Revealing Records V Conference.

24 May 2013,

King’s College London.

The Revealing Records conference series brings together postgraduate students from across the UK and Europe to share challenges and approaches in the study of medieval sources. Revealing ‘records’ from coins to castles, letters to law codes and chronicles to crusade sermons, from the sixth century to the fifteenth, the series is a highlight of the postgraduate calendar. Hosted by the King’s History Department, previous benefactors have included the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Royal Historical Society, the Henry III Fine Rolls Project and the King's Arts & Humanities Research Institute (AHRI).

Keynote speakers :

Professor Julia Crick (King’s College London) 

Professor Jonathan Phillips (Royal Holloway, University of London) 

Now in its fifth year, the Revealing Records conference series brings together postgraduate researchers working with a wide range of sources from across the medieval world to share challenges and approaches through the presentation of their research.

* Call for papers *

We encourage applications from postgraduate students working with a wide variety of records – from the written work to objects, buildings and more. Papers that employ an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon palaeography, archaeology or other related disciplines are particularly welcome. Abstract (200 words maximum) are welcome from students wishing to present a 20-minute paper. Students should provide their name, institution, contact information, paper title and synopsis. 

Please send abstracts to revealingrecords

Deadline: Friday 14 December 2012.

Source: @medievalpecia 

Colloquium/Workshop. Codex and text. The use and relevance of codicology, paleography and illumination for textual studies Napoli.

Università degli studi «L’Orientale»

Colloquium/Workshop

6-7 Dec 2012.

6 December 2012

3e JOURNEE D’ETUDES SERIES CATALOGORUM

The Journée d’études, Pratiques de catalogage des manuscrits islamiques (Actualités de la recherche) / Cataloguing of Islamic Manuscripts (Work in Progress) is a workshop (atelier de recherche) devoted to some current projects of the Series Catalogorum, the presentation of the manuscript collections under the process of cataloguing, and various case studies.

Information on previous Journées d’études Series Catalogorum: 2e Journée (Paris, 2011), 1e Journée (Paris, 2009).

Program

Maria SZUPPE, Michele BERNARDINI and Roberto TOTTOLI, Introductory remarks and Presentation of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Dipartimento Asia Africa Mediterraneo of the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”.

Francis RICHARD, Le Catalogue des Suppléments Persans de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

Günsel RENDA, Cataloguing illustrated manuscripts at the Ethnographical Museum of Ankara.

Farid ALAKBARLI, Islamic medical manuscripts in the Library of the Academy of Sciences of Baku.
Thibaut D’HUBERT, Notes on the colophons of Bengali texts copied in the Arabic script and of some Persian manuscripts from Bengal (17th-19th c.).
Sara FANI, Bindings and watermarks in Arabic, Persian and Syriac manuscripts in the National Library of Florence and in the Medicea Laurenziana Library.
Mauro NOBILI, The De Gironcourt Collection in the Institut de France. Script styles in West African manuscripts.
Delio Vania PROVERBIO, Turkish manuscripts in the Vatican Library: A brief survey of the (late) twentieth-century acquisitions.

Angelo Michele PIEMONTESE, The Persian Manuscripts at the Vatican.
Luca BERARDI, Ottoman manuscripts in Italian libraries.
Maria SZUPPE, Manuscripts from the Regional Museum of Ferghana (Uzbekistan).
Nourane BEN AZZOUNA, Nuskha-shināsī et catalogage de manuscrits en Iran (20e-21e siècles).

Anne REGOURD, Le catalogage des papiers filigranés des manuscrits de Zabid et ses apports: le Yémen, une place privilégiée pour l'étude des papiers dits “locaux”.

Paolo SARTORI, The Archive of the Khans of Khiva: an Islamic culture of documentation?

François DEROCHE, Typologie paléographique et catalogage.

7 December 2012

 COLLOQUIUM CODEX AND TEXT

The Colloquium is dedicated to Codex and Text. The use and relevance of codicology, paleography and illumination for textual studies. Its aim is to highlight the relation between text and  manuscript support, and focus on interrelations between codicological studies and textual studies in the research on the history of Islamic manuscript tradition.

