Israeli library unveils medieval manuscript collection discovered in Afghanistan

A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.

 On Thursday Israel's National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records. 

Researchers say the "Afghan Genizah" marks the greatest such archive found since the "Cairo Genizah" was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found.

 The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters.

Click here to read this article from NPR

Medieval exhibition spotlights Stanford Libraries' manuscript collection

For centuries, Bibles were painstakingly copied and lavishly illustrated, and then cherished from generation to generation. They became the focus of scholarly, creative and mystical activity for a millennium.

 You can trace the Bible's literary history in Scripting the Sacred, a Stanford Libraries exhibition of Western European manuscripts and fragments. The exhibition, which opened Sept. 17, continues through Jan. 6, 2013, in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda of Green Library. The exhibition features about 75 manuscripts and facsimiles – the latter are often valuable collectors' items in themselves, reproducing the shape and flaws of each medieval page. (Some facsimiles show works not included in the current Stanford collections.) Original works date from the ninth century to the 16th century.

 The exhibition also includes a few examples of the book's precursor – Greek and Egyptian fragments from the Stanford Libraries' papyrus collection, dating from around the thirdcentury B.C. The exhibition includes early musical notation, books of hours, hagiographies and texts from such early church fathers as Origen, Augustine and Gregory the Great. Typical is a manuscript of The Life of Catherine of Siena, open to the lavishly illustrated frontispiece, circa 1500, previously owned by the 74th Doge of Venice, and a rare, pristine Dialogues by Gregory the Great, owned by Philippa of Guelders, the Duchess of Lorraine and Queen of Sicily. Several elaborate books of hours have illustrated devotions that "strengthen the association between text and temporality, as turning the pages of a book of hours parallels the unfolding of time and the passing of seasons," said Kathryn Dickason, co-curator of the exhibition with David Jordan.

Click here to read this article from Stanford University News

Click here to learn more about Scripting the Sacred

Book of Kells has attracted ten million visitors to Trinity College Dublin Library

The 10 millionth visitor to the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin since the creation of its visitor centre in 1992 was welcomed yesterday by the Librarian, Mr Robin Adams. The Old Library and Book of Kells is one of Ireland’s major tourist venues and attracts over 520,000 visitors each year to see the exhibition on the Book of Kells and other medieval manuscripts and to enjoy the spectacular space of the Long Room.

The number of visitors to the Old Library has increased from 220,000 in 1992. Figures for this year have increased by 10% over the previous twelve months. Visitors to the Old Library come from across the globe, with the majority coming from Europe (39%) and North America (33%). Eight percent of visitors come from Ireland, with over 20,000 schoolchildren having free access, often coming as part of a school visit.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Burgers in the Bodleian? Professors fume (quietly)

Academics are aghast that manuscripts and rare books in one of the world's great research libraries may soon be mauled by undergraduates munching fast food.

 Paradoxically, what many see as a threat to the status of the Bodleian, founded in 1602, results from a £1 million ($1.6m) grant from the University of Oxford's most generous benefactor.

The university accepted the grant from the Oxford Martin School, a research institute endowed in 2005 by James Martin, an IT entrepreneur who has donated almost £100m to Oxford. In return,the school gets exclusive use of the university's Old Indian Institute building, displacing a large collection of history books.

Click here to read this article from The Australian

Medieval library with chained books gets annual clean

It is like taking a step inside the restricted section of the Hogwarts' library - rows and rows of chained up books and manuscripts line the tall wooden shelves secured in place on thick metal rods.

Hereford Cathedral's chained library dates back to 1611 and it is not hard to imagine how it looked in Medieval times when it was used by scholars and the clergy as a reference centre for religious study and church law.

Books were chained because they were so valuable at the time - before the printing press each book took hours of skilled work to produce.

The start of the year sees the library undergo its annual deep clean but how do you clean 1,500 books and 225 Medieval manuscripts particularly when those items are chained to the shelves?

Click here to read this article from the BBC

Click here for more information about the Library

Missing medieval manuscript found after 50 years

In one otherwise unremarkable storage box in Connecticut College’s Shain Library, Ben Panciera made a remarkable discovery.

Wedged between a set of magazines containing stories for Australian children and a biography of an Episcopalian priest was a book Panciera never thought he’d see with his own eyes – a medieval manuscript presumed stolen more than 50 years earlier.

Panciera, the Director of Special Collections in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, said the find was exhilarating. “You could see right away that it wasn’t paper,” Panciera said. “I thought, ‘Ahhhh, this has got to be at least 400 years old.’”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

University of Basque Country granted priceless library collection

The University of the Basque Country (UPV) revealed on Wednesday it had become the beneficiary of an "invaluable" library collection donated by a resident of Madrid. As a condition of his donation, the benefactor insisted only that the collection remain intact and be open to anyone interested in attending the library.

The donation contains more than 5,000 books including an extensive collection of texts from the Medieval and Renaissance eras, as well as an exquisite selection of art and oriental artifacts.

