that caliber of manuscripts

Happy to be proven wrong! But of course many text manuscripts aren't meh at all. And we definitely can't guage quality by reading dealer catalogues, except by reading between the lines!

Clarification due to too-few available characters: Pretty much everything from Europe/Asia/Africa that is now in N. America has been through the market and so was considered market-able. Meh-nuscripts? Not so much.

If I had to guess, I'd say that (with the exception of ex-situ binding fragments) meh-nuscripts (TM Drimmer 2026) are underrepresented in N. American collections, since pretty much everything from Europe/Asia/Africa has been considered marketable. Books of Hours, however, are likely overrepresented.

Thank you for this important service

I heard that, Aaron 😎

All I know is that it's really really big and has an enormous image of a very disturbing demon...

I know of scrolls that were turned into codices, but not vice versa. Bnf NAL 1493, 1494, and 1495 are copies of the Chronique Anonyme Universelle that were cut into sheets (and not even at the natural sheet divisions!) and bound into oversize atlas volumes. It's chaos.

Teaching @rarebookschool.bsky.social last year. This year, I'll be teaching Latin Paleography June 1-5. Can't wait to be back in Charlottesville!

It's the @rarebookschool.bsky.social-to-@digitalscriptorium.bsky.social pipeline! Learn how to identify and catalogue fragments in your collection by taking a class at Rare Book School and then join the Digital Scriptorium consortium to make them discoverable!

rarebookschool.org/impact-story...

Definitely.

Fantastic!

In the meantime, Andrew Hughes is my go-to for details like Psalm order, combined with a Liber Usualis.

I'll be discussing a lot of this in my forthcoming textbook on medieval manuscript studies, including several video walk-throughs of books of hours and other liturgical manuscripts.