Palaeography

The Avestan alphabets which appear in different manuscripts have got
received a treatment not as systematic as they deserve. Especially from Geldner, they have been treated like recent texts without almost no value. This article aims to highlight their importance from the historical and palaeographic point of view as well as from the liturgical point of view in the Zoroastrian ceremonies.

CC-BY 54 SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS: Climate ReConstRuCtion and impaCts fRom the aRChives of soCieties Arab historiographical studies can provide detailed climatic data and information on natural disasters through the exploitation of academically revised and re-edited ancient manuscripts. Maghrebian scholars have written valuable chronicles and annals that can form the basis of relevant paleoclimatic series.

Until the 1840s old spelling style prevailed in the Estonian language. In 1843 in his grammar Lutheran pastor Eduard Ahrens introduced a new spelling style which was inspired from the Finnish one. Spreading of new style was not rapid and in 1844 only four Lutheran pastors in North Estonia started to use it in their parish registers. In the 1850s only two more joined and in 1867 two first pastors from South Estonia accepted the new style. Lutheran pastors were almost entirely Baltic Germans until that time.
In South Estonia the first pastors to accept the new style were sympathetic to the national awakening of Estonians, which was stronger there and weaker in North Estonia. Also first pastors of Estonian ethnicity appeared in the 1870s in South Estonia and most of them (but not all) started to keep their parish registers in new spelling style.
By 1875 most of published books were already in new spelling style, but some clerical books still appeared in the old style. The New Testament was printed in the new style for the first time in 1888 and the whole bible in 1889.
Of the 110 analysed congregations 76 accepted the new spelling style by 1891. Mostly it was done in the 1880s (47 congregations), peak years were 1880–1881. Of the pastors who changed the spelling style, 32 were new to the congregation, 17 had worked there from 2–7 years, 13 from 8–15 years and 11 from 16–36 years. The number of changing congregations was quite equal in North and South Estonia (also in absolute numbers). The highest percentage of congregations who
accepted the new style was 100% in Viljandi county, 87% in Lääne county and 85% in Harju county. The smallest was 22% in Võru county, 43% in Järva county and 47% in Tartu county. In Võru and Tartu counties possibly the Southern dialect (“Tartu language”) was the factor of small style change ratio. Since 1892 parish registers were ordered to be kept in Russian/Cyrillic and not all pastors added names in Latin alphabet. Thus it is not possible to analyse the spelling change since 1892 in all of Estonia.
Keywords: Estonian language, language history, orthography, paleography, onomastics, language planning

In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour and arguing for a date in Cnut’s reign. He presents evidence for the use of more than three exemplars and at least two artists as well as two scribes, making this an intentional and creative re-presentation uniting literature religious and heroic, in poetry and in prose.

He goes on to set it in the broader context of manuscript production in late Anglo-Saxon England as one example among many of communities using old literature in new ways, and of scribes working together, making mistakes, and learning.

""Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Latin Bibles survive in hundreds of manuscripts, one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. Their innovative layout and organization established the norm for Bibles for centuries to come. This volume is the first study of these Bibles as a cohesive group. Multi- and inter-disciplinary analyses in art history, liturgy, exegesis, preaching and manuscript studies, reveal the nature and evolution of layout and addenda. They follow these Bibles as they were used by monks and friars, preachers and merchants. By addressing Latin Bibles alongside their French, Italian and English counterparts, this book challenges the Latin-vernacular dichotomy to show links, as well as discrepancies, between lay and clerical audiences and their books.
Contributors include Diane Reilly, Paul Saenger, Richard Gameson, Chiara Ruzzier, Giovanna Murano, Cornelia Linde, Lucie Doležalová, Laura Light, Eyal Poleg, Sabina Magrini, Sabrina Corbellini, Margriet Hoogvliet, Guy Lobrichon, Elizabeth Solopova, and Matti Peikola"


LIVE(!) table of contents:


Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 
Eyal Poleg and Laura Light

