Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

YouTube video by Viktor Athelstan The Mediaeval Monk Want to Visit an Archive? What every new researcher needs to know! (You don't need to be a student!)

New Youtube video up! #medievalsky

youtu.be/at7p_sVXNf0?...

Confessions Of An Accidental Medievalist Mary Flannery on the Joys of Manuscripts

Had the chance to write about my professional (and sometimes unprofessional) love of medieval manuscripts….

therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/confession...

Join us to learn everything you always wanted to know about the #Voynich Manuscript but were afraid to ask!

Coffee with a Codex: The Voynich Manuscript (Facsimile) An informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different...

For a special one hour #CoffeeWithACodex next week (8/14), Curator Dot Porter will bring out a facsimile of Beinecke Library MS 408, aka The Voynich Manuscript. We’ll be joined by Lisa Fagin Davis, who is the world’s expert on the Voynich as a physical object.

Register here: https://bit.ly/3GPcs4e

Please see #medievalcalendar for more illustrations of the labours of the month.

Books of Hours on BiblioPhilly: bit.ly/3WFYXZc
LJS 463 (not a book of hours): bit.ly/33wlRcI

The year moves slowly forward, the crops are grown and it's time to thresh! One of the labors of the month is threshing wheat. To illustrate, here are August pages from calendars from a variety of books of hours from Philadelphia (and one non-book of hours...). The Zodiac is Virgo, the virgin.

Thank you! Passing this along to the cataloger.

Today’s #FragmentFriday is Ms. Codex 1162, a single sheet of parchment from an undated medieval liturgical text used to cover late 16th century lecture notes on Aristotle’s Parva naturalia.

🔗: bit.ly/44Z3F7E

We take August off for CWAC but this year we're making an exception - a special one hour Coffee With A Codex on August 14 featuring (a very good facsimile of) the Voynich Manuscript and @lisafdavis.bsky.social !!

We love the Peripheral Manuscripts Project! Read Rose McCandless's blog post to find out more about how the PMP is working with Digital Scriptorium 👇

This is a tiny book of hours, use of Metz. It is bound in modern velvet, and features a miniature of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus - iconography specific to artwork made in Metz (dated between 1375 and 1399) (Ms. Codex 1566)

🔗: bit.ly/4kJdOex

Coffee with a Codex: Astronomical Texts (Two fragments from the same original manuscript) An informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different...

For #CoffeeWithACodex on July 31, @leoba.bsky.social‬ will bring out LJS 188 and LJS 191, astronomical texts in Middle English, in two portions of an original manuscript that is now in four parts. The original manuscript was written in England circa 1496.

Register here: https://bit.ly/40kD6sd

Manuscript ASMR

Lovely little video showing miniatures and labelling them to make it easier to know what we are looking at. You can then look at the book in detail here openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/ht...

Large miniatures from a book of hours made in Rouen, France, circa 1475. We have the evangelists, the Annunciation, Three Living and Three Dead, and many more. Can you spot the portrait of the original owner? Look for a woman with a 15th-century headdress. (UPenn Ms. Codex 1056)

🔗: bit.ly/4m0SpP7

Front Cover: Front and back cover image: Washington, DC, Library of Congress, M2147 XVI M3 (MS 38), fol. 1v.

New issue of Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social Vol. 10, No. 1 (2025) muse.jhu.edu/issue/55231 @projectmuse.bsky.social @pennpress.bsky.social #openaccess @sophiekelly59.bsky.social @themedievaldrk.bsky.social @ana0dias.bsky.social @madpoli.bsky.social

My piece "Confucius and the Richness of Ancient Chinese Manuscripts" for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social is out! This introduces some of the new manuscript discoveries in the field of Chinese studies.

Learn about these new discoveries, #openaccess

The promises I made to @laurajcleaver.bsky.social have been fulfilled 😄 phew

Out now, in Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social part of my ventures into the trade of medieval mss in the late 19th century

I have a new article in this latest issue of Manuscript Studies on early diagrams of the Shield of Faith (like this one!👇) It’s an adaption of some of my thesis ideas & was a pleasure to write. Huge thanks to the editorial team @sims-mss.bsky.social for their help in getting it to press #medievalsky

Close-up photo of a rabbit playing a horn in the margin of a medieval manuscript

Photo of a manuscript page, with illuminated initials and decorations in the margins. Marginal decoration includes a small rabbit playing a horn in the bottom margin.

Channeling its inner Boromir, a rabbit toots a horn in the bottom margin of f. 308v, Ms. Codex 724, a 13th century illuminated Bible #DrolleryDonnerstag

🔗: https://bit.ly/432C9Fi

Coffee with a Codex: On calculation with integers and fractions An informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different...

For #CoffeeWithACodex on July 24, @leoba.bsky.social‬ will bring out LJS 293, a copy of the text On calculation with integers and fractions. The text was originally composed in the Maghrib, this copy written in Baghdad in A.H. 590 (1194).

Register here: libcal.library.upenn...

PhD position available in the field of history of astronomy from Late Antiquity to the End of the Middle Ages

Università di Pavia, Italy

Deadline June 30, 2025

More details available at the following webpage: phd.unipv.it/call-41/

Please share!

A placard with a pointing fist atop a wooden post directs extra attention to a roadside sign reading “SPEED LIMIT 30”

Manicule in the wild, Orrs Island, ME

Students in Digital Codicology class sitting around the table, making their illuminated initials.

Photo of a beautiful illuminated initial S (made by a student)

Photo of a bound version of the sheet we printed at Common Press on Monday

Photo made by a microscope camera, it's a close-up of a little face in a root in LJS 419, a 15th century Italian herbal. The little face looks very grumpy.

Days 2 & 3 of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160)... more materiality (we bound our printed sheets and made illuminated initials!), talked about cataloging, IIIF, VisColl, DM, HTR, and we toured our digitization lab (SCETI) and took photos of our own. WHEW! Two more days to go!

I've been working in the special collections for 12 years and this is the way it's been for as long as I've been here. It does depend on the material (always wear gloves for photos and metal) and some places are old fashioned and request gloves, but it's not current best practice.

For Rare Book Librarians, It’s Gloves Off. Seriously. (Published 2023)

I pretty much never wear gloves when I'm handling books. www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/a...

Today’s #FragmentFriday is this printed book bound with fragments from 2 leaves of a 13th-c copy of the encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum. It's not unusual to see fragments in binding, but it is interesting to see the leaves folded instead of being trimmed. (UPenn LJS 395)

🔗: bit.ly/3u8rFE1

UWA Awarded Cluster of Excellence Status

It's been an exciting day for us, and now we are extremely proud and happy to spread the news that our cluster will keep going for at least another 7 years! 🥳
www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/news/2025-05...

I mean, people have read it, but it hasn't been loved *too* much and it hasn't been dropped in the mud or anything like that. It is true that as much as lots of love to a book is interesting (to me), it can be damaging (to the book)