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20.02.02: L'Europe, rue de Londres / rue d'Athènes By the time I was back in Paris, I felt almost (deep breath) re-energized about my research. In Parma I'd spent quality time at the wonderful Biblioteca Palatina with the best-known of the Judeo-Portuguese texts, followed by a langorous day of walking through the fiery colonnades of Bolgona (which included the somewhat surreal experience of staying at a rural hostel with my computer and nice wool coat, as well as the requisite hanging out with a travelling Australian). Back through Paris en route to northern England for an afternoon with some Judeo-Portuguese fragments at Leeds Univeristy, followed by a longer stop in Oxford to discover the sleeping angel: an 800-page astrological text at the Bodleain Library, more or less ignored in all previuous work on Judeo-Portuguese. Before leaving England I spent one day at the University Library in Cambridge checking out a few other manuscripts (including one I could now say had been misclassified as Spanish), but back in Paris it was down to business figuring out whether that Bodleain manuscript could really be my muse. Long e-mails to my advisors, inconclusive fact-finding at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and coffee at an inoffensive place just above that one really seedy block near the Gare St. Lazare to try to make sense of it all.
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