Penn Libraries Manuscripts

Today's manuscript is a carta executoria issued in Valladolid, Spain, August 1564. Issued in the name of Philip II in favor of Juan Ximenez de Angulo of Sancto Domingo de la Calçada (i.e., Santo Domingo de la Calzada) in response to his pleito de hidalguia (litigation to establish noble status). Includes signatures and a later addition dated 1614. (UPenn Ms. Codex 74)

Record:

Complete video orientation:

Video transcription:

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On July 23, curator Dot Porter will bring out Ms. Codex 826, an astronomical work originally written in Arabic and translated into Latin by Gherardo da Cremona, including glosses and diagrams. Our copy was probably written in Paris, France, or Oxford, England, in the mid-13th century.

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Here we have a leaf from a Persian manuscript of uncertain date and origin, with an illumination overpainted in the 20th century to mimic Mughal style, likely in India for the tourist trade. The leaf is possibly from the late 19th or early 20th century, and the paintings are considerably later. On this leaf, the miniature of a scene of a man kneeling at the mouth of a cave with another man kneeling before him enclosed in a rondel is painted over the text on the page. This video is a snippet from a Video Orientation, which you can watch in full by following the link below. (UPenn LJS 196)

Link to record:

Video Orientation:

A delightful copy of the Seven Penitential Psalms (Les sept pseaumes penitentiaux) written in France in 1681. We looked at it a couple of weeks ago for #CoffeeWithACodex, and here's a snippet, focusing on the gorgeous embroidered binding. (UPenn Ms. Codex 1564)

Catalog record:

Full CWAC video:

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On July 16, curator Dot Porter will be joined by Judaica Special Collections Cataloging Librarian Louis Meiselman, who will show us a manuscript copy of the Hebrew printed edition of "Economy of human life", adapted from the work attributed to Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), who claimed to have derived it from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy (from conversations with the Tibetans and from a manuscript in a Tibetan monastery) on the commission of the Chinese emperor. Written between 1821 and 1822.

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Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On July 9, curator Dot Porter will be attending the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK. While there she will host Coffee With A Codex from the Brotherton Research Centre, the special collections unit of the University of Leeds. We are selecting a manuscript to feature soon, you won't want to miss it!

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A gray birb gazes up from the bottom margin of Ms. Codex 724 f. 327r, a 13th century illuminated Bible.

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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)

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On July 2, curator Dot Porter will bring out LJS 386, substantial sections from an illustrated treatise on the measurement of weight, with a historical introduction to theories of gravity and weighing in Greek and Arabic science; tables of densities of substances including metals, precious stones, solids, and liquids; and descriptions of different types of balances. Undated, but likely copied sometime in the late 13th or early 14th century.

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Here we have the first part of a four-part poem in octaves on the monarchy of Portugal, with allusions to astrology, alchemy, and cabala. It's an interesting book that while written by hand reflects the publishing history of the printed test. The manuscript contains a copy of the edition printed in Lisbon in 1624 in 131 octaves, with its accompanying annotations on selected octaves, followed by another copy of the work, copied from an edition printed in Hamburg in 1644 in 133 octaves; 20 aphorisms of Bocarro from 1626; summaries of 3 documents (dated 1659, 1640, and 1668) related to Manoel Bocarro; and a list of dias aziagos (fateful days) for a particular year, date not given. The list of fateful days is probably from another manuscript, being written in different hand. (UPenn Ms. Codex 1646)

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Here is Ms. Codex 1566, a 14th century book of hours from Metz, France: a brief look inside, at the calendar, and then a miniature of the Virgin and Child, nursing - typical of use of Metz - at the opening of Matins.

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Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On June 25, curator Dot Porter will bring out Ms. Codex 1564, a copy of the Penitential Psalms in French, written in France in the 17th century. It is written in a lovely calligraphic script and contains many illustrations. It's bound in a gorgeous embroidered binding, which we'll spend some time looking at, too.

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Sooo I was out of town last week and neglected to queue up social media posts before I left, so in apology for the lack of content I share with you our most recent acquisition: an artist's facsimile of Rosenbach MS 1004/29, a 15th century medical almanac. The original manuscript includes several pages of moon phase charts, a urine wheel, and a bloodletting guide - everything a 15th century medical practitioner would need! The facsimile was made by Bryn Michelson-Ziegler, an artist local to Philadelphia who also works at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Check out Bryn's website here and her Insta here!

A "bat book" is a specific kind of book, where the pages fold out into full sheets. Bryn played with the term, by creating a leather binding in the outline of a bat with outstretched wings (the binding of the original only partially survives, but it was definitely not in the shape of a bat). We are thrilled to be adding this book to our collection!

If you want to learn more about the original, you can see digital images and read the catalog record here, or you can watch the recording of the Coffee With A Codex that I did with Rosenbach Librarian Elizabeth Fuller.

A couple of weird little guys are chilling out in the bottom margin of Ms. Codex 724 f. 326v, a 13th century illuminated Bible.

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