Our Archives
[First published on 24 September, 2016, with updates]
As our website (You are Here) records more and more of our activities, which continue to advance and to expand, we also present more elements from our organization’s archives. These elements take various forms, on paper, in photographs, in print, and in scanned materials.
Our Websites (2007‒)
Our official website is a generous, long-term donation by our Webmaster, our Associate Jesse D. Hurlbut. Designed and maintained by Jesse, it is updated by our WebEditor, Mildred Budny, with contributions by Guest Bloggers and Administrators. It is one of our principal Publications, whose number continues to grow.
Our First Website (2007‒2014)
From the first, once we received a website (2007‒), it began to report our activities variously in progress and in preparation. In a series of Pages, it published our Profile (formerly circulated only in print — as with the Profile dated October 1992 — but now online, with updates, starting with our Front Page). With our Mission statement on the Front Page, this first website presented a series of Pages outlined in its sidebar. It named our Officers, Associates, and Volunteers, described our various events, listed our Publications, and more.
That first website is archived in some “snapshots” by the Wayback Machine.
- March 24, 2008
- May 25, 2008
- September 11, 2011
- February 11, 2013
- June 5, 2013
- December 11, 2013
- January 2, 2014
- May 8, 2014
- May 9, 2014
- May 17, 2014
- December 8, 2014
- December 17, 2014
Thenceforth, the Wayback Machine has captured snapshots of our new website (You are Here), starting in June 2015.
In the transition between websites (2014), the first site (Drupal) remained active, as a site archived online and still accessible directly, while the second site (WordPress) was launched, albeit with some “teething problems”.
As preserved in a final snapshot via the Wayback Machine (December 17, 2014), the first site proclaimed its obsolescent state prominently at the top of the Front Page:
PLEASE NOTE: OUR WEBSITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. We are upgrading and redesigning our website. While we transfer materials from this site (our first website), to the new one, it is now available for viewing: http://manuscriptevidence.org/wpme/). The new site allows for images and other media, so that we can illustrate our activities and publish more of our materials.
At that time in our history, when we could launch our first website in 2007, our principal activities in the form of scholarly gatherings focused upon the Congress Activities (1993‒1995, 1997, and 2004‒), occurring at the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies, held at Kalamazoo each May. Soon, we resumed the tradition of other events as well.
For convenience, we come to distinguish between these many “Congress Activities” (1993‒1995, 1997, and 2004‒) and our other “Events”, which occur elsewhere. Those Events take the forms notably of Seminars, Workshops, Colloquia, and Symposia (1989–).
Another group of Events comprises our Photographic Exhibitions and Masterclasses. They overlap in significant ways with our growing list of Publications, which appear in print and electronic forms.
Our Second Website (2014–)
Snapshots of our second, redesigned website (You are Here) appear in the Wayback Machine.
And so on. The archive presents 11 snapshots for 2016 and 6 for 2017. See manuscriptevidence.org there. Thus the Internet Archive contributes (arbitrarily) to the records of our history outside our own sphere.
With the upgrade and redesign of our website (launched in 2014), we could display more materials, in both images and downloadable pdfs. This opened the path to set up Galleries of Images, for example to show you the Posters for our Events and our Congress Activities, to exhibit examples of our Layout Designs, to display Photographs from our Events, Activities, and Research Discoveries, and to give you more of our Publications, including the Program Booklets for Events and Activities and the Booklets publishing some of our Research Discoveries.
Other Social Media
Seminars, Workshops, Colloquia & Symposia (1989‒)
One of the first phases of the process of opening the Research Group Archives for our website focused upon the Early Years of our Seminars, Workshops, and Symposia, which occurred regularly as part of the collaborative Research Project at the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from which the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence emerged. This “First Series” was principally dedicated to Seminars on “The Evidence of Manuscripts” (1989‒1995). Organized or co-organized by Mildred Budny, these events took place mainly at the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and occasionally at other centers in England, Japan, and the United States.
View Toward the Entrance to the Parker Library in mid-1989. Photograph © Mildred Budny.