The Bible as Bellwether: Manuscript Bibles in the Context of
Spiritual, Liturgical and Educational Reform, 1000–1200  (http://www.academia.edu/3742204/The_Bible_as_Bellwether_Manuscript_Bibles_in_the_Context_of_Spiritual_Liturgical_and_Educational_Reform_1000-1200_in_Form_and_Function_in_the_Late_Medieval_Bible_eds._Eyal_Poleg_and_Laura_Light
Diane J. Reilly

The Twelfth-Century Reception of Oriental Languages and
the Graphic Mise en page of Latin Vulgate Bibles Copied
in England............................................................................................................ 31
Paul Saenger

Durham’s Paris Bible and the Use of Communal Bibles in a
Benedictine Cathedral Priory in the Later Middle Ages ......................... 67
Richard Gameson

The Miniaturisation of Bible Manuscripts in the
Thirteenth Century. A Comparative Study ............................................... 105
Chiara Ruzzier

The Epistles of St. Paul of the Convent of San Domenico
(Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1545).......................................... 127
Giovanna Murano

John Pecham on the Form of Lamentations ................................................. 147
J. Cornelia Linde

The Summarium Biblicum: A Biblical Tool both Popular and Obscure............................................................................................................... 163
Lucie Doležalová

The Thirteenth-Century Pandect and the Liturgy:
Bibles with Missals .......................................................................................... 185
Laura Light

The Interpretations of Hebrew Names in Theory and Practice ............... 217
Eyal Poleg

Vernacular Bibles, Biblical Quotations and the Paris Bible in
Italy from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century: A
First Report........................................................................................................237
Sabina Magrini

Vernacular Bible Manuscripts in Late Medieval Italy: Cultural Appropriation and Textual Transformation ............................................. 261
Sabrina Corbellini

The Medieval Vernacular Bible in French as a Flexible Text:
Selective and Discontinuous Reading Practices...................................... 283
Margriet Hoogvliet

The Story of a Success: The Bible historiale in French
(1295-ca. 1500)................................................................................................307
Guy Lobrichon

Manuscript Evidence for the Patronage, Ownership and Use
of the Wycliffite Bible ..................................................................................... 333
Elizabeth Solopova

Tables of Lections in Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible ......................... 351
Matti Peikola

Epilogue................................................................................................................... 379
Peter Stallybrass "

Рецензируемое издание представляет собой editio princeps (ранее публиковались лишь небольшие фрагменты) уникального стихотворного произведения на греческом языке середины XII в. Текст издан по единственной сохранившейся греческой рукописи MS. 4577 (olim N-42), написанной на 119 листах восточной бумаги, из Национальной библиотеки Испании в Мадриде. Автор поэмы, как видно, приближенный
сицилийского короля РожераП (1130-1154), попадает в опалу и отправляется в ссылку на Melitogaudos - остров Гозо Мальтийского архипелага. Пробыв там девять лет, он в стихах оплакивает свою долю изгнанника. Поэт обращается к визирю Рожера II адмиралу Георгию Антиохийскому (ум. в 1152 г.), умоляя ходатайствовать перед королем о возвращении на родину. Поэт воспевает подвиги короля,
тогда еще наследника престола, в ходе его экспедиции на Мальту и Гозо в 1127 г., а попутно описывает этот остров, его природу и обитателей, их занятия и обычаи.

Abstract: This chapter is about the scribes who, in the early decades of the ninth century in north-eastern Iberia and of the twelfth century in the north and north-western, were pushed more or less diplomatically to change their graphic model from Visigothic script to Caroline minuscule. We will briefly discuss when and why each production centre, traditional or of new creation, adopted the new writing system that had come to dominate in Europe and how that change was implemented and perceived by their contemporaries. Special attention will be paid to scribes and copyists who show themselves as being in the fringe of the two cultural contexts by revising those very few extant examples of polygraphism in Latin writing in Iberia.
Keywords: Visigothic script; Caroline minuscule; Mozarabic rite; Roman rite; Polygraphism.

