Studies in Manuscript Cultures

Ancient cultures are studied through literary sources and artefacts, both of which are limited and often contradictory. Scholarly traditions often privilege one type of evidence over the other, depending on their research questions and the stories they want to tell. As a result, our understanding of the past may be shaped by bias. New archaeological discoveries force historians to rethink their views of the past. Missing evidence, though difficult to identify, can lead to educated guesses and a re-evaluation of previous ideas. However, over-reliance on a single dataset leads to the risk of overlooking important perspectives. While scholars have developed methods for dealing with insufficient data, methodological reflection on the subject is rare.
This volume presents case studies from ancient civilisations that explore how different types of missing evidence (e.g. missing, contradictory or neglected evidence) affect our perceptions of ancient cultures and shape the narratives we provide. Covering Southwest Asia, China, India, Greece, Etruria, early Christianity, Mesoamerica and Central Asian Buddhism, it invites scholars to compare the situation in their own fields to the state-of-the-art in others. 

People take notes in different contexts of their daily lives and for various purposes. While brief handwritten notes can occur individually, for example, as a Post-it note, they are also collected over the course of time in notebooks, diaries, or logs. Recent scholarship has proposed to approach written artefacts as ‘evolving entities’ and suggested frameworks to analyse the layers of material and/or content that they acquire over time. Such a stratigraphic analysis has been fruitfully applied to many types of written artefacts, especially those produced during a clearly identifiable and planned project. However, the potential of this approach remained largely untapped for written artefacts whose production does not follow a predefined plan or necessarily proceed in an orderly fashion. Focusing on the multifarious manifestations of notes as material tools for the visualisation, organisation, and transmission of knowledge, this volume aims to fill this gap. The present volume sheds light on how practices of note-taking and knowledge organisation (re)shape written artefacts and vice-versa by dissecting the processes in which notes accumulate in a variety of multilayered written artefacts from different cultures and periods.

Across the most diverse societies, the reuse of writing surfaces in contexts such as learning to write, note-taking, literary creation, and bookkeeping has been not only desirable but essential to optimising resources. In these contexts, it has been typical to use erasable media of various kinds – a practice which in turn has had important implications for palaeography, literary creation, and virtually every aspect related to writing. Manuscript cultures addressed the quest for rewritability through using permanently recyclable materials such as clay and wax tablets, special technologies such as erasable coatings, and ingenious strategies for reusing papyrus, parchment, paper, wood, and more. This volume systematically explores the fascinating intersection between the potential ephemerality of the written word and the reusability of its supports. It combines a theoretical framework on ‘rewritability’ with case studies on materials, related technologies and their interplay with competing techniques, spanning from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Nigeria, from Egypt to Japan, from Greece and Rome to the Arab world. In doing so, the volume illuminates a crucial aspect of cultural history relevant to anyone studying the written word.

The history of archiving and record-keeping has recently attracted a lot of attention, however, scholarship on the physical and spatial aspects of that history are still scant. Hence, the volume foregrounds the material aspect of record-keeping and highlights the object-nature of archiving. Chapters on archive-related document preparation and the composition of archivable records are followed by explorations of storage containers, furniture, and spaces.
The volume is cross-cultural in nature, highlighting the materiality of record-keeping practices as a prime entry point for a globally comparative history of archiving. Exploring the rich traditions of record-keeping practices and facilities makes visible previously underappreciated parallels and unique specifics of various archival cultures from around the globe.

Throughout the Middle Ages manuscripts were routinely commissioned, copied, illustrated, displayed, read, and transferred across both sides of the Mediterranean. Their significance as vehicles for the transmission of visual and textual knowledge is well known. Less understood, particularly when it comes to non-Latin manuscripts, is the complex web of spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional interactions that influenced their production and reception. The twelve essays presented here seek to address this gap by exploring the very direct relationships that existed between manuscripts and those individuals or communities that were involved in their making. The volume is broad in scope, covering written artefacts produced between Late Antiquity and the fifteenth century and presenting case studies that range from the British Isles to East Africa and from Spain and the Maghreb to Armenia. The visual and textual evidence preserved in these manuscripts is interpreted by drawing from disciplines such as palaeography, art history, codicology, and textual criticism. The result is a book that details the impact of makers, patrons, collectors, and readers on the making and circulation of manuscripts across Afro-Eurasia.

