- Feb 2024
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ar.pinterest.com ar.pinterest.com
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Local file Local file
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, one of the reasons that the New York Public Library had toclose its public catalog was that the public was destroying it. TheHetty Green cards disappeared. Someone calling himself Cosmoswas periodically making o with all the cards for Mein Kampf. Cardsfor two Dante manuscripts were stolen: not the manuscripts, thecards for the manuscripts.
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- Jan 2024
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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read [[Dan Allosso]] in Actual Books
Sometimes a physical copy of a book gives one information not contained in digital scans. Allosso provides the example of Charles Knowlton's book The Fruits of Philosophy which touched on abortion and was published as a tiny hand-held book which would have made it easy to pass from person to person more discretely for its time period.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Newton's notebook was done in a tête-bêche (French for "head-to-toe") style in which he flipped the notebook over and began using it from the back to the front as a means of starting a second notebook within to separate the contents.
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Collection in Focus: Sir Isaac Newton's Pocket Memorandum Book<br /> by The Morgan Library & Museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Zpo5yla7w
More details and a digitized version of this memorandum book at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/isaac-newton/memorandum-book
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johnhalbrooks.substack.com johnhalbrooks.substack.comHwæt!1
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To illustrate this liminal space between the oral and the literate, here is an illustration from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript from the late eighth century, that depicts King David singing the Psalms: David is accompanying himself with a harp, and there are horn players and a couple of people apparently clapping along with the beat. But there are also two scribes behind him, who are writing down his song. Here we have a representation of a culture in a transitional stage between oral and literate transmission of poetry—the oral performance of a poem and the written transmission of the same poem are both present in the image.
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- Dec 2023
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franklin.library.upenn.edu franklin.library.upenn.edu
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colenda.library.upenn.edu colenda.library.upenn.edu
- Nov 2023
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laist.com laist.com
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Guzman-Lopez, Adolfo. “How A Centuries-Old History Of Indigenous Mexico Inspired These College Students To Change Career Paths.” LAist, November 1, 2023. https://laist.com/news/education/florentine-codex-getty-digitization-project-higher-education.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 5 - FINALE - Leather Tooling - Brass Hardware - Final Assembly <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LCldA51XE
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 4 - Paring and Applying Leather https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9j9MqyoyYA
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 3 - Wooden Boards, Carving & Mortising, Attaching the Covers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzJujQGBbak
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 2 - Trimming & Rounding, Edge Decoration, Sewing Endbands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFRrbxyjerE
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 1 - Folding Pages, Endpapers, Piercing & Sewing<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuWfhESpFc
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- Oct 2023
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www.academia.edu www.academia.edu
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https://www.academia.edu/community/VDDN6V
Evina Stein has a nice list of digital manuscript databases
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libcal.library.upenn.edu libcal.library.upenn.edu
- Sep 2023
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franklin.library.upenn.edu franklin.library.upenn.edu
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Parchment has two distinguishable sides:<br /> hair, which is usually darker and may show follicles (and even hair itself when poorly scraped) and<br /> flesh, which is usually lighter.
Most planned manuscripts' bindings have the hair side of the parchment facing hair sides of opposing leaf and similarly the flesh facing flesh.
Because of additions and potential mistakes in binding there are places in LJS 101 in which hair faces flesh and vice-versa. This "mistake" can provide an indication of binding procedures or mistakes in them.
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Periermenias Aristotelis
Notes from event on 2023-09-07
Used as part of the Carolingian educational program (rhetoric)
As of 2023, it's the oldest codex manuscript in Philadelphia
Formerly part of the (Thomas) Phillipps Collection (MSS Phillips appears on p1); see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Phillipps
There is some green highlighting on portions of the text
contains some marginalia and interlineal notations
Periermenias is the Greek title
Underdotting of some of the letters is used to indicate deletion of the text (used like striking out text today)
There are two sets of Carolingian script in the book, likely by different hands/times.
Shows prick marks in parchment for drawing lines to write evenly.
Has a few diagrams: squares of opposites (philosophy); color was added in XI C or possibly later
folio 45 switch to newer MS copy to continue text
Poem in last few lines with another text following it
parchment is smaller in one section at the end.
Another poem and then a letter to an abbott with a few pages in between (likely misbound) - quire of 12
Book starts with grammar, then Boethius translation of Aristotle, and then a letter. This could be an example of the trivium put together purposely for pedagogy sake, though we're missing all of their intended purpose (it wasn't written down).