Resumen: El presente capítulo versa sobre los escribas que, en las primeras décadas del siglo IX en el noreste de la península Ibérica y del siglo XII en el norte y noroeste, fueron más o menos diplomáticamente empujados hacia el cambio de sus modelos gráficos pasando de la escritura visigótica a la carolina. Trataremos brevemente sobre cuándo y por qué cada centro de producción, tradicional o de nueva creación, adoptó el nuevo sistema de escritura dominante en Europa y cómo ese cambio fue implementado y percibido por sus contemporáneos. Atención especial se prestará a los escribas y copistas que se muestran entre dos contextos culturales diferentes mediante el análisis de los pocos ejemplos conservados de poligrafismo en escritura latina en Iberia. 
Palabras clave: Escritura visigótica; escritura carolina; rito mozárabe; rito romano; poligrafismo.

Summary: 1. Introduction. 2. On the concept of change: state of the field and terminology. 3. And the Change began. 3.1. Septimania and the North-Eastern Iberian Peninsula. 3.2. Northern and North-western Iberian Peninsula. 3.3. Mozarabic Iberia. 4. The consequences of change. 4.1. Visigothic cursive and Visigothic minuscule. 4.2. Visigothic script and Caroline minuscule. 5. Conclusions: Our perception of (their) graphic change. 6. Bibliographic references.

The proposed Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool will be an open source, online digital platform bringing together for the first time a multiplicity of the latest electronic and digital information tools to allow users to learn how to read the four writing styles predominant in Spanish language documents of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

Pour le paléographe, il est plus commode de travailler avec des classifications nettes et des périodisations distinctes qu’en suivant une tradition confuse. Les styles d’écriture arménienne ne sont pas clairement définis, et il est commun de mélanger un type avec un autre. Une véritable catégorisation universelle n’est véritablement apparue qu’avec l’imprimerie, où l’idiosyncrasie du scribe laisse la place à une implacable logique des formes de lettres.

Peter Dubrovsky (1756-1816), Russian nobleman, diplomat, and bibliophile, was attached in 1780 to the Russian Embassy in Paris, where he was able to engage in a highly successful, if opaque, campaign of collecting historical monuments, chiefly, ancient books and manuscripts. Little is known of Dubrovsky's methods, but in 1805 he had accrued to himself a vast collection of rare manuscripts sufficient in number to present to the (then) Imperial Library of Russia a foundation collection of remarkable worth and antiquity. Thus Dubrovsky, who was then librarian from 1805 to 1812, formed the class ex Musæo, i.e. manuscripts once kept in the cupboard in his study. In this class he had in place a small but secure group of Anglo-Saxon books, especially rich in historical, devotional and literary material of signal British interest. The name of the collection may have changed but these Anglo-Saxon books in St. Petersburg remain of historical and cultural significance; textually and palaeographically, too, they are of use and interest to scholars.

In 2012 the Israel Antiquities Authority launched the new photographic digital database for Judaean Desert manuscripts, the Leon Levy Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Library (www.deadseascrolls.il). The site features new images of a large number of Qumran mss, with the promise of many more on the way, including for many of these fragments the first ever photographs in full colour. This paper illustrates how the new IAA photographs can assist efforts of manuscript identification, reconstruction and interpretation on a digital platform applied to one of the Cave 4Q copies of the War Scroll, 4QMa (4Q491). I will set special attention on the colour photographs and the usage of colour for increasing our knowledge about this scroll. First, I will very briefly introduce 4Q491, and its somewhat controversial history of scholarship. While the first editor identified and published the fragments all together as part of a single manuscript, others have since delivered persuasive arguments for the existence of two and even three separate scrolls among the fragments, and this is a matter that I will challenge directly through an investigation of the new digital images. Second, I will illustrate my study in two parts of the physical features of 4Q491, in a close examination of one set of fragment pieces—those assigned to frg. 11 i–ii. I will initially explore and identify patterns of damage in the overall shape of the fragment pieces and the composite whole, and will illustrate how these are most clearly discerned with the application of colour. Then I will use targeted colour selection of the RGB images to make digital transparencies of the fragments, which are a useful tool for precisely interpreting various types of surface damage. Third, the results of my physical examination of frg. 11 i–ii will be applied to the whole manuscript in terms of how to understand the scribal activity, how to classify its literary content, and finally how a new arrangement of the fragments affects the structure of the composition and its meaning.

