a manuscript containing a drawing with circles and marginal notes
Commentaries and glosses functioned as vehicles for the study of astronomy. @nadineloehr.bsky.social presents "Reflections on the Many Forms of Commentary in Astronomical and Astrological Manuscripts" in this week's Gotha Manuscript Talk
📆 Wednesday, 1 April 2026, 6:15 CET
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BULAC has digitized the entire manuscript of Royer’s proverb collection here. bina.bulac.fr/s/bina/ark:/...
Nineteenth-century collection of Turkish proverbs with French translation, collected by Adrien Royer from a dictionary compiled at the end of the seventeenth century by Antoine Arcère (1664-1699). BULAC, ms Turc 17a
The manuscript, Cod. 10313, today in the Austrian National Library, has been digitized here onb.digital/result/1322D...
The inconsistent transliteration & orthography suggest it may have been written by someone who did not know the language well and was listening to a Turkish-speaking informant. Sometimes the Turkish has a Latin translation. There are also notes in Spanish and German.
“Can the soul be separated from the body?”: Ottoman poetry, recorded in transliterated Turkish by a seventeenth-century German traveler in an album with Ottoman decorative paper. ÖNB, ms Cod. 10313
A digitized copy of Du Ryer’s Rudimenta grammatices linguae Turcicae digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb1...
A Paris copy of André Du Ryer’s 1630 Turkish grammar, annotated by a seventeenth-century French orientalist studying Turkish with the help of a manuscript Persian-Turkish dictionary. From the library of the Abbey of Saint-Victor. BnF-Arsenal, 4-BL-214
I was very happy to be part of this special issue on Julia's wonderful book, which I used as an opportunity to reflect on the broader history of Persian literature in Europe and the limits of viewing translation and literary history through a national lens.
It was so intellectually rewarding to work with @global-ih.bsky.social on a special section on my book! The essays by @paulbabinski.bsky.social and @drjoeford.bsky.social extended the reflection temporally, while @saraharens.bsky.social and Richard Hibbitt made me reflect on my critical method.
“God will bring ease after hardship”: 1593 album amicorum entry by Franciscus Raphelengius (1539-1597), quoting from Ecclesiastes (in Hebrew), Apollinaris’s Metaphrase of the Psalms (in Greek), and the Qur’an (in Arabic). Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms 74 G 21
Lemming died in Madrid in 1819, not long after de Sacy left him the kind note. The manuscript was returned with the rest of Lemming's belongings to Denmark and is today Copenhagen Royal Library, ms Cod. Arab. 228
Parting gift: A manuscript of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt given to a Danish student, Povel Lemming, by his teacher, the great French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy. Its margins are filled with annotations by an earlier French student of Arabic who read the text using a Turkish source.
The Qur’an is described in Raphelengius’s Lexicon and a later note by Golius states it was owned by Arias Montano. Numbering on the margins marks the corresponding surahs in Robert of Ketton’s translation. The manuscript is digitized here: www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/view.j...
Twelfth-century Maghribi Qur’an owned by Benito Arias Montano (1529-1598) and Franciscus Raphelengius (1539-1597). Raphelengius used the Qur’an in compiling the first major Arabic dictionary printed in Europe. Uppsala University Library, ms O Vet. 77
Presumably they were copying the Escorial manuscript of the work (now lost). Lately, I've been puzzling over how this manuscript got to Paris, and what these details might tell us about its copyist. The seventeenth-century annotations are Casaubon's. Cambridge University Library, ms Mm.5.26.
Rushed work: whoever copied this manuscript of Juan Gabriel of Teruel’s Latin Qur'an translation started by only copying the Arabic & the Latin translation, leaving blank columns for Latin transliteration & notes. By the end, however, they simply filled all columns with the translation.
Before we moved away, I saw they were planning to open up a new non-profit video rental store on Main St in Northampton. I don't think return even has to be all that nostalgic. It's practical: there's so little available on streaming and the best service (TUBI) is ad based.
By way of introduction: my book, The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Toronto: PIMS 2025)
pims.ca/publication/...
Available in North America via @uoftpress.bsky.social, in Europe via @brepols.net, and in digital form by @degruyterbrill.bsky.social
Fabrica linguae Arabicae, a 1639 Arabic-Italian-Latin dictionary by Dominicus Germanus de Silesia, notable for the woodcut calligraphy of its title page and its tree of Arabic verb forms. This copy was owned by the German orientalist Siegmund Fraenkel (1855-1909)
Indeed, Leemann doesn't line up chronologically. Maybe the notes are earlier, and in a different hand (though the handwriting is similar). Perhaps recorded from annotations in another copy? Always possible there's a textual source but can't find it and there are no page numbers.
Not exactly news (since the semester began in August), but I’m very happy to have started a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia.
A pleasant surprise at the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia: Mark Pattison’s copy of the 1629 edition of Scaliger’s De emendatione temporum, with a few annotations and a lovely nineteenth-century manicule
1656 edition of Thomas Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica, with the annotations of a seventeenth-century student of Arabic, recording what appears to be instruction from Erpenius’s student (and the editor of this edition), Jacob Golius (1596-1667).
If there's anything more exciting than seeing a book you work on in an exhibition, it's surely being invited to talk about it. Very excited for this event next month!
📷 Lancelot Browne's annotated copy of Avicenna in Arabic at the @rcpmuseum.bsky.social exhibition, 'A body of knowledge'.
Ms. 3406, Süleyman Efendi’s endowment deed on folio 1r. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ms. 3406 © 2023 by AMS Historica is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Rawda El-Hajji visiting the Church of Our Lady of Buda Castle, Budapest. © Ashraf Sarip
Once a hub of Ottoman culture, Süleyman Efendi’s library was scattered by conquest. In our PhD Research Series, Rawda El-Hajji traces these manuscripts, showing how they help reconstruct lost intellectual communities and reveal the fate of cultural heritage in times of conflict:
uhh.de/csmc-el-hajji
Here’s the link for the talk, “The Royal Danish Library: A Case Study in the History of European Islamic Manuscript Collections”, 25 April, 12:00 PM EDT: www.library.upenn.edu/events/royal...
For instance, one our more exciting discoveries in Copenhagen: this 1633 printing in Arabic of the Poem on the Soul attributed to Ibn Sīnā, which was bound into the Dutch orientalist Jacob Golius’s interleaved & annotated copy of his Proverbia quaedam Alis. CKB, ms Or.Arch. 1-8
This Friday I'll give a talk online (for UPenn's Schoenberg Institute) on the collection of Islamic manuscripts at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Please come (link below)! I’ll be highlighting some of the new finds made by the Copenhagen team of the EuQu project.