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https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/event/11148297
9th-century copy of Boethius's Latin translation of Aristotle's De interpretatione, referred to in the manuscript as Periermenias, with the shorter of two commentaries that Boethius wrote on that work. Replacement leaves added in the 11th century to the beginning (f. 1-4) and end (f. 45-64) of the manuscript, in addition to providing the beginning and end of the Boethius (which is probably lacking 2 gatherings between extant gatherings 6 and 7), include the Periermeniae attributed to Apuleius in the medieval period, a poem by Decimus Magnus Ausonius on the seven days of Creation, a sample letter of a monk to an abbot with interlinear and marginal glosses, and other miscellaneous verses, definitions, and excerpts. Dot Porter, University of Pennsylvania, has determined that two groups of leaves are misbound; leaves 5-12 (the original order appears to have been 5, 9, 10, 6, 7, 11, 12, 8) and leaves 53-64 (the original order of the leaves appears to have been 61, 62, 53-60, 63, 64).
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- Apr 2023
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www.thefizzcollection.co.uk www.thefizzcollection.co.uk
- Feb 2023
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www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com
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DECRYPT project, an international, cross-disciplinary team scouring the world's archives to find coded historical documents to decipher.
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popmec.hypotheses.org popmec.hypotheses.org
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Are there symbols for 'supported by' or 'contradicted by' etc. to show not quite formal logical relations in a short hand?
reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/are_there_symbols_for_supported_by_or/
In addition to the other excellent suggestions, I don't think you'll find anything specific that that was used historically for these, but there are certainly lots of old annotation symbols you might be able to co-opt for your personal use.
Evina Steinova has a great free cheat sheet list of annotation symbols: The Most Common Annotation Symbols in Early Medieval Western Manuscripts (a cheat sheet).
More of this rabbit hole:
- Steinová, Evina. Notam Superponere Studui: The Use of Annotation Symbols in the Early Middle Ages. Brepols, 2019.
- Cappelli, Adriano. The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography. University of Kansas Libr., 1984.
- Coulson, Frank, and Robert Babcock. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography. Oxford University Press, 2020.
- Lindsay, W. M. Notae Latinae. Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://archive.org/download/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich.pdf.
- Bains, Doris. A Supplement to Notae Latinae (Abbreviations in Latin Mss. of 850 to 1050 A.D.). Cambridge [England] University Press, 1936. http://archive.org/details/supplementtonota0000bain.
(Nota bene: most of my brief research here only extends to Western traditions, primarily in Latin and Greek. Obviously other languages and eras will have potential ideas as well.)
Tironian shorthand may have something you could repurpose as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes
Some may find the auxiliary signs of the Universal Decimal Classification useful for some of these sorts of notations for conjoining ideas.
Given the past history of these sorts of symbols and their uses, perhaps it might be useful for us all to aggregate a list of common ones we all use as a means of re-standardizing some of them in modern contexts? Which ones does everyone use?
Here are some I commonly use:
Often for quotations, citations, and provenance of ideas, I'll use Maria Popova and Tina Roth Eisenberg's Curator's Code:
- ᔥ for "via" to denote a direct quotation/source— something found elsewhere and written with little or no modification or elaboration (reformulation notes)
- ↬ for "hat tip" to stand for indirect discovery — something for which you got the idea at a source, but modified or elaborated on significantly (inspiration by a source, but which needn't be cited)
Occasionally I'll use a few nanoformats, from the microblogging space, particularly
- L: to indicate location
For mathematical proofs, in addition to their usual meanings, I'll use two symbols to separate biconditionals (necessary/sufficient conditions)
- (⇒) as a heading for the "if" portion of the proof
- (⇐) for the "only if" portion
Some historians may write 19c to indicate 19th Century, often I'll abbreviate using Roman numerals instead, so "XIX".
Occasionally, I'll also throw drolleries or other symbols into my margins to indicate idiosyncratic things that may only mean something specifically to me. This follows in the medieval traditions of the ars memoria, some of which are suggested in Cornwell, Hilarie, and James Cornwell. Saints, Signs, and Symbols: The Symbolic Language of Christian Art 3rd Edition. Church Publishing, Inc., 2009. The modern day equivalent of this might be the use of emoji with slang meanings or 1337 (leet) speak.
