Archaeology of Book: Bindings of Court Books of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Leather and Footwear Journal, 2018

Libellarium: journal for the research of writing, books, and cultural heritage institutions, 2011

2011

Knygotyra

The article discusses manuscript books – collections of public life materials created in the 17th and 18th centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now located in Poland. They were created mainly by nobles and by chancellery clerks and officials employed at magnates’ and state dignitaries’ courts as an expression of the interests of collectors or documentary and historiographical concerns, and sometimes also as support for public activity. They contained various materials related to conducting, documenting and recording public life. The present overview is based on an identification of copies and on the information contained in printed and online manuscript catalogues and inventories. The number of surviving manuscripts of that type can be hypothetically estimated at ca. 400–500 copies, with ca. 100 copies identified in Poland. Their largest collection is held in the Radvilos Archives, part of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw, with single copies scattered acros...

La Relieure Medievale. , 2008

The paper described the two different methodological approaches used in order to identify and survey Byzantine and post-Byzantine bindings of the late 15th-early 18th century in order to establish their evolution.

From BwB Magazine: https://bwb.hypotheses.org/, 2021

In this article, I shall focus on a newly identified example of a dismembered codex of an important legal compendium, the Halakhot Gedoloth, whose fragments reappeared in Bologna and in Leipzig. In this particular case, a bookbinder in Bologna reused individual folios of the same manuscript to bind different printed books. In centuries following the reuse, which generally had occurred during the second half of the 16th and in the 17th century, scholars and bibliophiles from Europe, in our case Leipzig in Germany, acquired books bound with such sheets in Bologna, for their personal libraries, whose contents finally ended in the University collections. This fascinating example of reused fragments kept today in two different countries has an interesting history. No less than fifteen beautiful pages containing the Halakhot Gedoloth in Leipzig were discovered when the book got accidentally wet and had to be re-bound.

Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts Reused as Book-bindings in Italy, 2022

How can it be possible that sheets dismembered from the same manuscript are now found in two distant libraries, namely as Bologna and Leipzig University Libraries? In fact, several Juridical Books Bound in 16th-Century Bologna were reused to bind with Folios from a 12th-Century Manuscript of Halakhot Gedolot, that are held in Bologna and in Leipzig. After years of research I am convinced that the dispersion of manuscript fragments, formerly used as book-binding and reappearing today in libraries across Europe and continents, originates in the purchasing of antique books for private collections and libraries, most of which, eventually, ended as donations at University or National Libraries. At the National Library of Israel, for example, sheets and fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, used as bookbinding, reappeared among contents of book donations. Two individual folios, discovered in Bologna and containing part of the Halakhot Gedolot, had parental links with 15 fragments, discovered and preserved in Leipzig, actually belonging – as it appears – to the same manuscript, copied by the same scribe. They were reused in Bologna as ligatures of code belonged to Ulisse Aldrovandi collection, at the University Library of Bologna. Information kindly provided by Dr. Martin Eifler, librarian at the Leipzig University Library, was of fundamental importance, allowing us to retrace the fascinating history of these folios, reused to bind legal books, and the chain of events, proofing the connection between the Leipzig and Bologna fragments. The Halakhot Gedolot fragments had been reused as bindings of five volumes of Latin juridical works belonged to Odofredus de Dinariis, Lecturae in Digestum Novum, printed in Lyon, in 1552. The Odofredus de Dinariis printed Latin work had been in the possession of the Leipzig jurist, Professor Gustav Friedrich Hänel,19 whose library, consisting in a large number of manuscripts and prints reached the University Library of Leipzig after his death in 1878. The five volumes, now in Leipzig, were printed in Lyon in 1532 and sent to the Bologna purchasers who had them bound by reusing folios of the same codex of the Halakhot Gedolot. In the 19th century, the bibliophile Professor Gustav Friedrich Hänel, on a journey to Bologna, in search of old books of law, acquired the five legal volumes. When he died in 1878, the five tomes came to the Leipzig Library. The printed volumes, damaged by water, underwent restoration around the year 2000. During the restoration work, the fragments of the Hebrew manuscript were detached and the five volumes refitted with new bindings.

Studi di storia, 2020

Papier Restaurierung – Mitteilungen der IADA, vol. 2 (2001) - Suppl., pp. 96-100.

Fragmentology, 2021

Medieval manuscript collections in Teutonic Prussia have been particularly affected by numerous events in modern history, such as the Polish-Swedish wars and the turmoil after World War II. Still, the attempts to reconstruct the local collections may shed new light on the intellectual history of this historical region. To this date this kind of research was based mostly on surviving manuscripts with Prussian origin or provenance, that is, manuscripts produced or used in the territory of Prussia, supplemented by evidence on lost volumes derived from archival inventories. The article, taking as an example the history of collections of the city of Elbląg, discusses the potential of systematic studies of parchment waste used in bindings of manuscripts and printed books for reconstructing the intellectual landscape of the territory in question. It presents the range of provenance evidence that can link manuscript waste to the territory of Teutonic Prussia, including content, script, musical notation, binding and other material evidence.