The main goal of the paper is to show the value of texts preserved in more than one version for studies aimed at identifying reasons for the demise of words. The data selected is a set of six non-surviving English preterite-present verbs. The analysis of the material shows that mediaeval manuscripts often exhibit orthographic and morphological variation as well as differ in lexemes. Such differences prove to be useful for the search of factors leading to the elimination of the verbs in question.
Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.
Manuscript number 888 of the Collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial (Spain) contains a small treatise composed by physician and pharmacologist ʿĪsā b. Māssah al-Baṣrī (9th century). This work offers a detailed description of different causal agents that originate the sexual impulse and its culmination, the coitus. The treatise enumerates and interprets the physical factors that conform man’s sexual response, which is viewed as a purely physiological process, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that shape and modulate the sexual preferences of each individual.
The paper presents the results of a study into lexical substitutions found in the Old English gloss to psalms 2-50 in the Eadwine Psalter. The major objectives to determine the possible sources of this manuscript, which clearly go beyond the traditional explanation that originally the gloss was derived from a Vespasian Psalter-type gloss, later revised by the corrector based on a Regius Psalter-type gloss. The analysis shows that the affiliation of the gloss is indeed highly complex for such a resource. Moreover, the paper shows that despite its numerous corrections, the Old English gloss to the Eadwine Psalter is in fact a valuable source of information on the twelfth-century scribal practice of the post-Conquest England.
The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.
The article presents the results of the discovery and text-critical analysis of the Mongolian language “golden” manuscript fragments brought to Russia and Europe from Dzungaria in the 18th century. At present 34 fragments have been detected in various depositories. The fragments belong to one set of the Mongolian Kanjur most likely dated from the first half of the 17th century. The list of the texts, to which the fragments belong, is given at the end of the article. The text-critical analysis of the fragments reveals that they contain a plethora of preclassic orthography and spelling of loanwords. Three fragments contain the text of the hitherto unknown Mongolian version of the Bhadrakalpika-sūtra, which differs from Dayičing Tayiǰi’s translation included in the bulk of the Mongolian Kanjur copies.
The pharmacologist of al-Andalus, born in Malaga and died in Damascus, Ibn al-Bayṭār (576/1180 or 583/1187–646/1248) composed a dozen works among which we must highlight: The Kitāb Mīzān al-Ṭabīb. The work presented here studies the only manuscript of this work that has been preserved, number 351 or Vet. 58 of the Universitetsbibliotek of Uppsala (Sweden) and describes the content of the same, a medical-pharmacological dissertation, divided into eighty chapters, each of which is dedicated to one or more diseases, going through all the organs of the body, starting with the head and ending with the feet.
The Kórnik Library is one of the oldest and most valuable establishments in Poland. By creating a library during the Partitions of Poland and collecting valuable old books and manuscripts, Tytus Działyński intended to save and foster Polish culture and traditions for posterity. Heir to Tytus – Jan Działyński – secured and expanded the Library. Having no heir himself, Jan Działyński left the Działyński inheritance to his nephew, Władysław Zamoyski, who continued his grandfather's and uncle's work. Just before his death, Władysław Zamoyski donated the entire inherited property to the Polish nation. In 1924, he established a Foundation meant to supervise the Library, a museum and the Institute of Dendrology. The Zakłady Kórnickie Foundation operated until 1953 when it was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences and has remained within its structure until today. The library continues assembling, developing and sharing its collections. The latest technologies have enabled us to provide the library and museum collections to the largest possible number of readers. The collections have been successively digitized and made available on the Digital Platform of the Kórnik Library created as part of the EU project POPC.02.03.01-IP.01-00-002/15 “Digital access to the resources of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Library”.
This article examines two collections of manuscripts (previously unanalyzed) with poems which make up Leopold Staff’s debut volume The Dreams of Power. The poet offered them as a gift to Maryla Wolska who deposited them in the Michał Pawlikowski Archives at Medyka. With access to the fi rst, nearly complete, collection we can get an insight into the process of selecting poems for the version that was to go to print (1899–1901). As most of the poems are dated, we are able to establish their sequence and reconstruct the changing concept of their selection. Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished. Each of them is presented briefl y in the article. Apart from making this discovery, the article demonstrates that Leopold Staff’s debut volume as we know it had an earlier version with a set of poems, different from the one that was earmarked for publication under that title.