#upenn libraries

Penn Libraries has acquired over 50 MSS from Ralph George Algernon Percy, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. The manuscripts were collected by General Charles Rainsford (1728-1809), an 18th-century gentleman scientist, and cover subjects such as alchemy, astrology, Cabbala and Tarot. [Read more]

From SIMS blog: "Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 229,  Commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry. The manuscript was written in Provence or Spain, between 1450 and 1499, in Hebrew. It is a 15th-century copy of anonymous commentaries in Hebrew on talkhīṣāt (middle commentaries) by Averroës on Aristotle and Porphyry, originally written in Arabic in the 12th century. The commentaries on Aristotle’s Categoriae and De interpretatione are titled Sefer ha-Maʼamarot and Sefer ha-Melitsah in the manuscript; the two commentaries of Averroës on these works are known as Talkhīṣ kitāb al-maqūlāt and Talkhīs kitāb al-ʻIbārah, respectively. The commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge is titled Sefer ha-Mavo in the manuscript; the commentary by Averroës on this work is known as Talkhīṣ madkhal Furfūriyūs."

As part of Oxford's Bibliography in Bits podcast series, Adam Smyth talks to Penn's Will Noel about the potentials of digital technology for the study of manuscripts.

In today's Daily Star, article by Benjamin Fleming on Ramamala Library Manuscript Project to preserve and digitize Bangla and Sanskrit manuscripts in Comilla, Bangladesh.

Inauguration of the Ramamala Library Project, headed up by Benjamin Fleming and supported by the British Library's Endangered Archive Programme and the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections. The project brings together a team of international scholars to create an inventory of 6,000+ Sanskrit, Bengali, and Prakrit palm-leaf and paper manuscripts held at the Rāmamālā Library in Comilla, Bangladesh, and to begin preserving and digitizing them with local scholars and students. Above pictures include Saymon Zakarya housing palm leaf manuscript in locally-made cotton; palm-leaf MSS of Bangla versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana; and the manuscripts in various states of preservation. For more pictures and updates, see http://twitter.com/indic_mss/

U.Penn MS Codex 1560 - ” a highly compressed lectionary, listing citations and minimal incipits in four columns, on which is written in a later hand a title and a list of the books of the New Testament (f. 1r),” attached to the beginning of a 13th-century Latin NT. More information