Lamps from Lorca

There is a small exhibition at Madrid's Casa Sefarad of glass lamps found during the excavation of the fifteenth-century synagogue in the medieval city of Lorca.

 

They were all in serious need of reconstruction; striking, though is the extent to which they have the same shape as mosque lamps from other Mediterranean sites.

Desengaño

I had a love/hate relationship with the Don Quijote class that I took as an undergraduate. Love because, well, what's not to love; and hate because as an undergraduate I was mostly put off by professors whose personalities were forces of nature. I could be as guilty of hero-worship as the next star-struck undergraduate being taught by the go-to authorities on their topics, by the laureates of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and the Guggenheim and the MacArthur,  but my heros were often not the usual ones.

The one lecture in that class that has stuck with me for a decade was the first of the semester. I remember much of what I learned in the class (although my reading of Quijote has matured considerably since then) but that first lecture is a complete unit in my mind's eye and ear. It walked us through the title page of the first edition of Don Quijote; as a college senior, I was astonished at how much detail and information my professor could pull out of a single page that came before what I then imagined as "the book" even started.

One of the themes of the course was the idea of desengaño. The word is often translated into English as disillusionment but it doesn't carry the same kind of negative connotation; it's a word with more neutral and wider possibilities that represents not a loss of illusion but an increased awareness, a lifting of the curtain from before one's eyes. It's an idea that comes from a very classically-constructed field of Hispanic literature (that's a nice way of not coming right out and calling it a bit outdated), and Otis Green is the scholar most closely associated with developing a vision of that trope within the classically-constructed canon. (Citing Otis Green is another way of not explicitly calling the framework old-fashioned.)

Imagine the desengaño that I would feel ten years thence — unexpectedly and by necessity becoming something of a book historian — upon opening Roger Chartier's The Order of Books to find this spread, a discussion of the title page of the editio princeps with special attention to the relationship between the author and patron named on the title page and the author and patron identified from within the pages of the book: the ultimate source of that lecture.

My the persisting memory of my inner Yale College senior was, if briefly, devastated by this realization that the best bit of that class was cribbed from Chartier, that I had stood in awe of my professor for something that he had not done. Of course, from the other side of the table I know better. Or, "better," because we all cite the scholarship of others when we teach; and when we teach undergraduates we don't necessarily give them the full chain of transmission. Because it would be disruptive to the flow of a lecture for information that won't be meaningful to 99% of them? Because we never expect that one of those students will grow up in her professional life to accidentally open the book that was our source? Because for the most part most of us don't draw so heavily upon a single piece of scholarship as the backbone of a lecture?

Of course, the evidence before me forces me to wonder whether that was actually ever what happened.

The class seems to have changed since then. Thanks to the dubious miracle of the internet and open-online education, I can go back and read a full transcript of the first lecture of that class, a lecture that no longer makes any mention of the shape of the title page or the dedication to the duke or the name of the printer. Perhaps it is appropriate that it should be a lecture on Quijote called up shockingly suddenly from the hazy memory of an undergraduate not yet professionally trained in the study of literature, that should make me question my own judgment, perception, and memory, and wonder whether the lecture occurred as I remember it or whether I myself somehow previsaged my later reading of another scholar's work.

Reverse Anthropology

I popped into the anthropology museum on the Brown campus en route to the workshop. One of the special exhibitions is on the symbols of the university. My initial reaction was that it was a sort of cheap appropriation of the anthropology museum to promote school spirit during homecoming season (which happens to be this weekend here). But in fact, by subjecting academic regalia and ritual to the same scrutiny as the kind of objects one would more conventionally expect to see in an ethnographic collection, it posed a serious question about the place of this sort of thing and about why the viewer should consider a Brown University robe any less strange than the personal adornments of various groups from central America and Africa.

Andalusi Textiles at the Institut du Monde Arabe

On loan from the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.

Granada, Nasrid, 13th and 14th centuries:

Post-1492 Almería:

 Textiles that are being described as specifically Andalusi from north Africa post 1492:

A video at the end of the exhibition followed a day in the work life of a man who took over his family textile workshop in Chouen from his father, and demonstrated some of the techniques described and shown throughout:

And the self-indulgent yet obligatory selfie from the panoramic roof garden with Notre Dame in the background:

Paleography Solution

A few months ago I posted about a set of paleography problems I was having, signatures of the owners of a manuscript I'm working on: 

I'm sharing pre-publication data because the hive mind of the web was so helpful in my getting it sorted out that it seems only fair. (And the individuals who were particularly helpful are, of course, acknowledged by name in the article.) But this is still pre-publication data and my own drawings (that will appear in a chapter entitled 'Meeting the Mediterranean Halfway: The Material Text as a Map of the Maimonidean Controversies' in an as-yet untitled book to be published by Penn Press in or around 2016). Please don't be a jerk.

The first one remains undeciphered. The second two are as follows:

זה הספר שייך להירשל בן צבי

This book belongs to Hirschell ben Ẓvi.

This was a bit disappointing because it didn't add any new information to the provenance of the manuscript, since I already knew that it had belonged to Solomon Hirschell (son of Ẓvi Hirschell), but it was satisfying to sort it out.

שלי

יצחק

בר מנחם

הצ נע

This belongs to me,

Isaac

bar Menaḥem

the F[rench guy whose] s[oul is in] E[den]

It's been suggested to me that the personal name for this last one should be read Yishayahu rather than Yiẓḥaq. However, the grapheme that would have to be either a letter hey or a letter quf is, in the sixteenth century when this MS was copied, far more likely to be the latter. Plus, I can identify a relevant Isaac but no relevant Isaiah.

The names only get us so far and there is more to the story — hate to be cryptic about it but I don't want to run into issues with the editors, who were very clear that the material for the book had to be all new and unpublished elsewhere. I think I'm ok sharing the images, but I may have to take them down at a later date.

So that's that. It was a lot of work and a lot of frustration and a lot of help from others for two little names. (Of course I'm still more than happy for any additional feedback or critique.)

A King Without a Crown

Sixty mostly medieval manuscript items from the Schoyen Collection are being auctioned at Sotheby's in London next month. Notice of the auction came over one of the listserves because several of the items are Spanish in origin.

(Click any of the images to embiggen.)

The list, interestingly, directed readers to a catalogue being maintained by an Oxford don who is keeping track of the movement of medieval manuscripts on the market, a valuable service indeed so that we don't lose manuscripts in private collections. That catalogue can be found here.

The medieval pieces weren't of such great interest to me, but I thought that this one, a leaf of a translation of the Gospel according to Matthew into Hebrew, was fascinating since it raises very provocative questions about what constitutes authenticity for different audiences:

Translation Diary, Entry #5

I write all over my text while I'm working.

I also read aloud, which doesn't photograph as well and makes me look like a mad person when I decide to work in a cafe rather than in my office or at home.

The Week in Links (10/9-10/15)

One of those detective stories that make my heart beat just a little faster, and proof that archival work is worth the hassle. I also like how sanguine everyone is about the fact that it showed up in a Virginia library: "'Documents scatter and manuscripts travel,' said [George] Greenia."

W&M professor chronicles history of 700-year-old missing Spanish document

And an interesting article on art valuation (Islamic art, in this particular case) and the auction house scene:

When Auction Estimates Go Haywire


As a medievalist and an anglophile, I should be very excited by the possibilities, but all I can think is that this going to be like Jurassic Park with microscopes. Sequencing the Y. pestis genome? Great! Vivifying an infectious agent that traveled very quickly on its own long prior to the age of the airplane? Substantially less great. 


Scientists Sequence Genome of Ancient Plague Bacterium