here is no medieval manuscript that has been seen, studied, analyzed, and debated more than the mysterious and as-yet-unread Voynich Manuscript (Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 408). 1 The manuscript is so infamous that medievalists and other scholars have been conditioned to roll their eyes when the very name is mentioned. It is easy to forget that underneath the media buzz and unsubstantiated theories lies an actual medieval object well worthy of study, six hundred years old, with a lengthy and fascinating recorded history. 2
While single manuscript leaves in the United States were sourced from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of manuscripts and distributed by many bookdealers, a large portion of the Canadian corpus of around 650 leaves can be traced to a single source in the mid-twentieth century: Cleveland educator, collector, and dealer Otto F. Ege. Because of this common origin, an analysis of the Canadian corpus presents intriguing possibilities for the identification of related membra disiecta. This article presents a case study focusing on the four Canadian leaves from the late thirteenth-century Beauvais Missal.
The International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript, which took place 30 November and 1 December 2022, was the first peer-reviewed conference that was dedicated entirely to the Voynich MS. The only similar event took place ten years earlier at Villa Mondragone, Frascati, Italy, with invited presentations but without published proceedings (Schmeh, 2013). This paper summarises the event, its preparation and organisation, with a summary of the papers that were presented and potential avenues for further research.
Thousands of medieval manuscripts have survived to the present day only as literal fragments of their former selves: cut up for binding scrap in the early modern period, initials and miniatures trimmed for framing by collectors and dealers in the Victorian era, and entire codices cut up leaf by leaf by modern biblioclasts. There are at least thirty-thousand fragments in North American collections and exponentially more in Europe and elsewhere. The potential for discovery, pedagogy, scholarship, and public engagement is enormous, and the work has only barely begun. Recent developments in data modeling and image service are making it possible for scholars to digitally reconstruct these broken books, enabling important outcomes for research and teaching. The essays in this volume will engage with medieval manuscript fragments and fragmentology in different ways. This introductory essay surveys the history of fragmenting, fragments, and fragmentology.
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