#manuscript studies

[upennmanuscripts]

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:

Project MUSE - Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

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)

Nir Shafir

[qqueenofhades]

The mysterious doodles hidden in a 1,300-year-old book

Centuries-old books, manuscripts and printing plates often contain invisible etchings, mysterious letters – and even doodles.

This is a very interesting story in its own right, especially if you're interested in the new techniques being developed to map/study medieval manuscripts, but just look at these utterly charming eighth-century doodles:

(The bottom right need to be made into medieval cartoon characters immediately.)

[dreamsrunfaster]

being a medievalist means laughing at dead copyists like

[eibhlinniccolla]

A History of Gaelic Script, A.D. 1000-1200?

Does anyone happen to know where I could access a copy of Dr. Elizabeth Duncan's PhD thesis "A History of Gaelic Script, A.D. 1000-1200" online somewhere? I would write to her, but she seems not to have an online presence anywhere.

[on-the-heath]

Hi! Do you have recs for readings on book history or manuscript studies? Codicology and paleography are my new fave topics and I can’t get enough!

hello! i am so sorry for taking forever on this. partly why-- besides, like, life-- is that codicology and paleography are not my areas of expertise (i tend towards the 16th-18th centuries) so thank you for giving the me the opportunity to dive into them!!

Book History:

DF Mckenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts

Alan Galey, "The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination"

Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books

Kate Ozmat, “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography”

Joanna Brooks, “The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History” Early African American Print Culture eds Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan A. Stein  

Codicology and Paleography:

David Rundle, ed Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology (series)

Malte Rehbein, Patrick Sahle, Torsten Schassan, Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age

ASG Edwards "What is Palaeography For?"

Sébastien Barret, Dominique Stutzmann, and Georg Vogeler, eds. Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages: Formal Aspects of Written Communication

Jane Roberts, Pamela Robinson, "Paleography and Codicology" (The entire book, A Companion to the History of the Book eds Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, is a great resource)

[skeleton-richard]

Free as Pre-Order: Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) Kindle Edition

Free as Pre-Order: Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) Kindle Edition

This is a bit of a niche work, a scholarly book that's part of a scholarly series from Fordham University https://www.amazon.com/gp/produ

[mearcatsreturns]

I just realized how creepy it would be to come across this as an object saying “flesh” on one side and “hair” on the other without the context of this being about parchment in manuscript construction. And I laughed. Every piece of parchment has a flesh side and a hair side. When you fold the piece of parchment in half, you create a bifolium. One half is a folio, which consists of the front and back (recto and verso—so page numbers are 1r, 1v, 2r, etc). In medieval manuscripts, the flesh side of a folio should only touch the flesh side, and the hair side should only touch the hair side. So when putting your bifolia into a gathering (or quire), you’d have one with the flesh side out nested in one with the hair side out, and so on. There are different conventions for which side should be external, but by the late Middle Ages, it was typical for the flesh side to be the outside. I made this little exemplar using index cards for ease of illustration, and it’s constructed in the traditional quaternio (4 bifolia) format.

[tracesremain]

a soft image from when I was first studying Jane Austen’s last, unfinished manuscript Sanditon. This is my personal copy of the second impression of the first published edition, 1925. I went on after this to complete a master’s digital edition of the 1925 edition (which is sadly offline right now, though I am happy to share more about it!).

In the meantime, this website has an excellent digital edition of the Sanditon manuscript, began in early 1817 and left off by Austen three months before her death in the same year. The manuscript contains 12 chapters, and leaves off right before Sidney Parker arrives in Sanditon (the projected love interest). But y’all already know that from the recent PBS adaptation.