Eerie the eel’s head.

This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.

- Ted Hughes

An eel is wielded in the bottom margin of f. 242r, Ms. Codex 724, a 13th century Bible. #drollerydonnerstag

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A #CoffeeWithACodex highlight reel from February featuring Ms. Codex 723, a 12th century collection of canon law texts with colored initials and some interesting terrain. For the full 30-minute version, go to YouTube:

Manuscript Monday: LJS 430 - [De urinarum judiciis]. (Video Orientation)

Dot Porter, SIMS Curator for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania Library, presents a video Orientation to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s LJS 430, a manuscript copy of a printed edition of Montagnana’s work on the analysis of urine in diagnosing disease; text includes variants not in the first edition of 1487 but found in an edition published ca. 1500. A few marginal…

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April 25 is "Bring Our Children To Work Day" here at Penn, and Curator Dot Porter will be bringing her son along for #CoffeeWithACodex! He enjoys math, so we'll look at three very different manuscripts about arithmetic and geometry, dating from the 12th, 15th, and 17th centuries.

Register here:

A sleepy owl lurks on page 276 of Ms. Codex 3, three volumes of paintings or hand-colored sketches depicting mainly insects, fish and other marine life, birds and flowers. We don't know much about these books except that they were made in Japan, probably in the 19th century. If you know more, let us know!

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Not a mermaid or a merman but a secret third thing (mermusician)

(Cambridge UL MS Add. 4085)

The Schoenberg Institute is delighted to announce the next SIMS Online Lecture on Friday, April 26. See below for details.

Principles of Manuscript Poetics Francesco Marco Aresu, University of Pennsylvania Friday, April 26, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT @ Virtual

This talk offers a reflection on the interactions between textuality and materiality, message and medium, visual-verbal discourse and its physical support through readings of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida and Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Each of these texts is read as an interaction between conceptual, linguistic, rhetorical, and material elements. In a manuscript poetics, the container and the content, the book and the text, share a material and symbolic solidarity. The book represents the primary idea of the text, and the text, conceptually, assumes the material shape of a book. A manuscript poetics informed the Teseida and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: operating within the manuscript culture of late medieval Italy, Boccaccio and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools and strategies of scribal culture to shape, signal, and layer meanings coextensive to those they conveyed verbally in their written texts.

More information and a link to register are available here:

This is incredible!! I love the in-progress shots! Thank you for tagging us on this!

a lil something from the commission stack

I was asked to include a beefy angel and swole nuns

For #CoffeeWithACodex on April 11, Curator Dot Porter was joined by guest host Louis Meiselman, Judaica Special Collections Cataloging Librarian. We looked at CAJS Rar Ms 25, a collection of medieval leaves in Hebrew that have been used in bindings.

Watch the full 30-minute recording on YouTube:

For #CoffeeWithACodex on April 18 (12pm Noon EST on Zoom), Curator Dot Porter will bring out Ms. Codex 3, three volumes containing paintings or hand-colored sketches depicting mainly insects, fish and other marine life, birds and flowers. The manuscript was created in Japan, probably in the 19th century.

Register here:

Manuscript Monday: LJS 429 - Natural Philosophy (Video Orientation)

Dot Porter, SIMS Curator for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania Library, presents a video Orientation to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s LJS 429, an illustrated introduction to natural philosophy, supposedly according to the principles of Isidore of Seville, but in fact representing later Aristotelian and Thomist thought and opposing the followers of Duns Scotus,…

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Four hands are better than two!!

WE UNBOXED THE PETRARCH

Watch!

It's a c. 1470s copy of Canzoniere and Trionfi, with Leonardo Bruni's Life of Petrarch. Made in the Workshop of Francesco di Antonio del Chierico. More information in the sales description.

WE UNBOXED THE PETRARCH

Watch!

It's a c. 1470s copy of Canzoniere and Trionfi, with Leonardo Bruni's Life of Petrarch. Made in the Workshop of Francesco di Antonio del Chierico. More information in the sales description.

From troubles of the world I turn to ducks.

- F. W. Harvey

An arguable blue duck flies low in the bottom margin of f. 230r, Ms. Codex 724, a 13th century Bible. #drollerydonnerstag

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A beautiful purple-blue iris waves at us from page 190 of Ms. Codex 3, three volumes of paintings or hand-colored sketches depicting mainly insects, fish and other marine life, birds and flowers. We don't know much about these books except that they were made in Japan, probably in the 19th century. If you know more, let us know!

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~ Mary Magdalene Borne Aloft.

Artist/Maker: Taddeo Crivelli (Italian, died ca. 1479, active about 1451-1479)

Date: ca. 1469

Place of origin: Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Medium: Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink.

And I even got a photo during the real thing! Only 88% totality in Philadelphia, but it got a little dim and chilly.

Today we're celebrating the eclipse with diagrams from several manuscripts from the Schoenberg Collection! They range from the 13th to the 16th centuries, and include texts in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. You'll see, however, that the diagrams in the different books are quite similar to each other!

To watch the complete 30-minute video, go to YouTube: