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    • Seminars, Workshops, Colloquia & Symposia (1989–)
      • Seminars on ‘The Evidence of Manuscripts’
      • Symposia on ‘The Transmission of the Bible’
      • The New Series
        • 2019 Anniversary Symposium Program: The Roads Taken
        • 2019 Anniversary Symposium Registration
        • 2019 Anniversary Symposium Registration Open
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      • Abstracts of Papers for Symposia, Workshops & Colloquia
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        • The Illustrated Catalogue (1997)
      • The Illustrated Handlist
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      • No Snap Decisions: Challenges of Manuscript Photography
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2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Preparations
The Weber Leaf from “The Warburg Missal” (Otto Ege Manuscript 22)
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Portfolio 93 of Ege’s “Famous Books in Eight Centuries” in the Collection of Richard Weber
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Two Ege Leaves and Two Ege Labels in the Collection of Birgitt G. Lopez
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An Illustrated Leaf from the Shahnameh with a Russian Watermark
J. S. Wagner Collection, Leaf from Ege Manuscript 22, verso, bottom right: Ege's inscription in pencil.
Another Leaf from the Warburg Missal (‘Ege Manuscript 22’)
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Otto Ege’s Portfolio of ‘Famous Books’ and ‘Ege Manuscript 53’ (Quran)
Grapes Watermark in a Selbold Cartulary Fragment.
Selbold Cartulary Fragments
Smeltzer Collection, Subermeyer (1598), Vellum Supports Strip 2 Signature Surname.
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You are browsing the Blog for History of Watermarks

An Illustrated Leaf from the Shahnameh with a Russian Watermark

August 4, 2021 in Manuscript Studies

An Illustrated Persian Leaf on Paper
from the Shahnameh
(Humai & Darab)
with a Russian Watermark

[Posted on 5 August 2021]

Continuing our examination of Watermarks and the History of Paper, we display an illustrated paper leaf from an illustrated manuscript which has come to our notice.  Its owner identified the text, but wondered about the watermark.  Responding to our blog, he offered its images for examination.

Private Collection, Leaf from a Persian Shanameh. Simurgh and Zal.

Private Collection, Leaf from a Persian Shanameh. Simurgh and Zal.

Now in a private collection, the detached leaf formerly belonged to an illustrated manuscript in Persian of the Shahnameh or ŠĀH-NĀMA / Šāhnāme (شاهنامه or “Book of Kings”), the renowned epic poem by the Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi or Ferdowsi (circa 329 – 411 AH / 940 – 1010 CE).  This poem, which the poet began to compose circa 977 CE and completed on 8 March 1010 CE, extends for more than 50,000 couplets.  Its text recounts the history of the kings and heroes of Persia from mythical times to the overthrow of the Sassanids by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century.

The importance and popularity of the text ensured that it has circulated in very many copies produced at various times and in various places, manuscripts included.  Not all of them survive, and some survive only in pieces.

An earlier post in our blog (see its Contents List) considered a detached leaf from another portion of the epic, from another illustrated manuscript, and in another private collection.

Simurgh and Zal from a Persian Shahnameh.

That leaf illustrates an episode from the fabulous story of the winged creature Simurgh and her adopted human warrior son Zāl. Within a stepped frame set within the page of text, its illustration depicts the large creature as she swoops down to grasp or grab him by the waistband as he flees.

The ‘new’ leaf belongs to a different episode, a different manuscript, and a different style of illustration, in the long and richly varied tradition of illustrations for the Shahnameh or Šāh-nāma  in books and other visual arts, and in Persian and other spheres.

Humai and Darab

Among the Episodes of the Shahnameh, the sections devoted to a legendary queen of Iran, Humai or Humay Chehrzad (sections 609–614 in one form of reckoning), recount events of her reign within the legendary Kayanian dynasty. They relate the birth of her son Kai Darab, her abandonment of him as an infant, her recognition of him as an adult as her son, after he had helped to defeat the attacking Romans at the edge of the Iranian Empire.  These sections end with her retirement from the throne in favor of him as the next king, Dara I.

The text on the leaf belongs to the episode that recounts how, after “Darab fights against the Host of Rum” (612), “Humai recognises her Son Darab” (613).

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Tags: History of Watermarks, Humai and Darab, manuscript fragments, Manuscript studies, Russian Watermarks, Shahnameh
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2022 Congress Preparations

July 16, 2021 in Announcements, Conference, Conference Announcement, Ibero-Medieval Association of North America, IMANA, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Societas Magica

Call for Papers (CFP) for Sessions
Sponsored or Co-Sponsored by the RGME

at the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Online)
Monday, May 9, through Saturday, May 14, 2022

CFP Deadline:  15 September 2021
[Deadline for Session Programs:  1 October 2021]

Le Parc Abbey, Theological Volume, Part B: Detail of Vellum Leaf.

Private Collection, Le Parc Abbey, Theological Volume, Part B: Detail of Vellum Leaf. Photography Mildred Budny.

