Mulaika Hijjas is Senior Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London, where she teaches literature and cultural studies of the region. She is the principal investigator of Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures, funded by a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award. Follow the project on Twitter or Facebook. Jessica Rahardjo is a DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford and a committee member of Teaching the Codex. Her current research interest is the Islamic material culture of Maritime Southeast Asia. Follow her here on Twitter.  Jawi is an adapted form of ..read more

David Ganz was Professor of Palaeography at King’s College London from 1997-2010. In 2016, he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. This post contains a reference to attempted suicide. In 1885 a slim volume, entitled XII Facsimiles from Latin MSS in the Bodleian Library, was published by Oxford University Press. [1] The author was listed as ‘R. Ellis, MA Reader in Latin literature.’  Robinson Ellis attained literary fame in his own lifetime as the friend of Tennyson, Swinburne and Robert Bridges; more recently he appeared in Tom Stoppard’s play abou ..read more

Astrid J. Smith has been digitizing materials as rare book and special collections digitization specialist for Stanford Libraries for over a decade. With a background in fine art, and a master’s degree in liberal arts, she strives always to ensure that cultural heritage preservation imaging best practices are combined with her own aesthetic and phenomenological observations to create meaningful new digital forms.         Figure 1: Septistellium Meditationis (Mss Codex 1126) digitized by Stanford’s Digital Production Group. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collecti ..read more

Dr Sian Witherden outlines a series of decorative manuscript features. Sian is a Rare Books and Manuscripts specialist. This post also appears on the St John’s College blog.  I recently joined the St John’s College (Oxford) library team to work on the TEI project, my main role being to incorporate existing catalogue records into the Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries online database. Due to Coronavirus restrictions, I was initially unable to consult the medieval manuscripts at St John’s College in person. Instead, I was working almost exclusively with Ralph Hanna’s Catalogue (biblio ..read more

Aysha Strachan is a PhD student in German at King’s College London/Humboldt University Berlin supervised by Sarah Bowden and Andreas Krass and funded by the LAHP. She completed the MSt. at Oriel College, Oxford in 2019 and took the History of the Book method option to complement her research into the depiction of transgressive women across diverse medieval genres. The year is 1813. The Bodleian library acquires what is later to be known as MS Bodl. 972 as part of a collection of late medieval travelogues which tell of the encounters of knights on their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. One of the m ..read more

John Zachariah Shuster studies reception history of the Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this brief series, I have written about navigating the Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Cod. Guelf. 84.3 Aug. 2° using the Eusebian Canons and the breviarium. In the process of navigation, we ran into a counting error that persisted uncorrected from fol. 16r to fol. 17r. I’ll let you in on a secret: the scribe left another mistake uncorrected in the Eusebian Canon on fol. 8r: In the Matthean column, we find the progression: “LXXIII / LXXXIIII / LXXVI.” The scribe wrote an extra “X” in “LXXXIIII ..read more

John Zachariah Shuster studies reception history of the Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This is the second of a series of three posts exploring the tools built into biblical manuscripts to help their medieval users find their way around.  In my last post, I wrote about the Eusebian Canons in the Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Cod. Guelf. 84.3 Aug. 2°. Unfortunately, most of us would not find the Eusebian Canons particularly helpful in navigating the manuscript. But not all is lost. On the bottom of fol. 15v., the scribe begins a breviarium (summary) of Matthew: The breviarium b ..read more

John Zachariah Shuster studies reception history of the Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This post is the first of a series of three exploring the tools built into biblical manuscripts to help their medieval users find their way around.  Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Cod. Guelf. 84.3 Aug. 2° is a neat, legible codex containing the four gospels. This manuscript includes thirteen ornate pages of tables. If you flip through the text, you will notice that the roman numerals in the tables correspond to numerals in the margins of the gospel texts. However, as tidy as they are, the ta ..read more

Mariken Teeuwen is senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), and Professor at the Department History and Art History of Utrecht University. Between 2016-2020, Irene van Renswoude, Irene O’Daly, and I worked together on a project titled The Art of Reasoning: Techniques of Argumentation in the Medieval Latin West (400-1400). We set out to study techniques of processing texts fundamental to the art of reasoning (rhetoric, dialectic, logic) by analyzing the evidence in the margin. In the current grand narrative o ..read more

Sebastian Dows-Miller is an MSt candidate at Merton College, Oxford. He has a particular interest in text transmission within manuscript culture, as well as short texts written in Old French, and is always very pleased when the two intersect. Follow him on Twitter here, or follow Merton Beasts directly.  The bestiary genre is well known, both inside and outside of scholarship, for a very simple reason: its images. We are fascinated by the insights that these give into a different kind of scientific understanding, and the minds of the illuminators that created them. Oxford, Merton College ..read more