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README.md

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 # ms-262-data
 Transcription and translation of Sefer Refu'os U-segulos (General MS 262)
 
-Overview of the project can be found here: https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/docs/fa21_steinman_charlie_final-project-ms262.html
+## [Transcribing, Translating, and Encoding MS Gen, 262: *Sefer Refu'os u-Segulos / Book of Remedies and Incantations*](https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/docs/fa21_steinman_charlie_final-project-ms262.html)
+
+Charlie Steinman
+Fall 2021
+
+### About the MS
+
+[<u>Columbia MS Gen.
+262</u>](https://archive.org/details/ldpd_11728201_000) is a collection
+of recipes and other instructional texts written by a Yiddish-speaking,
+Jewish practitioner in Northern Italy around 1470. The bulk of the
+manuscript is in a dialect of Old Western Yiddish, bearing witness to
+the increasing presence of Jews from the German-speaking lands in Italy.
+Nonetheless, it is a decidedly multilingual document. Most recipes not
+written in Yiddish are written in Hebrew, although there is one
+incantation in Ladino. The Yiddish and Hebrew bleed freely into one
+another, and the manuscript is peppered with little bits of the local
+Italian vernacular, mostly for naming/glossing plants and other objects.
+There are also some magical words in Latin and Aramaic.
+
+The manuscript was held in a private collection until 2015, when
+Columbia purchased it at a Sotheby’s auction. Since then, it has gone
+almost completely ignored by scholars. The only scholarly treatment of
+the manuscript was a robust but incomplete and unpublished report that
+Shlomo Zucker provided for Sotheby’s. Zucker’s report is invaluable.
+First, he transcribes and translates several entries, which laid a lot
+of linguistic and paleographic groundwork for my own project. Second, he
+was able to identify the date and region of production of the undated
+manuscript by matching the paper’s watermark with paper produced in
+Venice in the 1470s. This allows us to place the manuscript in a more
+certain historical context, where many medieval Hebrew and Yiddish
+manuscripts are left without such detail.
+
+The manuscript as it exists today is 29 folios long, but its original
+foliation makes fully clear that it was once part of a much longer
+manuscript. Mere weeks ago, Michelle Chesner, the Judaica librarian at
+Columbia, discovered with colleagues in Germany that its lost sibling is
+in fact Ms hebr. oct. 131 at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. Fols.
+184v-190v (at the end of the ms) are clearly part of the same work; the
+hand is identical, the layout of the pages is similar, and the Hebrew
+foliation matches up. There is one problem, however: the
+Goethe-Universität’s catalog dates this manuscript as seventeenth
+century. While there are certainly parts of the manuscript that are
+later additions, to my eye the handwriting of the bulk of the manuscript
+can be no later than the sixteenth. Furthermore, the manuscript is
+written in several different hands, so it is likely the different
+sections were produced at different times. Finally, I tried to track
+down the origin of the seventeenth-century date. The catalog cites the
+section of the *Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in
+Deutschland* dedicated to Hebrew manuscripts, published in 1982.[1] The
+entry for the Frankfurt manuscript cites Rafael Rabbinowicz’s 1888
+Hebrew manuscript catalog,[2] and indicates that there is no evidence
+for the 1626 date that Rabbinowicz provides. As such, both I and
+Michelle Chesner believe that Zucker’s fifteenth-century dating is more
+reliable.
+
+Most of these texts are remedies and other medical advice, but there is
+a significant minority of non-medical texts. Some of these are magical
+or mystical in nature. Among others, there are two recipes for banishing
+the evil eye, one for resisiting torture, one for revealing a thief, and
+one for freeing a prisoner. These are where the multicultural nature of
+the manuscript shines through clearly. First, one of the recipes for the
+evil eye is written in Ladino, and is thus a testament to the mixing of
+Spanish-speaking and German-speaking Jews in Northern Italy. Second, the
+procedure for revealing a thief uses a child as a medium to speak to the
+mystical messenger (a woman referred to as “madama”). While this entry
+is written in Yiddish, this child communicates with her solely in
+Italian. Third, the instructions for helping a prisoner escape prescribe
+the use of the name of Christ in a (vaguely) Latin incantation. The
+author insists that one should only use this in the most dire
+circumstances, as it uses an “impure name.” He also claims that he
+learned it from a convert to Judaism. This may indeed be so, although
+Zucker believes he learned it from a non-Jew and uses this story as a
+cover. Nevertheless, it indicates the exchange of magical knowledge
+between Jews and non-Jews in this place and time. At the same time, it
+also draws on much older traditions of Jewish magic. One recipe for
+clearing a fishbone stuck in one’s throat uses an incantation taken from
+the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 67a, although the instructions
+are in Yiddish. As such, this manuscript is an excellent object for the
+study of the transmission and adaptation of magico-medical techniques.
+
+This project is in large part a proof of concept for the portability and
+flexibility of the techniques applied to the Making and Knowing
+Project’s edition of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 to other premodern documents of
+practice. The schema I have used to markup MS Gen. 262 is a modified
+version of the [<u>M&K Project’s
+schema</u>](https://github.com/cu-mkp/m-k-manuscript-data/blob/master/schema/ms-transcription.rng).
+I have made changes mostly to reflect the differences in genre/context
+and language.
