Friday, December 21, 2007

Off topic: old news (but new to me)

I'm quite new to all of this, but for anyone who, like me, is also interested in medieval manuscripts in general: I just found a new website 'Medieval manuscripts in Dutch collections'. I will look at it better later:)

The website: http://www.mmdc.nl/static/site/

First post

This blog is hopefully going to help me with the writing of my doctorate. The title is a citation from an Hebrew incunabulum (or incunable), where the new technology of those days, printing, is compared to 'writing with many pens'.
In fact, it was Abraham Conat who made the remark. He was one of the earliest printers of Hebrew books in Italy, and was also a physician. In one of his earliest extant books, 'Nofet Tsufim', printed in the year 1475, he called himself "Abraham [...] son of Shlomo Conat [...], who writes with many pens without a miracle": "הכותב בכמה קלמוסים בלא מעשה נסים"