Early Medieval Palimpsests

Palimpsests are texts from which the primary text has been effaced to make room for fresh writing. The practice was particularly important in the early Middle Ages, when numerous, often precious, books were subjected to this treatment. As a result, many ancient texts lay hidden in European libraries for centuries. Ever since the first palimpsests were discovered in the seventeenth century, scholars have been fascinated by the possibility of discovering hitherto unknown texts. For a long time, the lower script of palimpsests could only be brought back to the light of day through the use of chemical reagents that proved very detrimental to the manuscripts. The great advance away from these destructive techniques came at the beginning of the twentieth century with the application of ultra-violet photography. Today, striking advances in this field are again being made with the development of digital imaging. The contributions in this volume focus mainly on the cultural evidence offered by palimpsests from the early Middle Ages. Some contributors have examined particular manuscripts in great detail (the London palimpsest of Jerome's Chronicle or the Munich palimpsest codex from Benediktbeuern); others have looked at specific types of texts that have suffered deletion in this way (liturgical palimpsests, Carolingian letters). The volume also contains a handlist of all known palimpsested manuscripts in Beneventan script.

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.

The 'Palimpsests' volume will contain thirteen chapters divided into five sections. The first section consists on a single overview study by Finbarr Barry Flood that addresses recognizing palimpsests in architectural contexts. The second section, entitled Monuments Inscribed, contains three studies that take what might be called a traditional approach. Each of them examines textual palimpsests added to the interior and exterior of buildings well after the completion of their construction. The third section, entitled Building Transformations, contains three studies that each present the palimpsestual transformation of built architecture. These studies address the transformation of either the original monument or the palimpsestual addition to it. The fourth section, called Site Transformations, considers how a palimpsest is used to transform not a single building, but rather a site as a whole. The final section, entitled Restoration and Rewriting, looks critically at the role of restoration as a process of rewriting in the remaking of older architectural monuments. The Palimpsests volume concludes with summary remarks and outlines directions for future research into monuments and sites as palimpsests, emphasizing the longue duree biography as the primary mode for monument and site studies.

The so-called "Middle Ages" (media æva) were the mediating ages of European intellectual history, whose commentaries, protocols, palimpsests, and marginalia anticipated the forms and practices of digital media. This ground-breaking collection of essays calls for a new, intermedial approach to old media periodizations and challenges the epochs of "medieval," "modern," and "digital" with the goal of enabling new modes of historical imagining. Essays in this volume explore the prehistory of digital computation; the ideology of media periodization; global media ecologies; the technics of manuscript tagging; the haptic negotiations of authority in medieval epistularity; charisma; pedagogy; and more. Old Media and the Medieval Concept forges new paths for traversing the broad networks that connect medieval and contemporary media in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. By illuminating these relationships, it brings the fields of digital humanities, media studies, and medieval studies into closer alignment and provides opportunities for re-evaluating the media ecologies in which we live and work now.

A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.

Irish scholars who arrived in Continental Europe in the early Middle Ages are often credited with making some of the most important contributions to European culture and learning of the time, from the introduction of a new calendar to monastic reform. Among them were celebrated personalities such as St Columbanus, John Scottus Eriugena, and Sedulius Scottus who were in the vanguard of a constant stream of arrivals from Ireland to continental Europe, collectively known as 'peregrini'. The continental response to this Irish 'diaspora' ranged from admiration to open hostility, especially when peregrini were deemed to challenge prevalent cultural or spiritual conventions. This volume brings together leading historians, archaeologists, and palaeographers who provide-for the first time-a comprehensive assessment of the phenomenon of Irish peregrini in their continental context and the manner in which it is framed by modern scholarship as well as the popular imagination.

The Archimedes Palimpsest is the name given to a Byzantine prayer-book which was written over a number of earlier manuscripts. This volume provides colour images and transcriptions of three of the texts recovered from it. Pride of place goes to the treatises of Archimedes, including the only Greek version of Floating Bodies, and the unique copies of Method and Stomachion. This transcription provides many different readings from those made by Heiberg from what he termed Codex C in his edition of the works of Archimedes of 1910-1915. Secondly, fragments of two previously unattested speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides, which are the only Hyperides texts ever to have been found in a codex. Thirdly, a fragment from an otherwise unknown commentary on Aristotle's Categories. In each case advanced image-processing techniques have been used to create the images, in order to make the text underneath legible.