Tags
- Curator's Code
- nanoformats
- emoji
- annotation symbols
- Evina Steinova
- Maria Popova
- note taking affordances
- manuscript studies
- Tina Roth Eisenberg
- shorthand
- via
- Medieval texts
- reply
- ars memoria
- leet speak
- Tironian shorthand
- paleography
- Universal Decimal Classification
- hat tip
- symbology
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abbreviationes.net abbreviationes.net
- Jan 2023
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www.scribesofthecairogeniza.org www.scribesofthecairogeniza.org
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genizalab.princeton.edu genizalab.princeton.edu
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Local file Local file
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Transcriptions taken from Goitein’s publications were corrected according to handwrittennotes on his private offprints. The nature of Goitein’s “typed texts” is as follows. Goitein tran-scribed Geniza documents by hand from the originals or from photostats. These handwrittentranscriptions were later typed by an assistant and usually corrected by Goitein. When Goiteindied in 1985, the transcriptions were photocopied in Princeton before the originals were sentto the National Library of Israel, where they can be consulted today. During the followingdecades, the contents of most of these photocopies were entered into a computer, and period-ically the files had to be converted to newer digital formats. The outcome of these repeatedprocesses of copying and conversion is that transcription errors and format glitches are to beexpected. As the Princeton Geniza Project website states: “Goitein considered his typed texts‘drafts’ and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions beforepublishing them.” See also Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 143. It is important tokeep in mind that only the transcriptions that were typed were uploaded to the project website.Therefore, e.g., Goitein’s transcriptions of documents in Arabic scripts are usually not foundthere. The National Library of Israel and the Princeton Geniza Lab also hold many of Goitein’sdraft English translations of Geniza documents, many of which were intended for his plannedanthology of Geniza texts in translation, Mediterranean People.
Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.
As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.
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Benjamin Richler’s Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections is the basicreference work for navigating the different libraries and collections of He-brew manuscript collections
Benjamin Richler, A Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections (Jerusalem, 1994), 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem, 2014). For an entry on the Geniza, see ibid., 79–81. See also entries for specific libraries and collections.
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- Dec 2022
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Local file Local file
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Paper was imported to Europe before the fourteenth century, often fromDamascus, hence it was known as “charta damascena.” It was expensive,but, as production developed in Europe, the price fell and it graduallyreplaced parchment.
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If we narrow the process oftransmission down to a single, hypothetical strand, it is feasible thatPtolemy originally wrote The Almagest on a papyrus scroll insecond-century Alexandria. That scroll would have had to berecopied at least twice for it to survive until the sixth century, at whichpoint it might well have been copied onto parchment and bound intoa book. This, too, would need to be recopied every few hundredyears to ensure that it survived (again assuming that it escaped theusual pests, damage and disasters) and was available to scholars in1500. It is therefore likely that The Almagest had to be recopied atthe very least five times during the period 150–1500.
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Atbest, papyrus only lasts for a couple of hundred years before the textneeds to be recopied onto a new scroll.
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geniza.princeton.edu geniza.princeton.edu
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This has hints of the stereotypical Borscht Belt humor seen in "you never call, you never write" and Jewish mother disappointment.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Princeton Geniza Lab on Twitter (@GenizaLab)</span> in "New join for this letter from a disconsolate mother to her son in al-Ushmūnayn (Upper Egypt), 1146–54 CE. Found by @OdedZinger! https://t.co/w86PRW7eew https://t.co/ldRvosxY2a" (<time class='dt-published'>12/16/2022 10:10:53</time>)</cite></small>
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- May 2022
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guides.lib.ku.edu guides.lib.ku.edu
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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A few weeks back I joined the Schoenberg Institute's ongoing series "Coffee with a Codex" which featured two manuscripts the Penn Libraries have relating to Rhetorica ad Herennium. One is MS Codex 1630, a 15th century copy of the text itself, and MS Codex 1629 which is a 14th century commentary on Rhetorica.
As a few here are interested in some of the older memory texts and having access to older copies from the Renaissance is rare, I thought I'd share some of the resources from that session including photos, descriptions, and the videos themselves which have recently been posted online. For those who are interested in these spaces, I hope this is as much of a treat as I thought it was.
A blog post with some details, links, and great photos: https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/03/09/ms-codex-1630-ms-codex-1629-rhetoric/
A short video introduction to the MS Codex 1630: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpFbbHgNQ4
And here's the full 30 minute video of the walk through session of both manuscripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6Qdgz93Ec&list=PL8e3GREu0zuC-jTFRF27a88SzTQ6fSISy&index=8
Full digital copies of both books and bibliographic details for them can be found below: Ms. Codex 1630: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958935643503681
Ms. Codex 1629: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958752123503681
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- Apr 2022
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Medieval manuscripts did not include title pages, and bibliographers identify them by incipit or opening words: no special markers were needed to recognize a book that one had commissioned and waited for while it was copied.185 By contrast, a printed book needed to ap-peal to buyers who had no advance knowledge of the book, so the title page served as an advertisement, announcing title and author, printer and/or book-seller (where the book could be purchased), generally a date of publication, and also additional boasts about useful features—“very copious indexes” or a “cor-rected and much augmented” text. T
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A later version of this concordance survives in eighty manu-scripts made between 1280 and 1330—these are large, handsome volumes with rubrication to facilitate use, a few of which show signs of having been used as exemplars to be copied by university students according to the pecia system (in which students would rent from a stationer successive sections of the exemplar for copying, so that each student would end up with his own new copy of the ex-emplar).120
The pecia system was one in which university students would rent portions of manuscripts from stationers and then manually copy them to ultimately end up with their own full copies of the books they were reading or studying.