Program

Dagmar E. RIEDEL, The Downsides of Popularity: the Methodological challenges posed by the manuscript tradition of al-shifā’ by ‘Iyāḍ b. Mūsā.
Roberto TOTTOLI, Textual criticism and bibliography in Muslim Arabic texts: the case of a variant in a passage in the manuscript and printed versions of the Daqā’iq al-akhbār by ‘Abd al-Raḥīm al-Qāḍī.
Carmela BAFFIONI, The Ms. Ambrosiano arabo & 105 sup and its relationship with Berlin syr. 88.
Annie VERNAY-NOURI, Gloses décoratives dans la Turquie ottomane du XVIe siècle.
Osamu OTSUKA, The genealogical tree of Ḥamd-Allāh Mustawfī: how to write general history in a few folios?
Kristina RICHARDSON, Reconstructing the autograph corpus of Ibn Tulun (d. 1546).
Nuria MARTINEZ DE CASTILLA MUÑOZ, La codicologie au service de l’ecdotique: le cas des manuscrits morisques.
Serpil BAĞCI, Where do we place the pictures? The consistency of Mahall-i Tasvir.
Noha ABOU-KHATWA, Layout in the service of textual studies: a Mamlūk Qur’ān at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Tulun DEĞERLENDIRICI, A History from the Edge: Flyleaf Notes on the Turkish Hamzanâma Manuscripts and their Contribution to the History of Reading.Ayse ALDEMIR-KILERCIK, Vassale: A unique restoration technique of the past that led to the loss of codicological data.
Anna Maria DI TOLLA, An Arabic-Berber manuscript on customary law from Tafilalt, Morocco.
Florian SCHWARZ, The author as publisher. A codicological view on the oeuvre of the Kurdish theologian Ibrahim al-Kurani (1616-1690).

Program

Source: APILIST

International conference Autograph/holograph and authorial manuscripts in Arabic script.

10-12 October 2013,

Université de Liège (Belgium).
 

* Call for papers *

By definition and in broad terms, an autograph manuscript is a book, document, etc., handwritten by its author. The term autograph is now often used instead of holograph which normally designates a manuscript fully handwritten by an author. An authorial manuscript can be holograph or autograph: it may have been either written by the author himself or copied by a scribe whose work was then corrected by the author. Consequently, this category of manuscripts represents a stage (preliminary or final) in the redaction of the text intended by the author for the contents as well as the language used.
 

The material characteristics of both categories of manuscripts are specific to the time and the region in which the author composed his text. Codicological and textual studies about autograph/holograph and authorial manuscripts are thus steadily-founded and favorable to insightful conclusions. Unfortunately, they have received little attention in the field of Islamic studies though there is a wealth of material available.
 

The aim of the conference is to focus on four main aspects of the research about autograph/holograph and authorial manuscripts:

– codicology: can these books be analyzed as any other manuscript is? Do their pecularities, if any, bring forward particular pieces of information?
– paleography: how can one identify a handwriting with a certain degree of scientific confidence, beyond intuition? What are the discriminating criteria? Is there a method to be used/developed?
– textual criticism: how important is this category of manuscripts in an editorial process? Which strategy to choose when more than just one authorial manuscript of the same text is available? Should one study them separately or by comparison? What importance is to be given to the status of a manuscript (fair copy, draft, copybook, notebook, etc.)? How to classify all these versions? How can the study of authorial manuscripts improve our knowledge of Arabic in linguistic terms?
– working method: what benefit can be drawn from different autograph versions of a same text? Which information can be deduced from them? Is there a specific methodology or composing process? What about originality, plagiarism, or even authority?
 

Please note that papers presenting the discovery of an autograph manuscript will be taken into account only if they approach at least one the theoretical aspect listed above. Those who wish to participate are kindly requested to send a provisional title together with an abstract of no more than 300 words to the organizing committee. The deadline for submission is 31 January 2013. A circular containing more details on the organization of the conference will be sent to those whose papers will have been accepted.
The duration of each conference paper is 30 minutes inclusive 10 minutes of discussion and questions. English and French will be the languages of the conference.
Speakers must pay for their own transportation and hotel accommodation. Liège can easily be reached by train (one hour) from the major international airport of Brussels. A conference hotel rate will be available and most hotels are within walking distance of the campus. Those wishing to attend but not to speak should register in advance to guarantee space is available.

Source: APILIST

DigiPal Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic.

The Digital Resource for Palaeography (DigiPal) is a project funded by the European Research Council that brings digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion of medieval handwriting. At its heart will be hundreds of newly-commissioned photographs of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon script from the major manuscript collections in the world, with detailed descriptions of the handwriting, the textual content, and the wider manuscript or documentary context.

DigiPal will be more than just an online annotated catalogue of manuscript images, however. Taking advantage of recent advancements in digital research, as well as developing new technologies, DigiPal will offer innovative ways of interrogating and interacting with the material.

It is our intention that DigiPal will showcase the benefits of digitally-assisted palaeography, opening up new possibilities for the study of scripts, scribes, and manuscripts.

Preliminary 'proof of concept' .

TRAME Texts and manuscript transmission of the Middle Ages in Europe.

TRAME is a research infrastructure project for the development and interoperability of web databases about medieval manuscript tradition.

The focus of TRAME is to foster the interactivity of repositories concerning digitized images of medieval manuscripts, their codicological descriptions, their textual and philological interest, their cultural significance in the context of the european history.