Click here to read this article from eitb.com

New App features Bodleian Treasures

The Bodleian Libraries have launched a mobile app featuring a selection of the rarest, most important and most evocative objects from the Bodleian collections: from ancient papyri through medieval oriental manuscripts to twentieth-century printed books and ephemera. The app supports the Autumn 2011 exhibition, Treasures of the Bodleian – on show until 23 December. Created in conjunction with Toura, a leading solution for cloud-based mobile app development, the Treasures of the Bodleian app can be downloaded for free.

Users can explore in high resolution through themes including the classical heritage; maps and boundaries; the sacred word; the animal and plant kingdoms; literature and music; the sciences of observation and calculation; and moments in history.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval manuscripts highlight of Lilly workshops at Indiana University

British scribe and illuminator Patricia Lovett will be this year’s guest for Indiana University’s Mediaevalia at the Lilly, an annual event focused on the Lilly Library’s large collection of rare medieval manuscripts and books.

The event is directed by Professor Hildegard Keller with Indiana University’s Germanic Department and Medieval Studies Institute and Cherry Williams, the Lilly’s curator of manuscripts.

As part of the event, Lovett will teach two workshops demonstrating calligraphy, illumination and manuscript-making. The workshops will be held on Thursday, Nov. 3, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 2:30 to 5 p.m. in the Slocum Room of the Lilly Library. Both workshops are free and open to the public, but registration is requested by calling the library at 812-855-2452.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Library completes digitization of medieval manuscripts

The secrets of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library have now been revealed on the internet. A two-year grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities has allowed Penn to finish digitizing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts produced before 1601. A second grant was secured in March to digitize manuscripts from 1601 to 1800.

“Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts,” an online collection, currently offers over 1,400 online facsimiles of manuscripts. The collection also includes over 100 facsimiles of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, a collection of late medieval and early modern manuscripts donated in April by 1953 College graduate and Wharton MBA recipient Lawrence Schoenberg.

Van Pelt is one of the first American libraries to have a large public digitized collection that is free of charge, said Nancy Shawcross, curator of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.


Click here to read this article from the Daily Pennsylvanian 

Treasures of the Bodleian exhibition opens today

The Bodleian Libraries’ autumn exhibition ‘Treasures of the Bodleian’ opens to the public today (Friday 30 September). The exhibition will feature a selection of the Bodleian’s rarest, most important and most evocative items – from ancient papyri to medieval oriental manuscripts to twentieth-century printed books and ephemera.

The exhibits are arranged into broad themes: the classical heritage; mapping the world; the sacred word; the animal and plant kingdoms; works of the imagination; the sciences of observation and calculation; historical moments in time.

Click here to read this article from Medievalist.net

Pages from history: the best of the Bodleian

Deep underground, 20ft below the sandy-coloured stones of Oxford, mile upon mile of shelves lie dusty and empty. The entire contents of the New Bodleian Library – one of the most ancient and precious collections in the world, founded by Thomas Bodley in 1598 – have vanished.

It is a sight to instil fear into any scholar. Four editions of the Magna Carta; the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays; and a document from the court of King Alfred that is reckoned to be the oldest in the English language. Three million books, a million maps, and countless priceless documents. All gone. But there is no need to worry: they have not been stolen, or teleported by culture-envying aliens. They have just been taken to Swindon.

Click here to read this article from The Telegraph

Historic library may close as subsidy slashed

A historic London reference library containing 50,000 books, including unique, centuries-old tomes relating to the history of the British Museum, is under threat of closure.

The Paul Hamlyn public library at the British Museum, which has a unique collection of museum guidebooks dating from 1762, along with collections on archaeology, history and art, could close as the institution seeks to cut costs.

"It is with regret that the British Museum is having to consider the closure of the Paul Hamlyn Library," a spokeswoman said. The museum is scaling back to accommodate a 15 per cent cut.

Click here to read this article from The Independent

World fame of Worcester Cathedral library

Worcester Cathedral's library is ranked among the most important in the country for medieval studies. It contains nearly 300 manuscripts and archives dating from the 10th Century.

Librarian and archivist David Morrison said the cathedral's collection is invaluable and attracts scholars from all over the world.

He said: "Worcester's got the second best collection of medieval manuscripts in any cathedral in the UK and only Durham has a larger number."

Click here to read this article from the BBC

$20 Million of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts donated to the University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries have received a major collection of 280 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, valued at over $20 million, from long-time benefactors and Library Board members Lawrence J. Schoenberg and Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg. To promote the use of this and other manuscript collections at Penn, the Libraries will create the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.

“Through their extraordinary philanthropy and vision, Larry and Barbara have helped build the foundation for a strong medieval studies program at Penn,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “This new gift of an unparalleled collection of Medieval and Renaissance artifacts builds on that foundation. For generations to come, the collection and Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies will have a profound impact on the study of human knowledge and creative invention.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Exhibition: The Great Lost Library of Alcuin’s York

Eighth-century York owed its reputation as one of the most intellectually influential cities in Europe to the library and school headed by the scholar Alcuin. But while rich and vivid evidence exists about the school, all trace of the library has disappeared.