This volume traces the history of a set of Tibetan tsakalis, consisting of sixty-five initiation cards that survived the mass destruction of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The set was eventually brought to Europe, the details of its origins having been lost. These tsakalis belong to the material culture of the Zhangzhung Nyengyü tradition, part of the Dzogchen practice common to both the Bon religion as well as certain schools of Buddhism. Used as a tool for transmitting knowledge from master to student, the cards document the transmission lineage of the Zhangzhung Nyengyü teachings.

The contributions to this volume each study the same object, but with different methodological approaches and tools to reveal its many facets. The authors are specialists in a range of fields including anthropology, art history, codicology, heritage science, artificial intelligence and archaeometry. This holistic research approach places the material object front and centre, exploring the creative process that transformed it from concept to artefact, then connecting the object with the rituals and people who used it to reconstruct a full account of its production, use and preservation.

Situating the history of genealogy in the ambit of manuscript studies, this volume explores how handwriting practices influenced the development of genealogies. It shows how lineages used handwritten documents in constructing and presenting their identity both to the outside world and to themselves. Genealogical handwriting is practiced in many manuscript cultures; this volume is the first to juxtapose studies from a wide variety of such cultures, ranging from East Asia, to West and Central Asia, to Europe. As the present contributions discuss in depth, tracing one’s lineage usually required taking note of personal histories, biographies and relationships; the chapters explore the many different reasons that compelled both individuals and institutions to do just this, and highlight the various contexts in which genealogy-writing occurred. Taking a material-oriented approach to handwriting practices in the study of genealogies can reveal the challenges implicated in producing such written artefacts, highlighting the enormous effort required in cultivating lineage-related knowledge. Seen from the view of manuscript studies, genealogies emerge as invaluable, yet also highly fragile forms of cultural capital.

The result of the authors’ painstaking documentation of over 1,500 Tibetan copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life from Dunhuang, now kept in the British Library’s Stein Collection, this book provides a detailed study of the sutra copies, how they were produced for the Tibetan emperor in ninth-century Dunhuang, and how they were conserved in twentieth-century England. It explores the lives of Dunhuang’s multi-ethnic scribes, editors, and administrators and reveals how their practices changed in a short period of time during the 820s. In addition, the book surveys the significant differences across the multiple Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Sutra of Limitless Life (Tib. Tshe dpag du myed pa’i mdo; Ch. Wuliangshou zongyao jing; Skt. Aparimitāyuḥ sūtra) circulating in Dunhuang at this time, and introduces a previously unknown Tibetan version. Through working with such a large cross section of the Stein Collection, and by coming to terms with one of the single largest groups of Dunhuang manuscripts, the book provides new insights into how these manuscripts were documented and conserved, on their way from Dunhuang through Khotan to London and at the British Museum, India Office Library, and British Library.

Palimpsests are manuscripts whose original content has been erased, scraped away, washed off and later overwritten. In their lower layers, they often contain unique versions of texts – including those otherwise lost – from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The volume addresses palimpsesting across languages, cultures, and times, as well as up-to-date research and imaging practices applied to them and results achieved in reconstituting removed layers.

Variously identified as an art, a technology, and a professional prerequisite, forms of shorthand have been in use from Antiquity to the modern day. Far from a niche corner in manuscript studies, shorthand represents an almost global phenomenon that has touched upon many aspects of everyday life and of scholarship. Due to its immediate illegibility, however, and the daunting task of decipherment, shorthand has long been neglected as a research object in its own right. The immense quantity of extant and unread shorthand manuscripts has been downplayed, as has the technology’s place in cultures of learning, religious devotion, court practice, parliamentary procedure, authorial composition, corporate life, public and private writing, and the academy. As the first ever peer-reviewed volume on the subject, this book presents a much-needed introduction to shorthand, its history, and its disparate historiography, alongside eight contributions by shorthand specialists that showcase some of the many lines of inquiry that shorthand inspires across a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. For readers with a vested interest in shorthand, this volume provides a range of approaches to shorthand in the Latin West, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, upon which to orient, substantiate, and inform their own work. For general readers, this publication invites scholars to consider ways in which historically overlooked or underestimated forms of writing facilitated a variety of writing cultures in different contexts, periods, and languages.