TRAME has three major issues:

• step 1: to build a metasearch engine capable to search across the databases of the italian partners that joined the starting phase of the project;
• step 2: to evaluate the possibility of extension of the metasearch approach to other web resources (libraries, portals, individual research projects), using various tools and technologies;
• step 3: extend the metasearch approach to virtually any relevant web resource devoted to medieval texts and manuscripts, through an extended partnership program

TRAME's first step was funded by the italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (FIRB program). Its development is in line with the Memorandum of Understanding of the COST Action IS1005 “Medieval Europe - Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources‏”.

Colloque: L’âge d’or des cartes marines.

3 et 4 décembre 2012,

BnF, Auditorium Colbert.

La Bibliothèque nationale de France possède l’une des plus importantes collections de cartes et atlas portulans au monde: près de 500 documents, du XIIIe au XVIIIe siècle. Cette collection, rassemblée à partir du XIXe siècle, mais dont les plus anciens exemplaires remontent au Moyen Âge, couvre toutes les périodes et les principaux centres de production. Afin de mettre en valeur ces collections, un programme de recensement, de description et de numérisation de l’ensemble des cartes portulans conservées en France dans les bibliothèques et fonds d’archives publics, a été lancé en 2010. Une large partie de ces collections est désormais en ligne sur Gallica.
Le programme Median de l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Les Sociétés Méditerranéennes et l’océan Indien) réunit depuis 2010 des chercheurs autour de la question des contacts entre le monde méditerranéen et l’océan Indien depuis l’Antiquité, à travers des sources historiques et littéraires, archéologiques et cartographiques. Le programme a suscité depuis trois ans de fructueuses rencontres entre historiens et de nombreuses publications.
Ces deux institutions sont partenaires pour l’organisation d’une exposition qui se tient actuellement à la BnF | François-Mitterrand (jusqu’au 27 janvier 2013). Elle permet au public de découvrir les plus beaux fleurons des collections françaises, à travers un parcours à la fois historique et thématique retraçant l’histoire technique et culturelle de ce genre spécifique de cartes. L’exposition accorde une place significative à la cartographie de l’océan Indien de l’Antiquité au XVIe siècle, espace dans lequel la circulation des savoirs peut être particulièrement appréhendée.
Une première journée portera sur le contexte de conception, de réalisation et d’usage des cartes de navigation entre le XIIIe et le XVIIIe siècle. Il s’agira d’étudier les techniques de fabrication, les milieux et dynasties de cartographes, les liens de la cartographie nautique avec les cercles intellectuels ou de pouvoir, ainsi que les échanges entre Orient et Occident. La deuxième journée du colloque sera consacrée de manière plus spécifique à la navigation dans l’océan Indien, en relation avec la connaissance géographique et la cartographie de cet espace, de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle.

Programme

Source: APILIST

BnF exposition: L’âge d’or des cartes marines.

L’âge d’or des cartes marines - Quand l’Europe découvrait le monde.

du 23 octobre 2012 au 27 janvier 2013,

François-Mitterrand / Grande Galerie.

Parmi les trésors de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, figurent des documents scientifiques d’exception dont la contemplation renvoie spontanément aux légendaires Grandes découvertes.
Il s’agit des cartes marines enluminées sur parchemin, souvent rehaussées d’or, appelées couramment «cartes portulans», de l’italien portolano (livre d’instructions nautiques). Ces cartes donnent la succession des ports le long des côtes, tandis que l’espace maritime est sillonné par des lignes qui correspondent aux directions de la boussole. Ce système graphique permettait aux marins de s’orienter et de faire le point, en reportant sur la carte la distance qu’ils estimaient avoir parcourue.
Le plus ancien portulan occidental connu serait de la fin du XIII^e siècle: c’est la fameuse «carte pisane», conservée au département des Cartes et plans. De ces premières cartes nautiques, seuls de rares vestiges ont survécu aux outrages du temps. Riche de cinq cents portulans, la BnF s’enorgueillit de posséder la plus grande collection au monde. Innovation technique, en même temps qu’objet de science et miroir de la quête d’un ailleurs, les «cartes portulans» s’imposent au regard contemporain comme de véritables oeuvres d’art dont le caractère spectaculaire tient autant à leur taille, souvent imposante, qu’à leur polychromie et à leur univers exotique.
À partir d’une sélection de deux cents pièces majeures – cartes, globes, instruments astronomiques, objets d’art et d’ethnographie, animaux naturalisés, dessins, estampes, tableaux et manuscrits, issus des collections de la BnF ou prêtés exceptionnellement par le Quai Branly, Guimet, le Louvre, les Arts et métiers, le Mobilier national ou le musée de la Marine, le Service historique de la Défense, la British Library, des institutions italiennes et des collections régionales –, l’exposition aborde plusieurs questions: les conditions de navigation et l’usage des cartes; les découvertes de l’Afrique, de l’Asie, des Amériques et du Pacifique et les rivalités entre les puissances maritimes, la circulation des savoirs géographiques entre océan Indien et Méditerranée; la création et la diffusion d’une iconographie des Nouveaux Mondes avec leurs paysages, leurs peuples, leurs mœurs, leur faune et leur flore.