This paper is the first study to map the transmission of the Appendices to the Lex Ro-mana Visigothorum. Based on full collations of all (8+3) known witnesses, it establishes the stemma codicum for the Appendices, which differs markedly from the stemma of the LRV text in the same MSS. Furthermore, the philological analysis shows that Appendix 3 is not so much a legal dossier as it is a medieval attempt to fill a lacuna, whereas the composite nature of Appendix 1 (= 1a+b) still leaves us with three Appendices. Moreover, Krüger and Mommsen were mistaken to claim that Vat. Reg. lat. 1128 and Hincmar of Reims relied on the Appendices. Finally, MS Berlin lat. fol. 270 must have been copied from MS Ivrea XXXV (17), which goes against palaeographers' communis opinio about their relative dating.

This paper, concluded on Aug. 11, 2020, is a summary of my work with Professor Gift Siromoney on the invention of the Brāhmī script, up till the time of his death in 1988, as well as my independent discovery, decades later, of where and when the invention took place. In my paper, I challenge those scholars who argue that the origin of the Brāhmī script pre-dates the Mauryan dynasty!

This work encompasses research in the field of Hebrew palaeography, and notably to the typology of Ashkenazi scripts. It includes a comparative analysis of the script used in medieval and post-medieval Torah scrolls, showing that certain features of the former are still discernible in the latter. The script used in Torah scrolls from these time periods reflect characteristics of both of the central Ashkenazic writing styles accepted today known as the Arizal and the Beth Yosef. A primary objective of  this palaeographical research is to suggest possible reasons and origins - historical, rabbinic, graphic etc. - for the discrepancies between these two scripts so that one may understand the impact of these factors on the development of Hebrew letters and their division into two main branches as they exist in the traditional scribal art of today.

Cette étude englobe des recherches dans le domaine de la paléographie hébraïque, et notamment dans la typologie des écritures ashkénazes. Il inclue une analyse comparative de l'écriture utilisée dans les rouleaux de la Torah médiévaux et post-médiévaux, montrant que certaines caractéristiques de la première periode restent toujours visibles dans la seconde. L'écriture utilisée dans les rouleaux de la Torah de ces périodes reflète les caractéristiques des deux styles principaux d'écriture ashkénaze acceptés aujourd'hui, connus sous les noms d'Arizal et de Beth Yosef. L'un des principaux objectifs de cette recherche paléographique est de suggérer des raisons et des origines possibles - historiques, rabbiniques, graphiques, etc. - pour les divergences entre ces deux écritures, afin de comprendre l'impact de ces facteurs sur le développement des lettres hébraïques et leur division en deux branches principales telles qu'elles existent dans l'art scribal traditionnel d'aujourd'hui.

This study analyses the emergence of royal signatures in Portugal and their diplomatic, political and cultural meaning based on a collection of documents signed, manu propria, by King Dom Dinis (1279-1325). It further discusses the historical importance of the «Rei»’s signature as a symbol of the Portuguese monarch’s public political image in the framework of Hispanic regal representation traditions.

A fronte dei molti libri che il medioevo greco ha trasmesso sani e salvi, altrettanti si sono persi inesorabilmente. Tra questi due estremi — la salvezza e la distruzione — si pone il degrado cui un libro poteva andare incontro, il quale, innescando l’esigenza di porre rimedio a un danno — si trattasse di uno strappo accidentale o dell’asportazione volontaria di un intero fascicolo —, rappresenta l’occasione di ogni storia di restauro. E come ogni storia che si rispetti anche quella qui ripercorsa si fonda sulla concretezza dei dati oggettivi — in primo luogo l’esame diretto dei manoscritti, quindi l’analisi di sottoscrizioni, note, documenti, inventari, cataloghi antichi —, ma sovente dà spazio alle fonti letterarie, indagate sempre dalla parte dei libri, sia che attestino situazioni e accadimenti reali, sia che riflettano il mondo delle rappresentazioni e dell’immaginario. L’ambizione è di offrire al lettore un quadro complessivo, ricco e vivido, di quella che è stata una vicenda di rovina e rinascita, in cui gli aspetti materiali del restauro librario, ancorché importanti, rappresentano solo una parte del fenomeno, che risulta altresì indagato per le sue implicazioni nella trasmissione dei testi e nella storia culturale e sociale di Bisanzio.