This collection brings together studies on vernacular manuscripts in regional Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Hokkien (South Fujian dialect), those of non-Han peoples in China and Southeast Asia such as the Zhuang and Yao, and a vernacular character manuscript in Vietnamese. Across this wide range, the focus is on manuscripts written in regional and vernacular adaptations of the Chinese script. Three chapters on Yao manuscripts each focus on a different aspect of their use in local society or on collections of Yao manuscripts in overseas collections; there are three chapters on Zhuang and related Tai languages; two studies on Hokkien; one on the Cantonese script in contemporary Hong Kong; and one on a Buddhist manuscript with Vietnamese chữ nôm commentary from a temple in Bangkok. Detailed descriptions of traditional paper manufacture in the villages are given for both the Yao and the Zhuang, as well as paper analysis used to date a Vietnamese manuscript. Coverage includes information about the physicality of the manuscripts investigated and the vernacular Chinese scripts in which they are written, but also a wealth of information about their use and significance in local society. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students interested in the philological analysis of East and Southeast Asian character scripts and manuscript traditions, but also the broader social contexts of manuscript use in traditional and modern society.

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women’s contributions from memory. Women’s agency has also been a glaring blind spot in the scholarly pursuit of gender perspectives on the production of written artefacts. This volume addresses these lacunae by highlighting manuscripts and inscriptions by and for women, their active participation and enabling sponsorship, and their role in the circulation and dissemination of written artefacts. Seven papers present case studies from East Asian inscriptions to ancient cuneiform epigraphic, Egyptian graffiti from late antiquity to individual specimen and large-scale collections in medieval Europe, focusing on how women participated in and contributed to those. How did they assert their involvement, their claims and their aspirations? By what rationales and mechanisms were they excluded or their contribution marginalised? How did they react to structures that discriminated against them, eventually circumventing, subverting and transforming them? The present volume sheds light on new findings, gives unique insights and discusses methodological considerations in the budding field of women’s manuscript studies.

This book explores multilingualism and multiscriptism in a great variety of writing cultures, offering an in-depth analysis of how diverse languages and scripts seamlessly intertwine within written artefacts. Insights into scribal practices are particularly illuminating in that respect, especially when exploring artefacts originating from multicultural communities and regions where distinct writing traditions intersect. The influence of multilingualism and multiscriptism on these writing cultures becomes evident, with essays spanning various domains, from the mundane aspects of everyday life to the realms of scholarship and political propaganda. Scholars often relegate these phenomena, despite being frequently encountered, to the status of exceptions compared to the more prevalent monolingualism and monoscriptism. However, in daring to challenge this viewpoint, this book emphasises the profound significance and relevance of multilingualism and multiscriptism in shaping the development of languages, cultures, and societies across Asia, Africa, and Europe. It caters to a diverse readership keen on delving into the intricacies of these phenomena within this rich tapestry of writing cultures.

Written artefacts are traditionally studied because of their content. Material aspects of these artefacts enrich the study of ancient history in many ways. Eleven case studies in five sections on the ancient world, including the Near East, Egypt, the Mediterranean, China and India, demonstrate the impact of a holistic approach that considers materiality and content alike.
Following an introductory sketch of relevant research, the first section, ‘Methodological Considerations’, critically examines the limitations the evidence available imposes on our understanding. ‘Early Uses of Writing’ addresses material and spatial aspects of inscriptions, and their communicative functions over the textual ones. The third section, ‘Material Features’, deals with clay, wooden and papyrus manuscripts and demonstrates the importance of an integrated approach. The contributions to ‘Co-presence of Written Artefacts’ take into account that written artefacts come in clusters. The final section, ‘Cultural Encounters’, presents studies on the interactions between social strata and ethnic groups, challenging previous ideas.
The volume contributes to the comparative study of written artefacts in ancient history, stimulating cross-disciplinary and -cultural research.

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions.
The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume’s three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience.
The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors’ respective fields.

