SU Library offers lecture by William Noel on Archimedes Palimpsest Project

SU Library offers lecture by William Noel on Archimedes Palimpsest ProjectSeptember 27, 2007Pamela McLaughlinpwmclaug@syr.edu

Syracuse University Library will offer a lecture on the Archimedes Palimpsest — its history, conservation treatment and continuing research — by William Noel, director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project and curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The talk, sponsored by the Brodsky Endowment for the Advancement of Library Conservation, will take place on Thursday, Nov. 1, at 4 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons on the first floor of E.S. Bird Library and is free and open to the public. Pay parking is available in the Marion lot on Waverly Avenue.

The Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th-century manuscript, is the unique source for two of Archimedes’ Treatises, “The Method” and “Stomachion,” and it is the unique source for the Greek text of “On Floating Bodies.” Discovered in 1906 by J.L. Heiberg, it plays a prominent role in his 1910-15 edition of the works of Archimedes, upon which all subsequent work on Archimedes has been based. The manuscript was in private hands throughout much of the 20th century and was sold at auction to a private collector in 1998. The owner deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore a few months later. Since that date, the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging and scholarship. The Archimedes Palimpsest project, as it is called, has generated a great deal of public curiosity, as well as the interest of scholars throughout the world, according to the Archimedes Palimpsest website.

Prior to joining the Walters Art Museum in 1997, Noel was assistant curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and director of studies in the history of art at Downing College at Cambridge University. Long dedicated to the study of early and medieval manuscripts, Noel experienced a dramatic life change in January 1999, when the Archimedes Palimpsest arrived on his desk and he became the director of an integrated program of conservation, imaging and scholarship on the world’s most important palimpsest. His book, “The Archimedes Codex,” co-authored by Reviel Netz, will be published in late October by Da Capo Press. The project is online at http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org.

The Brodsky Endowment sponsors programs that promote and advance knowledge of library conservation theory, practice and application to wide audiences, both on the SU campus and in the Central New York region. For more information, visit http://library.syr.edu/information/spcollections/brodsky/.

For more information on the lecture and series, contact Peter Verheyen at 443-9756 or pdverhey@syr.edu.