(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:
The form of this ms. is fascinating! Off the top of my head, I can't think of any cuneiform texts that appropriate the forms of other genres in what appears to be an attempt to imbue them with a certain kind of authority or acceptability. But I will certainly be thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteI know — the carpet page is just wild. This MS is (I keep wanting to call it Haskalah-period, but it's really just straight-up) Enlightenment-period and i just don't know enough about (again, the MS itself keeps spawning these funny terms in my head) the Christians of Ashkenaz to really know why such a thing would exist or who would use it... but presumably with the cuneiform, if such a thing were to exist, the status of the Greek could also very much be the issue?
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