Dataset

Detailed descriptions of reconstructed medieval calendar booklets from the Cairo Genizah Collection. The data was produced for the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants SRG 2018 project 'Calendar fragments as a tool for palaeography', Ben Outhwaite (PI), Nadia Vidro (Researcher). The objective of this project was to assemble, date and present a corpus of datable manuscript fragments on the Jewish calendar from the Cairo Genizah Collection, to serve as a dating tool for palaeography. Very few Cairo Genizah manuscripts are dated: legal deeds and some colophons of books are preserved with dates, but this is a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of fragments in the collection. A lack of dated or clearly datable texts hampers palaeographic analysis of the manuscripts in the Collection, and further datable sources among the manuscripts are always sought in order to improve the efficacy of palaeographic analysis. One set of texts that are strictly speaking undated, but which can in fact be dated to relatively narrow ranges of dates are calendar fragments.

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