+
+### The Schema
+
+#### Genre/Context
+
+Ms. Fr. 640 most closely resembles the early modern “book of secrets”;
+most of all it is a manuscript that clearly had its genesis in the
+workshop. Gen Ms. 262 comes from the medieval Hebrew tradition of
+*sifrei refuot u-segulot* (books of remedies and charms); these books
+are a combination of medical remedies and magic/mysticism (both ancient
+Jewish magic and practical kabbalah), and there is significant overlap
+between the two. As such, many of the things I added to the schema were
+meant to make space for the sort of magic and mysticism contained in the
+manuscript. Some of these are straightforward. For example, magical
+incantations play a large part in the techniques of the manuscript, so I
+wanted an “incantations” (\<inc/>) element. Similarly, medieval Jewish
+magic, like its other premodern counterparts, makes heavy use of magical
+names, especially those of angels. The “personal name” tag used for Fr.
+640 did not seem to fit the bill for figures like “Metatron” and
+“Uziel”—including them with the names of the author’s sources and
+informers would only muddy the waters. So, I added a “magical names”
+(\<mn/>) tag. Finally, and perhaps less intuitively, I wanted to add a
+tag for Psalms (\<ps/>). There is a significant corpus of Jewish magic
+(that overlaps heavily with prayer) that prescribes the use of
+particular Psalms for different problems. As such, I wanted a way to
+separate the Psalmic text in the manuscript from the other incantations.
+In hindsight, this may be too narrow. Another way to get at this problem
+might be to develop a better system for citation and quotation, as there
+are certainly other sources cited/quoted than just the Psalms. I have
+added a “citation” attribute and enabled it for the Psalm and
+incantation elements, as some of the incantations have sources I have
+been able to identify.
+
+#### Language
+
+The changes I made to the language elements in the M&K schema were quite
+basic, and speak to the portability of the schema. One can simply
+replace the languages of the author-practitioner with the languages used
+by any other scribe or author. In my case, these were Old Western
+Yiddish (\<owy/>), Hebrew (\<heb/>), Judeo-Italian (\<jit/>), La’az
+(Romance; \<laz/>), Ladino (\<lad/>), Latin (\<lat/>), and Aramaic
+(\<arm/>). There were some challenges here. First, I was (and remain)
+unsure of how to describe the Italian vernacular used in the document. I
+do not know if I should refer to it as “Judeo-Italian,” or if I should
+even describe it as “Italian.” Second, I chose to add an element for
+“La’az” (a Hebrew word of uncertain origin that is probably an acronym
+that stands for “lashon am zeh,” language of this nation), which refers
+broadly to any non-Hebrew vernacular, but most often to any Romance
+language. I added this for any entry that the scribe glosses with
+“la’az,” but where the word in question is clearly Romance but its
+actual origin cannot be specified. Finally, I am confident in using the
+term “Old Western Yiddish” to describe the language in which most of the
+manuscript is written. I am less confident, however, about my choice to
+use this element to tag the scribe’s German glosses. He often glosses a
+word with “lashon Ashkenaz” (the language of Germany), and does so in
+entries written in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Perhaps these glosses
+deserve their own language entry. Alternatively, perhaps there is a
+better way I could deal with glosses.
+
+There were also some basic technical challenges. It is extremely
+challenging to do XML markup for languages that read right-to-left.
+Because the markup itself scans left to right, the visible order of
+words in any given xml document becomes very muddled very quicky.
+“Author mode” in Oxygen XML Editor fixes the word order issue quite
+nicely, but it is more difficult to do markup there than it is in the
+normal “text mode.”
+
+Furthermore, both the M&K Schema and other existing markup systems like
+TEI have robust vocabulary for paleographic and codicological elements.
+I have had to adapt some of these to such elements that are unique to
+languages written in the Hebrew alphabet. First these languages (for the
+most part) do not vocalize with individual characters, but with marks
+called *nikkud* that are attached to the letters themselves, much like
+accent marks. There are unicode characters for all of these, but I
+wanted a way to indicate with the markup when the scribe chose to
+vocalize words. He uses it for foreign words, scriptural references, and
+incantations, for the most part. He occasionally adds it for
+Yiddish/German words as well. To aid in my analysis of the use of
+*nikud*, I created a \<voc/> tag.
+
+#### Future Changes
+
+To most effectively use the schema, I would like to make more
+adaptations as I move forward with the project. Because it is mostly a
+magico-medical manuscript, I would like to add more elements that deal
+with technique, as the \<md/> element alone doesn’t seem to suffice for
+a dedicated medical text. I will likely do the same for magic.
+
+I will also transcribe and translate the parts of the text preserved in
+the Frankfurt manuscript. Any holistic analysis of the manuscript seems
+silly at this point, knowing six folios of it are known to be elsewhere.
+I am not sure about how I want to deal with the rest of that manuscript;
+I will need to do more research about how this text fits in with the
+codex more broadly.
+
+I hope you enjoy looking at what I have done thus far, and I apologize
+for its rough state. Please see the [<u>github
+repository</u>](https://github.com/cu-mkp/ms-262-data) for my project to
+look at the markup.
+
+[1] Ernst Róth and Leo Prijs, *Hebräische Handschriften*, (Stuttgart:
+Steiner, 1982) 1A:185-187.
+
+[2] Raphael Nata Rabbinowicz, *Ohel Avraham: Reshimat Ha-Sefarim Asher
+Asaf ve-Kibez* (Munich: E. Hover, 1888), 6.