A new exhibition at the Old Palace, which houses the present-day York Minster Library, organised by Dr Mary Garrison, of the University of York’s Department of History, assembles clues to solve the mystery.

The Great Lost Library of Alcuin’s York features eye-catching new designs by Yorkshire calligraphers Dorothy Wilkinson, Sue Sparrow and Angela Dalleywater based on the distinctive eighth-century Caroline minuscule script that Alcuin encouraged his scribes to use.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

God’s Librarians: The Vatican Library enters the twenty-first century

One day early in the sixteen-twenties, an archivist working in the library of the Holy See stumbled upon a text of Procopius’s “Historia Arcana” (“The Secret History”), which painted a devastating new portrait of the Emperor Justinian and his inner circle as venal, corrupt, immoral, and un-Christian. The discovery set off a bitter debate about just who Justinian was, and raised questions about the way history is written. The tale of its discovery also exemplifies some of the paradoxical problems that have long haunted the institution in which it was found: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Apostolic Library—or, as its present-day users call it, the Vat. One problem is obvious: the Vat’s collection, which has been accreting since the mid-fourteen-hundreds, is so vast that even the people who run it haven’t always known what they’re sitting on top of. Another is that although the library was founded as, essentially, a public information resource, the Vatican itself has had a historically vexed relationship to knowledge, power, secrecy, and authority.

Click here to read this article from the New Yorker

Major medieval library in Amsterdam may have collection sold off

The upcoming sale of a medieval manuscript has raised speculation that a major academic library will be closed and have it collection sold off in order to pay off its owner’s debts. The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in the Dutch city of Amsterdam has been closed to the public and one of its major manuscripts, The Rochefoucauld Grail, is set to be auctioned off by Sotheby’s on December 7th.

The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica was founded as a private library in 1984 by JR Ritman, who owns a 60% stake in the library. The collection focuses on manuscripts and printed works in the field of the Hermetic tradition, more specifically the ‘Christian-Hermetic’ tradition, with works by Augustine, Lactantius and other medieval and Renaissance writers. The library holds more than 22,000 volumes: ca. 700 manuscripts (85 of which date before 1550), ca. 5,000 books printed before 1800 (305 of which are incunables, books printed before 1500) and ca. 17,000 books (primary and secondary sources) printed after 1800.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Vatican Library reopens after restoration

Following three years of restoration work, the Vatican Apostolic Library is due to reopen its doors on 20 September. The announcement was made in a press conference, held Monday morning in the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Museums by Vatican officials and the company in charge of the restoration work.

Click here to read the full article and see three video reports at Medievalists.net

The Newberry Library and the University of Notre Dame acquire rare fourteenth-century book

Chicago's Newberry Library and the University of Notre Dame recently jointly acquired an unusual early fourteenth-century codex originating in southern France that contains a collection of 38 scholastic texts, only two of which have been edited in modern critical editions and the rest of which have never been printed. All those that have been identified to date are Franciscan. The most noteworthy author included is Peter John Olivi, represented by two elements of his Principia in sacram scripturam, a text subsequently condemned by the Inquisition.

Olivi, born near Béziers and trained at the University of Paris, was a leader of the Spiritual Franciscans, whose absolute belief in apostolic poverty led Olivi’s writings to be condemned a year after his death in 1298. In 1299, a Chapter General of the Franciscan Order ordered his writings to be burned.

“More than 100 manuscripts containing his works are reported to have been destroyed, and consequently surviving manuscripts are exceedingly rare,” said Paul Saenger, the Newberry Library’s George A. Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Collection Development Librarian. “This is the sole known codex originating from Languedoc, where Olivi taught at the University of Montpellier and at Nîmes. Ultimately, however, the value to scholarship of this manuscript may lie in its unidentified and unedited content.

The codex complements the Newberry Library’s rich collections of Hebrew, Greek and Latin bibles, which is the most comprehensive assemblage of manuscript and printed biblical texts in the Midwest. This copy appears to have been preserved in a Dominican library.

“Because the Dominicans often administered the Inquisition, it was necessary for them to have copies of condemned texts so that they could refute them,” Saenger explained.

Since 1995, the Newberry Library has partnered with Midwestern universities and colleges to purchase more than 25 rare medieval manuscripts and printed books that otherwise would not be available to local scholars and residents. The Newberry Library created the joint-ownership program in order to bring more original source material to the Midwest.

The materials typically spend eight months of the year at the Newberry and up to four months of the year with the participating institution. In addition to Notre Dame, seven other universities or colleges in the region participate in the program, including DePaul University; Loyola University Chicago; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Minnesota; Spertus College; Tulane University; and Western Michigan University.

Other examples of joint acquisitions include:

- A processional from Portugal, ca. 1300 (Newberry Library and Western Michigan University);

- A 15th century code of regulations for monks attributed to Saint Jerome (Newberry Library and DePaul University);

- A bilingual English-Hebrew psalter printed in Utrecht in the 17th century (Newberry Library and Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies); and

- A Burgundian roll dating from about 1467 containing a major genealogical diagram (Newberry Library and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Source: Newberry Library