This collection of essays celebrates 50 years since the founding of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library. Three generations of scholars contributed their research and memories from their time at the GRU, stretching back to 1974. Their work comprises 18 articles on medieval Jewish History, Hebrew and Arabic…[Read more]

Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end of the 19th century, it held hundreds of tho…[Read more]

This article was prepared for the Carolingian Minuscule Mapping Project in 2016. It surveys the development of Carolingian minuscule, a Latin script used in the earlier Middle Ages, at Freising in Bavaria. The article provides an overview of manuscripts copied, corrected, or annotated in Carolingian minuscule at Freising and summarises the…[Read more]

The Michaelides manuscript collection at the Cambridge University Library contains approximately 700 papyrus fragments collected by George Michaelides in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century. While a preliminary handlist exists for this collection, most of the papyri have not been fully described. Among them are five Qur’anic papyri that h…[Read more]

The Michaelides manuscript collection at the Cambridge University Library contains approximately 700 papyrus fragments collected by George Michaelides in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century. While a preliminary handlist exists for this collection, most of the papyri have not been fully described. Among them are five Qur’anic papyri that h…[Read more]

King Alfred (r. 871–99) is the only native-born English ruler to have gained the byname ‘the Great’. This was not a contemporary sobriquet, but is often considered to have been bestowed in the Elizabethan era by Reformation scholars who increasingly cast Alfred in the role of the founder of the English nation. The acknowledged exception is a refer…[Read more]

This article presents an Arabic translation of Exodus 15 from the Cairo Genizah, preserved in two fragments of a Christian psalter (MSS CUL T-S NS 305.198 and T-S NS 305.210). The style of the psalter’s Arabic script suggests that it was copied by a well-trained scribe in the late 9th or early 10th century. Such a date makes it the oldest…[Read more]

Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware o…[Read more]

While the Cairo Genizah is mainly known as a repository of medieval manuscripts, modern Genizah collections also contain thousands of folios from texts printed with moveable type between 1500 and 1900. Most of these imprints come from Europe, but almost all of them reached the Cairene Jewish community at some point before 1897. They are also among…[Read more]

Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce…[Read more]

The Norse poem Atlakviða shows an irregular metre which is difficult to classify. This makes it a useful test case for comparing the explanatory abilities of two major theoretical frameworks of Germanic alliterative verse: the positional theory and the word-foot theory. I argue that the word-foot theory is more successful, especially in deriving…[Read more]

The trend of Carolingian royal advice literature, Fürstenspiegel, or specula principum offers advice to kings on how to rule well and examples of ruling poorly. Interpretations of these texts have often focused on traditional ideas of the Carolingian reforms, for example the focus on classical models of rule in Sedulius Scottus’ De rectoribus ch…[Read more]

Thijs Porck, “I can read Hollandsch very fairly. The Correspondence between James Murray (1837-1915) and Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899)”, in Language Use, Usage Guides, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Luisella Caon, Marion Elenbaas & Janet Grijzenhout (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021), 107-129.

Despite the epistemological importance of the scholarly journal, few thorough histories of individual academic journals have been written, especially of journals in the arts and humanities. This article uses both archival material and oral histories to construct a multifaceted history of Leeds Studies in English (LSE) from the beginning of its…[Read more]

When considering the establishment of overseas viking encampments, some of the most detailed and vivid contemporary descriptions of this activity originate from the Frankish realm, a region which nevertheless remains precariously positioned in wider comparative investigations of the viking world. To address this imbalance, this chapter assembles…[Read more]

This preface introduces in the main issues of the volume.

Die Vita der heiligen Adelheid von Vilich, geschrieben um 1056/57, wird vor dem Hintergrund ihres Entstehungskontextes interpretiert.

Lotharingia and East Francia: Marriage as a Political Instrument? – Kings and nobles arranged marriages for their daughters in order to form or strengthen po- litical alliances. Historical writers of the tenth century interpreted the relations of the Ottonian kings Henry I and Otto I with the Lotharingian dukes Giselbert and Conrad the Red in t…[Read more]

The seventh-century Regula cuiusdam ad uirgines (Someone’s Rule for Virgins), which was most likely written by Jonas of Bobbio, the hagiographer of the Irish monk Columbanus, forms an ideal point of departure for writing a new history of the emergence of Western monasticism understood as a history of the individual and collective attempt to p…[Read more]