[Update on 22 September 2021:
Following the close of the CFP on 15 September, we can welcome the received proposals for papers, observe their strength and range, and prepare the programs for each session.  With the selection of proposed papers accomplished, it comes time to arrange their sequence within the given Sessions, assign the Presiders for them, and submit the programs to the Congress Committee by 1 October 2021.

When appropriate, we can announce the Programs, report the assignment of their scheduling within the Congress Program overall, and publish the Abstracts of the Papers and Responses, as the authors might be willing. The Congress Program will become available in due course, and registration for the online Congress might commence.

Update on 1 October 2021:
At the close of the deadline for submission of the programs to the Congress, we report that each of our Sessions has three or four Papers; three sessions also have Responses; and we plan to hold a Business Meeting at the Congress, as in previous years.  All these activities are to take place online.]

[Posted on 15 July 2021]

After accomplishing the 2021 ICMS Online, with 5 Sponsored and Co-Sponsored Sessions, plus our Open Business Meeting, we produced the 2021 Congress Report, as we turned to preparations for the 2022 Congress.  We proposed Sessions, and received answers in stages.

Through the Confex system for the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies, we have learned that all but one of our proposed sessions have been accepted.

One of the accepted sessions resumes a series (“Medieval Writing Materials”) which a rejection for the 2015 Congress disrupted.  That rejection interfered with the momentum of our series of sessions on the subject at the 2011–2016 Congresses.  (See Sponsored Sessions.)  The interval between then and now is a long time to wait.  We had to turn to other subjects, as the momentum for their own action not only gathered to produce the proposals to sponsor or co-sponsor them, but also found favor by the Congress Committee, so that it could become possible to move to the phase of the Call for Papers for them. With the Pre-Congress Business Meeting in May 2021, as we prepared for this year’s Congress, we aimed to resume that series, as well as to explore other sessions as their subjects and proponents might direct.

So, we can resume the series on Medieval Writing Materials for 2022.  But a new rejection of another subject for the Congress leads us to reconsider our approach to its current momentum.  This time, learning from experience, we could choose what to do, but elsewhere, before long, with the subject not accepted this time around, rather than waiting for some other year — or decade — at the Congress.

And so, now, we announce the Call for Papers for the 2022 Congress.

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Tags: Ars Notaria, History of Alphabets, History of Magic, History of Paper, History of Paper Manufacture, History of Watermarks, Manuscript studies, Medieval Studies, Medieval Writing Materials
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Selbold Cartulary Fragments

July 4, 2020 in Manuscript Studies

 

Grapes Watermark in a Selbold Cartulary Fragment.

Selbold Cartulary Fragments

3 Leaves on Paper

Single columns of 38 lines
Circa 28.3 × 210 cm < written area of circa 20.6 × 15.5 cm>
Presumably Stift Selbold or its Region (Hessen) in Germany
Late 14th or early 15th Century
Watermark of Grape Cluster

[Posted on 3 July 2020, with updates]

Continuing our blog on Manuscript Studies (see its Contents List), we publish images and descriptions of a set of three leaves from the dismembered paper copy of a Latin cartulary (or codex diplomaticus or Kopialbuch, in Latin and German) of the former Premonstratensian monastery-and-then-abbey of Selbold in Hessen, Germany.  The set presents a now-disrupted series of uniform transcriptions in book form of individual dated documents issued by ecclesiastical and secular rulers confirming, or reconfirming, rights and privileges pertaining to that institution and its dependencies.

Purchased from Boyd Mackus in the United States some years ago and now in a private collection, the fragments comprise 1 single leaf and 1 bifolium.  We identify them here as folios “1” and “2–3”, using inverted commas or quotation marks to indicate a non-original sequence and location within the former volume.  Written by a single scribe with a uniform layout, the leaves contain a late-medieval copy of the texts of 8 documents (not all complete) issued by various authorities in a range from the 12th to 14th centuries.  Upon the original pages, even apart from the subsequent disruptions to the text through dispersal of leaves, the transcriptions are set out in sequences that are only partly chronological according to the issued dates of the documents.

Written in ink with elements of red pigment, the text is laid out on the leaves in single columns of 38 lines.  One leaf has a watermark.

These leaves deserve to be considered in the contexts not only of the transmission of the documents which they represent, but also of the preservation and circulation of Selbold Cartularies or Kopialbucher, insofar as they are known or survive.  Here we distinguish in red such historical records as the Selbold Cartulary Fragment(s) showcased here, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, one or more Selbold Kopialbuche (or Copialbuche) reported in German by various observers.  We indicate one or other of those  books known to have survived to the early modern or modern periods, but subsequently lost, or presumed to be lost, by a prefixed asterisk (*). Also recorded in some notices or copies thereof is a late-medieval [*]Liber privilegiorum et libertatum ecclesie Selboldensis (“Book of the Privileges and Rights of the Church of Selbold”), presumed to be lost.

