Lisa Fagin Davis
@lisafdavis
Medievalist, Paleographer, Codicologist, Voynichologist; Executive Director, @medievalacademy.bsky.social; Brown Univ. and Yale Univ. alum; PhD; Red Sox fan
Reading a #Voynich novel, and OMG! But please note that I am not, in fact, responsible for the care and feeding of the manuscript!
In 1956, the manuscript leaves were purchased by the St. Louis Public Library, where they can still be found.
Plot twist! Some of the single leaves in the exhibit were purchased from Otto Ege! Most came from other sources, including Number 44, a leaf of particular interest to me as it turned out to have come from Gottschalk Antiphonal, the twelfth-century antiphonal that was the subject of my first book!
The exhibit was a great success, if the dozens of thank-you notes archived by the St. Louis Public Library are to be believed: “We enjoyed going to the book exhibit...We enjoyed finding out how the gold was polished in the illuminated letters! Sincerely yours, Pupils of McElroy Dagg School.”
Glenn toured dozens of cities and small towns around the U.S. and Canada from 1951-1954, arranging tours for schools, churches and civic groups. Today, I reconstructed his route using articles about the exhibition that I found in Newpapers.com! (with thanks to ChatGPT for the Python code):
In the 1950s, a bookdealer from Kansas City named Frank Glenn, under the auspices of a The Grolier Society (publishers of the well-known Book of Knowledge encyclopedia for children), assembled an exhibit of tablets, manuscripts and printed books meant to demonstrate the History of the Book.
It's #TallShips day in Boston harbor! After a beautiful sunrise, the fire boats were out in force and the USS Constitution left early to meet her friends in the outer harbor and lead the parade! More pictures coming soon...
Now on my way to @imc-leeds.bsky.social from Dublin. See you at the @medievalacademy.bsky.social lecture tonight, starring the great Fiona Griffiths!
I had the absolute pleasure yesterday of examining the GORGEOUS al-Bawwāb Qur'an @chesterbeatty.bsky.social, written in Bagdhad in 391H / 1000-1 CE. Major thank-yous to the staff and curators (and local police...it's a long story) who facilitated my visit!
Here's the absolutely gorgeous al-Bawwāb Qur'an (Beatty Is 1431, Bagdhad, 391 H/ 1000-1001 CE): viewer.cbl.ie/viewer/image...
Covering a lot of ground, both intellectually & geographically! Delivering a lecture about digitally rebuilding dismembered manuscripts; visiting the 11th-c. Qur'an that is a case study in my forthcoming textbook on manuscript studies; & giving a #Voynich lecture at Leeds (Session 1235, Wed., 14:15)
And if you want to learn more, check out the project website (brokenbooks2.omeka.net) and my recent article in Digital Philology: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Here's the Fragmentarium record. Good thing it's a digital project that's updateable! fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-8...
🚨Beauvais Missal alert! 🚨A GORGEOUS leaf from the Commons being sold from a Paris collection. It's already part of my @fragmentarium.bsky.social rebuild of the manuscript, but once it sells I'll need to update the record with the new location. www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/...
Written in Bagdhad in 391 H/1000-1001 CE by Abu’l-Hasan `Ali ibn Hilal, known as Ibn al-Bawwāb (here's the colophon on f. 284r). An absolutely gorgeous early Qur'an written by one of the most important scribes of the Muslim world!
All of these markers are designed to help the reader navigate the text of the Qur'an. The manuscript also includes stunning geometric pages, such as the preliminary page listing the Ahl al-Kisāʾ (7v, left) and this abstract carpet page (8v,right):
And every Sura begins with a large marginal palmette and a line of golden lettering:
Every tenth verse is indicated by a large marginal medallion alternating gold or blue:
These small clusters of three blue dots indicate the end of each verse:
Spending today looking closely at images of the gorgeous al-Bawwāb Qur'an @chesterbeatty.bsky.social (which I will see in person next month!). The navigational features of this manuscript are brilliant. Here's the transition from Sura 3 to 4 (f. 43v): 🧵https://viewer.cbl.ie/viewer/image/Is_1431/82/
If you live in Boston's North End, please help me find my #LostDog Maggie! She has a collar with my contact information.
One of my amazing Latin Paleography students @rarebookschool.bsky.social composed elegaic couplets for me and wrote them out in a beautiful uncial bookhand! [translation follows]
If it's Wednesday @rarebookschool.bsky.social Latin Paleography, that means we've made it all the way to the year 1200, which means it's time for SPEED-DATING! Six minutes per leaf to classify the hand and give it a date (pre-1200). Ready, set, GO!
Just finished Kate Quinn's delightful and magical novel The Astral Library and commissioned my amazingly-talented niece to draw me as a Book Dragon guarding some of my favorites. Behold!