Info

Source: APILIST

Pratiques médiévales de l’écrit – Namur.

Créé en 2011, le Centre de recherche «Pratiques médiévales de l’écrit» réunit les médiévistes de l’Université de Namur (enseignants, chercheurs, doctorants et post-doctorants) qui s’intéressent à la problématique multiforme de l’écrit au Moyen Âge, ainsi qu’une vingtaine de membres associés belges et étrangers. Son objectif principal est de promouvoir les collaborations à tous niveaux dans ce secteur de la médiévistique occidentale actuellement en plein essor, grâce à des initiatives de coordination et de décloisonnement de la recherche, qui passent notamment par l’organisation de colloques, de conférences et d’ateliers de recherche interdisciplinaires.

Programme des séminaires-conférences 2012-2013 :

Jeudi 20 décembre 2012

Catharina Peersman (University of Sheffield), «In litteris vulgaris dictis»: l’emploi et la perception des langues dans la Flandre médiévale.

Jeudi 31 janvier 2013

Stéphanne Gioanni (École française de Rome), La construction d’un lien hagiographique entre l’Église de Rome et la Dalmatie: autour de la «Vita Domnii» d’Adam de Paris (XI^e siècle).

Jeudi 21 février 2013

Nicolangelo D’Acunto (Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano), Les inscriptions des fresques de Giotto dans la Basilique Supérieure de Saint-François d’Assise.

Jeudi 7 mars 2013

François Bougard (Université de Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense), Du catalogue aux manuscrits: l’inventaire de la bibliothèque cistercienne de Vauluisant.

Jeudi 18 avril 2013

Maria Careri (Università degli Studi G. D’Annunzio, Chieti), Écrire en français au XII^e siècle.

Jeudi 2 mai 2013

Céline Van Hoorebeeck (Bibliothèque universitaire Moretus-Plantin, Namur), Dans les allées du pouvoir. Livres et lectures des fonctionnaires des ducs de Bourgogne (ca 1420-1520).

Informations pratiques:

Les séances se tiendront de 16h00 à 18h00 au Séminaire Histoire de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Namur. Adresse: 61, rue de Bruxelles, B – 5000 Namur (Belgique).

Entrée libre.

Comité d’organisation :

Paul Bertrand (Université catholique de Louvain – Université de Namur)

Xavier Hermand (Université de Namur)

Jean-François Nieus (FNRS – Université de Namur)

Étienne Renard (Université de Namur)

Source: Jean-Luc Deuffic ‏@medievalpecia

New Book on ‘The Book of Kells’ launched.

The Book of Kells is widely recognised as one of the world’s most beautiful decorated manuscripts and a masterpiece of European medieval art, with images that are staggering in their richness, intricacy and inventiveness. This handsome new volume, by Dr Bernard Meehan, Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College Library, brims with fresh insights and interpretations and features the extraordinary imagery on a generous scale. The publication which was introduced by Professor of History of Art,  Roger Stalley also marks the tercentenary of the foundation of the Old Library building, Trinity College Library, Dublin, one of  the great historic libraries of the world.

The Book of Kells dates from around 800 AD and contains a Latin text of the four Gospels. There is great uncertainty about its origins. It is thought that the Book of Kells was first worked on at the monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, and was continued, after Viking raids, at the monastery of Kells in Ireland. The Book remained in Kells until the mid-1600s, and in 1661 was presented to Trinity College, Dublin, where it is on permanent display, and is regarded as a national treasure. It is seen every year by half a million visitors from all over the world.

This new publication, presented in a cloth-bound slipcase, features 84 full-size reproductions of complete pages of the manuscript, while enlarged details allow one to relish the intricacy of elements barely visible to the naked eye. Meehan explores the Book of Kells through its historical background; the spectacular openings of the texts that precede the Gospels; a study of earlier and comparable manuscripts; detailed examination of symbols, themes and narratives, a look at the scribes and artists who worked on the manuscript; and a consideration of technical aspects, illuminated by recent scientific research.

Bernard Meehan is Head of Research Collections and Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College Library, Dublin. His curatorial responsibilities include the college’s distinguished corpus of medieval manuscripts (including the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow), pre-medieval manuscripts, collections of Irish historical and literary papers, and the early printed books housed in the iconic Long Room of the Old Library.

See also > Videos

Source: Trinity College Dublin via @medievalbook