Among the challenges, we might wonder to what extent one or other of those recorded  [*]Selbolder Kopialbucher corresponds to this dismembered one.  This post includes some detailed examinations of published editions of its texts and related texts.  Why this detailed work is useful, and can yield strikingly significant results even for only a few leaves from a dispersed manuscript otherwise inaccessible, is revealed in the PostScript. 

The subtitle for this post could be Manuscript Studies in a Time of Bibliographical ‘Lock-Down’.  [Now see also the Addendum below.]

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Tags: Archbishop Heinrich I of Mainz, Birstein, Briquet Number 13003, Büdingen, Conrad III, Frederick II, Gustav Simon, Heinrich Reimer, Helfrich Bernhardt Wenck, History of Documents, History of Watermarks, Integrated, Isenburg, Karl IV, King Adolf of Germany, Langenselbold, Otto Ege's Manuscripts, Prince Bruno of Ysenburg-Büdingen, Royal Bible of St. Augustine's Abbey Canterbury, Selbold, Selbold Cartulary, Selbold Cartulary Fragment, Selbold Kopialbuch, Selbold Monastery, Ysenburg
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More Leaves from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 51’

August 10, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition

Detached Leaves from Otto Ege’s
Erfurt Manuscript of
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
in Latin Translation on Paper

Detail of Recto of detached leaf from the Nichomachean Ethics in Latin translation, from a manuscript dispersed by Otto Ege and now in a private collection. Reproduced by permission.Continuing our series on Manuscript Studies, Mildred Budny newly identifies 2 detached leaves, in separate collections, from a paper manuscript dispersed by Otto F. Ege (1888–1951).  Containing parts of the text of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in medieval Latin translation, the leaves formerly belonged to a copy prepared at Erfurt in Thuringia in Germany, and dated by colophon to 1365 C.E.

Detached leaves from this book were distributed, in part, through one or another of Ege’s series of Portfolio editions of individual specimen leaves extracted from manuscripts and printed books.  Earlier blogposts have examined cases from Ege’s Portfolios of Fifty Original Leaves (1930–1950) and Famous Bibles (1938 and 1949).  They report the discoveries of a New Leaf respectively from Ege Manuscript 41, from Ege Manuscript 8, from Ege Manuscript 61, and from Ege Manuscript 14.  Now it is the turn of “Ege Manuscript 51” and the Portfolios of Original Leaves from Famous Books (1923 and 1949), in which its Aristotelian specimens normally appeared as their Leaf Number 2.

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Tags: 'Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts', 'Original Leaves from Famous Bibles', 'Original Leaves from Famous Books in Eight Centuries', 'Original Leaves from Famous Books in Nine Centuries', Aristotle, Beauvais Missal, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Briquet Filigranes, Briquet Number 5726, Burgunsius Pisanus, Erfurt, Germany, History of Paper, History of Watermarks, Johannes Gutenberg, Kent State University Special Collections and Archives, Lisa Fagin Davis, Manicula, Manuscript Road Trip, Martin Luther, Nichomachean Ethics, Nurenberg Chronicles, Otto Ege, Otto Ege MS 51, Otto F. Ege, Robert Grosseteste, Royal MS 6 E V, The British Library, University of Erfurt, Vladimir Nabokov, Wilhelm von Mörbeke, Wilton Processional
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2014 Congress Announced

January 8, 2014 in Anniversary, Conference Announcement, ICMS, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo

49th International Congress on Medieval Studies

8-11 May 2014

[Published on our first website on 8 January 2014, with updates there and here]

We announce the program for our sponsored and co-sponsored sessions at the next International Congress on Medieval Studies, when we will celebrate our anniversary year, along with that of one of our co-sponsors, the Societas Magica.  2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the Societas Magica.  For the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, it marks our 15th anniversary as a nonprofit educational organization and our 25th anniversary as an international scholarly society.  This is the ninth year of our co-sponsorship with the Societas Magica, and the first year of co-sponsorship with the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Florida.  The Events at this Congress celebrate these shared accomplishments.

This year, with the transition to our second, updated website (begun in 2014 and completed in 2015), we began to issue the announcements for a given Congress in a series of blogposts, rather than overwriting its statements, which had left only the final state in view.  Here we offer the Congress Announced, with more to come.

Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Abba Gärima Gospels, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, Archaeology, Barberini Gospels, Biblical Studies, Book of Kells, Bulgarian Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Florida, City of Tărnovo, Corpus Christi College MS 197B, Datini Archives, Early Medieval Art, Early Ottoman Empire, Ethiopic Manuscripts, Gems, Half-Uncial Script, History of Canon Law, History of Catholicism, History of Magic, History of Music, History of Paper, History of Style, History of the Assenids, History of Watermarks, House Style, Individual Style, Insular Manuscripts, Islamic Manuscripts, Legal History, Manuscript Illumination, McGill University MS MCG 117, Medieval manuscripts, Medieval Studies, Mediterranean Trade, Orthodox Christianity, Palaeography, Polygraphism, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Visual Culture, Second Bulgarian Empire, Silistra, Societas Magica, South-East European History, Talismans, Uncial Script, Workshop Practices, Writing materials
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