Michael Hensley
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hensleym.bsky.social
Michael Hensley
@hensleym.bsky.social
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phd student and researcher of Ethiopian and Eritrean books, booklists, and libraries in the Horn of Africa (and beyond) at the University of Hamburg
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Reposted by Michael Hensley
csmc-hamburg.bsky.social
‘We like lists because we don’t want to die’, said Umberto Eco. What drives our deep fascination with lists? PhD researcher Michael Hensley explores the meaning of Ethiopian and Eritrean book lists, offering glimpses into communities that would otherwise be lost:
uhh.de/csmc-hensley
Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscript evidence from the medieval period survives until today in varying states of preservation, ranging from whole codices, small fragments, or somewhere in-between. Some exemplars, for example, were later palimpsested to accommodate new texts. One such case is shown in the image above. Now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this manuscript was acquired by Antoine d’Abbadie (1810–1897) during his travels in Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. While the overtext dates to the seventeenth century, the pages on which it was written were taken from at least four earlier manuscripts, ranging from the fourteenth (or possibly earlier) to the early sixteenth centuries. This written artefact, and other palimpsests like it in the Ethiopian and Eritrean context, was treated recently in Erho 2025. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, ms. Ethiopien d’Abbadie 191, f. 96v. Gallica. Accessed 20 August 2025. Donation List of ʾIyasus Moʾa from the gospel book of ʾIyasus Moʾa = EMML 1832 (1280/1281), recording the manuscripts that he donated to the monastery of Ḥayq ʾƎsṭifānos on his death in 1292. This important document is treated in my dissertation. Image courtesy of Meseret Oldjira.
August 25, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Michael Hensley
aethiopica.bsky.social
Publication day! 🤩🥳
We are extremely excited to share the new volume of AETHIOPICA with you!
Vol. 27 (2024) is hot off the press, and also available online in open access.
journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/aethiopica/i...
May 20, 2025 at 11:56 AM