Some copies of extant manuscripts have indicators that they were used or produced by this pecia system.
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On leaf numbering in the Middle Ages, see Saenger (1996), 258, 275–76, and Stoneman (1999), 6. Saenger notes nonetheless that printing created the context in which leaf numbering flourished in both print and manuscript.
Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.
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- Mar 2022
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schoenberginstitute.org schoenberginstitute.org
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Lemmata from the main text are underlined in red, and the commentary is provided after.
: lemmata ; a heading indicating the subject or argument of a literary composition, an annotation, or a dictionary entry.
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- Jan 2022
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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But Google also uses optical character recognition to produce a second version, for its search engine to use, and this double process has some quirks. In a scriptorium lit by the sun, a scribe could mistakenly transcribe a “u” as an “n,” or vice versa. Curiously, the computer makes the same mistake. If you enter qualitas—an important term in medieval philosophy—into Google Book Search, you’ll find almost two thousand appearances. But if you enter “qnalitas” you’ll be rewarded with more than five hundred references that you wouldn’t necessarily have found.
I wonder how much Captcha technology may have helped to remedy this in the intervening years?
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- Dec 2021
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threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
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www.heritagedaily.com www.heritagedaily.com
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- Nov 2021
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mss.pennpress.org mss.pennpress.org
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schoenberginstitute.org schoenberginstitute.org
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LJS 418, f. 3r, the remnants of a sewing repair with thread remaining
In parchment manuscripts one will often see small pin prick holes in the parchment which indicates that a hole in the animal skin was repaired during processing. Usually after curing and before use the thread from the repair is removed leaving only the small holes.
Rarely, but occasionally, the thread will still remain in the final manuscript. An example of this is LJS 418, f 3r where one can see the thread left in the page.
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The smudged line indicating where the quire would have been originally folded is clear in the center of the folio.
Smudged or worn lines on manuscripts may be indicative of a manuscript having been unbound and potentially folded and possibly carried during regular use.
LJS 418 f. 6v shows an example of this pattern though the manuscript was later bound.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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́his historical interest is fueled not onlyby the rapid growth of the history of readingW of which the study of notetaking is an offshootW
Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.
What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?
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- Oct 2021
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjZAdPX6ek0
Osculatory targets or plaques were created on pages to give priests
Most modern people don't touch or kiss their books this way and we're often taught not to touch or write in our texts. Digital screen culture is giving us a new tactile touching with our digital texts that we haven't had since the time of the manuscript.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SpLPFaRd0
Skins soaked in lime to loosen the hair from the skin in a rudimentary washing machine.
Scraping the meat side while stretched on a frame
Drying for a day or two, then cut them out.
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faculty.franklin.uga.edu faculty.franklin.uga.edu
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Great set of resources and links.
Downloaded a copy to work through them. Some I've run across in the past.
[[Cynthia Turner Camp]]
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- Aug 2021
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
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Marginal bracket in the shape of an octopus (with five legs), Cicero, Paradoxa stoicorum, 14th century, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, BANC MS UCB 85, fol. 1v
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medievalbooks.nl medievalbooks.nl
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Since the reader was able to shape hand and finger as he or she saw fit, we can sometimes recognise a particular reader within a single manuscript, or even within the books of a library. The charming hands function as a kind of fingerprint of a particular reader, allowing us to assess what he or she found important about a book or a collection of books.
I've heard the word "hand" as in the phrase "an operator's hand" used in telegraphy to indicate how an experienced telegraph operator could identify the person at the other end with whom they were communicating by the pace and timbre of the code. I've particularly heard reference to it by code breakers during wartime. It's much the same sort of information as identifying someone by their voice on the phone or in a distinctive walk as seen at a distance. I've also thought of using this idea in typing as a means of secondary confirmation for identifying someone while they input a password on a keyboard.
I wonder if that reference predates this sort of similar "hand" use for identifying someone, if this may have come first, or if they're independent of each other?
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- Jul 2021
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uniweb.uottawa.ca uniweb.uottawa.caMembers1
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Victoria E. Burke, Commonplacing, Making Miscellanies, and Interpreting Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1680, Oxford University Press Oxford, 2022Editors: Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-BaumannBook historyEarly modern literatureManuscript studiesSeventeenth-century women's writing
This looks like a fun read to track down.
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