Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts The Penn Libraries' Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Coffee with a Codex: Humanist History of Rome on May 9 -
05/06/2024

Coffee with a Codex: Humanist History of Rome on May 9 -

Thank you for subscribing to the Coffee With A Codex mailing list! We’ll send you one email a week to remind you of upcoming Coffee With A Codex events. All meetings are 30 minutes long on Thursdays, 12pm Noon Eastern US time / 5pm UK time.

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the...
04/29/2024

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.
On May 2, curator Dot Porter will bring out Ms. Codex 1071. This book contains coats of arms, painted and drawn in ink, for the nobles of England from Edward the Confessor to Elizabeth I. Written in England, 1597.

Thank you for subscribing to the Coffee With A Codex mailing list! We’ll send you one email a week to remind you of upcoming Coffee With A Codex events. All meetings are 30 minutes long on Thursdays, 12pm Noon Eastern US time.

April 25 is "Bring Our Children To Work Day" here at Penn, and Curator Dot Porter will be bringing her son along for Cof...
04/22/2024

April 25 is "Bring Our Children To Work Day" here at Penn, and Curator Dot Porter will be bringing her son along for Coffee With A Codex! He enjoys math, so we'll look at three very different manuscripts about arithmetic and geometry, dating from the 12th, 15th, and 17th centuries.

Thank you for subscribing to the Coffee With A Codex mailing list! We’ll send you one email a week to remind you of upcoming Coffee With A Codex events. All meetings are 30 minutes long on Thursdays, 12pm Noon Eastern US time.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a new Collector’s Edition box set by authors J.W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich and published b...
01/30/2024

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a new Collector’s Edition box set by authors J.W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich and published by Taschen, is a treasure trove for fans of the iconic film. Featuring an exhaustively researched making-of book, photo album that’s jam-packed with never before seen materials, and ‘ephemera box’, the collection shines a light on a production and director that have long been shrouded in mystery and myth. For Kubrick aficionados, cinephiles or casual film fans alike, it’s sure to change the way you see the film.

Learn more about this collector’s box in today’s Unique@Penn blog post by guest author Ian Dykstra, link in bio.

“De sigillo Lunae” from a thirteenth-century manuscript of talismans or seals, thought to help manifest the powers of th...
01/26/2024

“De sigillo Lunae” from a thirteenth-century manuscript of talismans or seals, thought to help manifest the powers of the planets when created in metal or on parchment.

For Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, as well as the Moon and Sun, there is a brief text accompanied by five seal faces (except in the case of the Moon, which has four). Three faces have esoteric zodiacal and planetary signs and names, some with Hebrew letters; the fourth has a magic square (array of numbers) associated with the planet; and the fifth has a careful ink drawing of the planet represented as a divinity in human form.From a manual on talismans or seals, thought to help manifest the powers of the planets when created in metal or on parchment. For Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, as well as the Moon and Sun, there is a brief text accompanied by five seal faces (except in the case of the Moon, which has four). Three faces have esoteric zodiacal and planetary signs and names, some with Hebrew letters; the fourth has a magic square (array of numbers) associated with the planet; and the fifth has a careful ink drawing of the planet represented as a divinity in human form.

Shelf mark: Ms. Codex 1264

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Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 3420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA
19104

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+12158987088

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Videos

Volvelles are paper or parchment discs that rotate to represent the movement of planetary spheres. They are held together with paper and wax and, as you can imagine, these are often very fragile. But we're lucky to have a manuscript containing a few volvelles in good enough condition to demonstrate how they work. Here is a series of images of how the volvelle (carefully) turns, with the 121 frames put together as a gif. Aylin Malcolm writes about this manuscript and the volvelles in a blog post (https://aylinmalcolm.com/astro/items/show/17), noting that "... this codex attests to the enduring relevance of Ptolemaic astronomy in the early Renaissance. The volvelles (rotating discs) on these pages represent the solid “orbs” associated with the sun; like Ptolemy, Peuerbach believed that celestial bodies orbited within spherical shells. Page 7 [this volvelle] shows the deferent orb of the sun (the circle around which its epicycle moves) between the two deferent orbs of the sun’s apogee (the point in its orbit at which it is furthest from the Earth)." The manuscript is untitled but labeled as [Illustrations to Georg von Peurbach's Novae theoricae planetarum] (shelfmark: LJS 64). It includes diagrams, many with moving parts, designed to accompany the work 'Theoricae novae planetarum' by 15th-century Austrian astronomer Georg von Peurbach, who taught at the universities in Padua and Ferrara. The diagrams demonstrate increasingly complex planetary motion. #volvelle #manuscript #astronomy #science #renaissance

Woodblock depicting a scene of Our Lady of Sherpenheuvel effecting the cures of Catherine du Bus and Jean Clement. As Patricia Stoop notes in a blog post about the item, "The devotional print is related to Scherpenheuvel (literally ‘Sharp Hill’, most often called ‘Montaigu’ after the French), which since the beginning of the seventeenth century was the main pilgrimage center in the Habsburg Low Countries. Its cult goes back to at least the beginning of the fourteenth century. In his continuation of the Spiegel Historiael the Brabantine priest and author Lodewijk van Velthem (c. 1260/75–after 1317) mentions a holy oak, which had the form of a cross and stood on the hilltop between the towns of Diest and Zichem, where he was ordained as a priest. The tree was worshipped because of the healing powers ascribed to it. ... [A] small statue of the Virgin Mary was placed in the cross-shaped tree. According to the legend, a shepherd had noticed around 1415 that the statue had fallen down. When he lifted it up in order to take it home, he was unable to move. Only when his master, who was worried because the shepherd had not returned home after work, put the statue of the Virgin back into the tree, was the servant able to move again. In this way the Virgin had shown the spiritual importance of the place. In the woodblock the shepherd is depicted in the lower left corner: he is identified by the French word berger, which indicates that the prints to be produced from this block were intended for a French-speaking audience. After the miracle with the shepherd, the site was frequented by inhabitants of the surrounding villages whenever they were sick or a member of their family suffered from illness or pain." #scherpenheuvel #miracle #woodblockprint #specialcollections

Burmese manuscript
Burmese manuscript

Sometimes opening a four-flap cover reveals a surprising item! This beautiful cover is from a set of Burmese manuscripts created in 1924 or 1925 (shelfmark: Ms. Coll. 990, Item 6). There are two manuscripts and each have red and gold molded covers with small pieces of colored and mirrored glass and a phrase in the central panel of the upper cover of each. The phrases on the covers both end with the word wu' htu, indicating that the texts are narratives or stories. #burmese #manuscript #specialcollections #buddhism

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