Making (and remaking) texts past, present, and future through a Quattrocento book of hours
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created by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe
during her 2023–2024 fellowship
with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies
in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
How do manuscripts’ layers of material manipulation across the centuries shape how they have been understood, described, and associated with other texts?
Making (and remaking) texts past, present, and future grapples with this question and others through a deep dive into the archaeology of a single manuscript and its archival accretions.
September 2023–May 2024, Julia Pelosi-Thorpe delved into the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ physical and digital resources and exchanged knowledge with specialists across Penn libraries and departments—to focus a series of experiments on an April 2023 acquisition: a small, apparently ‘unremarkable’ 15th-century Italian book of hours whose years of interventions saw the loss of its illuminated folia and various acts of replacement and addition.
This digital edition and its attendant workshop have aimed to
negotiate overlapping cycles of making and mediation, conservation and reader interaction, as well as small- and large-scale data extraction;
put the book in conversation with other mss. and projects; and invite librarians, archivists, researchers, educators, students, enthusiasts, and the wider community to join in acts of speculation around what a manuscript might be, might have been, and might become.
The work of this fellowship would never have been possible without the contributions and collaborations of many individuals at the University of Pennsylvania. Lynn Ransom (Curator of SIMS Programs and Schoenberg Database Manager) provided invaluable support at every stage and had already been mentoring me when I was an assistant with the SIMS manuscript database. Similarly generous with their time and expertise were Nick Herman (Lawrence J. Schoenberg
Curator at SIMS, Penn Libraries), Abby Lang (Collections and Metadata Management Unit Coordinator, Amey Hutchins (Manuscripts Cataloging Librarian), Chris Lippa (Library Specialist), Jessie Dummer (Digitization Project Coordinator), Whitney Trettien (Associate Professor of English), Dot Porter (SIMS Curator of Digital Humanities at Penn Libraries), and Cosette Bruhns Alonso (Contemporary Publishing Fellow). For the workshop segment I add the invaluable support of Michael Carroll,
Eri Mizukane, Mitch Fraas, John Pollack,
Lourdes Contreras,
and our twenty participants.
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