rusalka, rusalka

Gaza is under siege, and the price of staples has climbed tremendously. Community kitchens have been forced to close due to lack of supplies, and have been unable to afford to replenish their stocks.

Gaza Soup Kitchen is a grassroots organization that uses money from global donors to feed thousands of people every day. Their most recent campaign was to provide food parcels for Ramadan, and they are going to struggle to keep people fed in the midst of this new, horrifying war.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

The Spring 2026 issue of Manuscript Studies (vol. 11.1) is now available in Open Access!

We are pleased to announce the latest issue of Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. The journal is published semi-annually by SIMS and the University of Pennsylvania Press. All content from this and from previous issues is available for reading and download, completely free of charge, via the Project Muse platform. Follow the link to access the full issue:

The Spring 2026 issue features the following Articles, Annotations, and Reviews:

Articles:

Indic-Siamese Bitexts and Ayutthaya Scribal Culture: Exposition and Exegesis in Three Kham Luang Manuscripts

Tossaphon Sripum, Trent Walker

Through an analysis of the intricate layouts, scripts, and color-coding of three bilingual Thai Buddhist manuscripts, this study reveals how these distinct scribal choices were deployed strategically to distinguish exposition from exegesis and to map the structure of court poetry in visual terms.

“These Lots Never Deceive”: Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum

Bruno Schalekamp

By exploring the intricate compilation and reception history of the popular late-antique dice divination text known as the Sortes sanctorum (“lots of the saints”), this article details how the work could serve as a useful pastoral and secular tool for navigating fraught decisions in everyday life.

Of Catalogs, Cupboards, and Chemists: Revising the Handlist of the Ordinal of Alchemy

Lisa H. Cooper

This paper untangles a century of bibliographic misunderstandings and cataloging oversights that have obscured the material history of Thomas Norton’s 1477 Middle English poem, the Ordinal of Alchemy. It includes a newly revised handlist of forty-eight known witnesses of the text.

Adventures in the Animal Archive: New Techniques for the Genetic Analysis of Parchment Manuscripts

Timothy L. Stinson, Melissa K. R. Scheible, Rachael Thomas, Nicholas E. Wagner, Matthew Breen, Benjamin J. Callahan, Kelly Meiklejohn

This piece summarizes an interdisciplinary study that deployed a new and entirely non-destructive brush procedure to extract animal DNA from ninety-one historical manuscripts held at Duke University. The project report shows how parchment can serve as a repository of biological data concerning medieval agricultural history, livestock economies, and trade routes.

Annotations:

Medieval Manuscripts in Marsh’s Library: An Unintended Collection in Dublin’s First Public Library

Laura Cleaver, Danielle Magnusson, Isabel Tookey

By examining the correspondence and acquisition records of Dublin's oldest public library, this article reveals how personal motivations, unexpected opportunities, and historical coincidences led to the accidental preservation of a small but valuable collection of twenty-three medieval codices.

Reviews:

Tributes to Elly Miller: Opening Manuscripts ed. by Stella Panayotova, Lucy Freeman Sandler and Tamar Miller Wang (review)

Anne Rudloff Stanton

Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and Its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the British Library by Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney (review)

George A. Keyworth

Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past by Hannah Weaver (review)

Raluca L. Radulescu

Making Books in Fifteenth-Century Cambridge: William Dyngley’s Patristic Project by Ann Eljenholm Nichols (review)

Mimi Ensley

Florentine Humanistic Manuscripts: Revised and Enlarged List from Albinia C. de la Mare, New Research (1985) by Giovanna Murano (review)

Francesco Marco Aresu

The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery: Visualizing History, Time, and Ritual in Aztec Solar-Year Festivals by Catherine R. DiCesare (review)

Lori Boornazian Diel

The Ottoman Scientific Heritage by Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (review)

like it is supposed to feel jarring and insane. it is supposed to feel like lestat has been violently submerged in modern young people trends and culture and is now repeating all the new words he learned like a beautiful fresh baby. but because the book is from 1985, all I think is oh interesting huh I didn’t know that slang term even originated in the 80s how vintage how retro how lestat wow he’s so embarrassing aw aw so cute.

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

you only have to do it

for the first time once.