Introducing UPenn MS LJS 184
The Manuscript
LJS 184 was donated in 2012 to the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) Collection, which contains a significant number of texts considered integral to the history of knowledge.
Check out the SIMS YouTube video orientation to LJS 184 to get a feel for the manuscript's physical presence.
It is an impressive, 184-folio copy of Isidore of Seville's most famous and influential work, the Etymologiae (Etymologies, or Origins), as well as a short, eleven-folio excerpt at the end from Bede's De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time). The excerpt from Bede appears to be an original component of the manuscript, as it is written in what appears to be the same hand as the preceding text, does not start a new quire, continues immediately after the conclusion of Isidore's Etymologies on fol. 178v (it is still identified by the headers as Book XXI of the Etymologiae), and ends with a colophon-like dedication of the book to Christ and a now-missing crest.
LJS 184 was probably written in Catalonia in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century (ca. 1265-1299). Although LJS 184 was identified by its third known owner, bookseller H. P. Kraus, as being of French origins, additional evidence from paleography overwhelmingly suggests that the manuscript originated in Spain -- making it one of the rare, roughly 1% of all extant medieval Etymologiae manuscripts to come from Spain (Quandt). While most of this evidence comes from Abigail B. Quandt's extensive conservation efforts in 1990, recorded in a lecture published in 1991, my brief examination of the codex's loose pastedown has revealed additional information -- including a date, location, and the names of one or more individuals -- which, I would argue, all but confirms LJS 184's Castilian provenance.
This Project
This project aims to:
- compile existing information and images to give viewers a sense of LJS 184's complex history as an almost 800-year-old material object by providing a stratigraphic overview of its composition from parchment to text to readers' interactions, etc.;
- introduce some exciting new discoveries I have made about LJS 184; and
- offer fruitful avenues for future studies into LJS 184's provenance and its overall fascinating "story" from its composition in the thirteenth century to its existence now in the SIMS collection.
This information comes primarily from of my hands-on work with LJS 184 during the five days (5-10 July 2015) of Rare Book School course M-95: The Medieval Manuscript in the Twenty-First Century, led by Will Noel and Dot Porter at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts. Much of my work was corroborated by a published lecture by Abigail B. Quandt at the Walters Art Museum, which I have tried to cite where it provided greater detail than I could possibly know on my own, with the understanding that there is much overlap in our conclusions.
Although I am no longer able to work directly with the manuscript, I continue to research its history with the resources at my university's library, as well as the high-quality, open-access data provided by the University of Pennsylvania at Penn in Hand and OPenn:
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