Con la disgregación del Imperio Romano y la pérdida de la estructura educativa y cultural de tradición clásica a la que ésta derivó, hemos visto como en cada uno de los territorios europeos un nuevo tipo de escritura comenzó a desarrollarse. Poco a poco, partiendo de modelos clásicos, las escrituras insular, merovingia y visigótica se convierten en los sistemas gráficos al uso en las Islas Británicas, el reino franco y los reinos cristianos de la Península Ibérica respectivamente. El mismo proceso de desarrollo y consolidación de sistemas gráficos tuvo lugar también en centro Europa, donde se había desplazado el centro cultural antes en Roma. Con Carlomagno y la llamada renovación cultural carolingia una escritura sencilla, legible y de toque clásico era indispensable para la preservación y transmisión del conocimiento...

This paper studies the letter shape of the final jīm, ḥāʾ, and khāʾ in seven early Quranic manuscripts. Examination of the shape of these letters in these manuscripts reveals a graphemic distinction between the jīm, which lacks the typical curved tail, and the ḥāʾ and the khāʾ, which do have this tail. This distinction is lost in later Quranic manuscripts. I argue that the distinction between jīm and ḥāʾ/khāʾ is a continuation from the Arabic script’s origins in the Nabataean Aramaic script, which had distinct letter shapes for these signs. Contrary to what has been previously thought, the evidence adduced in this article shows that the merger happened in the Islamic period rather than in the pre-Islamic period.

We present an end-to-end system for aligning transcript letters to their coordinates in a manuscript image. An intuitive GUI and an automatic line detection method enable the user to perform an exact alignment of glyphs on the manuscript with an existing transcription. In order to bridge large regions in between annotation, and augment the manual effort, the system employs an opticalflow engine for directly matching at the pixel level the image of a line of a historical text with a synthetic image created from the transcript’s matching line. Meanwhile, by accumulating aligned letters, and performing letter spotting, the system is able to bootstrap a rapid semi-automatic transcription of the remaining text. Thus, the amount of manual work is greatly diminished and the transcript alignment task becomes practical regardless of the corpus size.

This article presents the first forensic source criticism of the papal encyclical that launched the Third Crusade, Audita tremendi (1187/1188); it makes four main arguments. First, its core empirical contribution is to demonstrate textual variation across the four issues of the letter. Second, it engages with the debate on whether the crusading movement existed in an institutional form in the twelfth century by challenging the interpretation that the reissue of Audita tremendi and similar papal documents was the result of uninspired "plagiarism". Third, it offers a new reconstruction of the immediate context of the issue of the document and argues that, rather than being the product of a long period of careful composition, it was issued as a hurried response to the arrival of the news from Hattin. Fourth, it reconsiders the role of the encyclical in the call for the Third Crusade and contends that the papacy was focussed not on the promotion of the military expedition but the launch of an immediate liturgical campaign of communal repentance. Additionally, the article prints comparative transcriptions of the four issues as an appendix, three of which are published here for the first time.

This book examines a cultural revolution that took place in the Scandinavian artistic landscape during the medieval period. Within just one generation (c. 1340–1400), the Augustinian monastery of Helgafell rose to become the most important centre of illuminated manuscript production in western Iceland. By conducting cross-disciplinary research that combines methodologies and sources from the fields of Art History, Old Norse-Icelandic Manuscript Studies and Nordic History, this study presents a comprehensive and international approach that respects both the historical setting of the manuscript production and the illuminated products themselves. It examines not only one but several medieval cultures in relation to similar domestic artistic monuments and relevant historical evidence: Helgafell in Iceland, East Anglia in England, and Bergen in Norway. It offers a detailed account of one cultural site in relation to its scribal and artistic connections with other ecclesiastical and secular scriptoria in the broader North Atlantic region.