Following the move of our principal base to the Princeton in 1994, we developed a wide-ranging further series of Seminars, Workshops, Colloquia, and Symposia. First among them was the annual series of Symposia on “The Transmission of the Bible” (1995‒2000), held in turn at Princeton, Rutgers, and Fordham Universities. There followed the The New Series of Symposia, Colloquia, Workshops & Seminars (2001–), held at a variety of centers, including Princeton University.
While the Research Group continued its Congress Activities at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, with the addition annually (since 2014) of a Reception and an Open Business Meeting (and its handy 1-page Agenda, available on our website), we have also begun the tradition of Sponsored Panels at the Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association (2016‒).
As the redesigned website took fuller shape, and the work of presenting more of our archival evidence, the site could include a blog on Manuscript Studies (2014–), which, among other things, showcases some discoveries from our long-term, as well as recent, research. See the Contents List for the blog, arranged mainly by subjects and materials.
M for ‘Manus’ (‘Hand’), Bouquets Included
Interviews
A new series of Interviews, in various forms, reflects upon our origins and history as an organization, as well as our publications and activities.
*****
More is on the way. Watch this Space.
*****
Continuing our series of interviews and reports, we explore the processes by which Mildred Budny’s 2-volume Insular, Angl0-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue (“The Catalogue” or “The Illustrated Catalogue”) was designed, laid out, and typeset to camera-ready copy for its publication as a set of 2 volumes of “Text” and “Plates”.
A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Euthymius
December 24, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition, Uncategorized
A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms
Budny Handlist 3
In our blog on Manuscript Studies (see its Contents List), Mildred Budny (see Her Page) continues to report the results of research for her Illustrated Handlist.
Here, we focus upon a leaf plucked from its 12th-century manuscript and pressed into service, with trimmed edges and mitered folds, as the vellum covering for a binding for a different text of small format. Both texts, primary and secondary in the life of the leaf, concern religious subjects, but they emanate from authors of different dates, locations, and languages in the Latin West and the Orthodox East respectively. The primary text represents a remnant of a text and an author familiar in some other blogposts, which consider the Dialogues, the Sermons or Homilies, and other texts by Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 694 CE).
Handlist 3, Recto
Handlist 3, Verso
Part of Gregory’s Dialogues, Book III, Chapter 7
(on Andreas, Bishop of Fondi/Fundi):
Sections 2 (Hic namque uenerabilis uir) –
8 (uel quae in conuentu)
Present measurements:
Circa 357 × 237 mm
< written area circa 266 × 133 mm >
Single column of 28 lines
in revived Caroline minuscule
without embellishments
Germany, circa 1175
Reused for some time as the vellum cover for the binding of a copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus‘s Commentary on the Psalms
in Greek or in Latin translation?
(now lost or preserved elsewhere in a location unknown)
For this secondary use, the remnants of a set of titles on the outside of the spine of the cover (the original verso of the reused leaf) remain in place, albeit abraded and fragmented, as both a pasted, inscribed paper label (orientated along the ‘horizontal’ across the spine) and an ink inscription on the reused leaf itself in Capitals (‘vertical’, with the tops of those letters turned toward the ‘front cover’). Another, smaller and fragmentary pasted label with a broad rectangular border stands near the bottom of the broad spine of the cover and partly overlies the ‘vertical’ spine inscription.
Acquired, probably by purchase (according to the Owner’s recollections), in France in the past 15 years or so, but before 2007 when I first saw and began to photograph the leaf. This item and others in the Illustrated Handlist acquired in France at various times and by various means (purchase, gift, or exchange), came from a single source in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, from about 1999 onward. Because the leaf does not carry indications of its original place and time of production, apart from its materials, layout, design, script, orthography, and punctuation, those unknowns must depend upon evaluations of the style of the script, lacking any forms of embellishment, such as decorated initials, which might have provided possibly more closely datable symptoms than the letters “alone”.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: 'Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts', Binding History, Bishop Andrew of Fundi, Budny's Illustrated Catalogue, Ege Manuscript 41, Euthymius Zigabenos, Fondi, Gregory the Great, Gregory's Dialogues, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Manuscript studies, Psalter Commentary, Saki, Temple of Apollo
No Comments »