Over the last two decades, the study of graffiti has emerged as a bustling field, invigorated by increased appreciation for their historical, linguistic, sociological, and anthropological value and propelled by ambitious documentation projects. The growing understanding of graffiti as a perennial, universal phenomenon is spurring holistic consideration of this mode of graphic expression across time and space. Graffiti Scratched, Scrawled, Sprayed: Towards a Cross-Cultural Understanding complements recent efforts to showcase the diversity in creation, reception, and curation of graffiti around the globe, throughout history and up to the present day. Reflecting on methodology, concepts, and terminology as well as spatial, social, and historical contexts of graffiti, the book’s fourteen chapters cover ancient Egypt, Rome, Northern Arabia, Persia, India, and the Maya; medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Turfan, and Dunhuang; and contemporary Tanzania, Brazil, China, and Germany. As a whole, the collection provides a comprehensive toolkit for newcomers to the field of graffiti studies and appeals to specialists interested in viewing these materials in a cross-cultural perspective.

Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. The volume’s contributors – who come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history – explore a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women. This book is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.

The present volume contains twelve chapters authored by specialists of Asian, African and European manuscript cultures reflecting on the cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts. Assuming that ‘codicological units’ exist in every manuscript culture and that they are usually composed of discrete elements (such as clay tablets, papyrus sheets, bamboo slips, parchment bifolios, palm leaves), the issue of the cohesion of the constituents is a general one. The volume presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve this cohesion by manuscript cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium bce to the present). This comparative view provides the frame for the understanding of a phenomenon that appears to be of essential importance for the study of the structure of written artefacts. Regardless of the way in which cohesion is realised, all strategies and devices that allow the constituents to be kept together are subsumed under the term ‘binding’. Thus, it is possible to highlight similarities, convergences, and unique physical and technical methods adopted by various manuscript cultures to face a common challenge.

The interest in Andronikos Kallistos, a leading personality among the Greek émigrés who participated in Italian Humanism, arose at the end of the nineteenth century within the frame of the studies on Byzantine scholars of the Renaissance. Researchers have only glimpsed the depth of Kallistos’ erudite personality. To date, nearly 130 manuscripts have been found bearing evidence of his work as a copyist and philologist. However, research into both his scribal and scholarly activity remains fragmented into many isolated contributions, mainly concerning specific chapters of the manuscript tradition of classical Greek authors. Adopting a synergistic approach to historical, philological, codicological, and paleographic data within this framework, this monograph study aims to fulfil the following tasks: outlining an updated biography; defining Kallistos’ scribal activity better by means of a thorough examination of all surviving manuscript sources; attempting to reconstruct the development of his book collection; acknowledging Kallistos’ scholarly activity both as a teacher and philologist; making an inventory of all the manuscripts which bear traces of his writing; and, finally, publishing Kallistos’ works.

Paper has become the most common writing material worldwide in the course of a two millennia history. This study provides a magisterial synthesis of recent scholarship and original insights into the origins of papermaking and its subsequent history in imperial China, including a wide range of archaeological evidence and literary sources. The volume introduces the materials and technologies of paper production and presents the cultural history of paper in traditional China.

A comprehensive survey of literary sources on the production and use of paper is undertaken starting with the ongoing debate about the origin and genesis of paper, which was fuelled by recent archaeological discoveries of paper or proto-paper from the last two centuries BCE. In addition to its having become a popular writing material produced in many different qualities for both handwriting and printing, it also served as a material for wrapping or decorating, money and numerous uses in everyday life, such as umbrellas, windows, clothing, wallpapers, curtains and kites. Precious paper contributed to the aesthetics of calligraphy and painting, catering to the taste of the educated elite and artists.

Some manuscripts have been produced for the personal use of their scribe only; whereas a number of them are valued as autographs, most have been ephemeral and were discarded. Personal manuscripts were not written for a patron, commissioner, or client. They are personal copies, anthologies, florilegia, personal notes, excerpts, drafts and notebooks, as well as family books, accountancy notebooks and many others; these forms often being mixed with one another.
This volume introduces a number of such manuscripts in a comparative perspective, from Japan to Europe through the Middle East, with a focus on the Near and Middle East.
The main concern is the possibility of identifying typical features of such manuscripts in terms of materials, visual organization and content. In attempting this, both the conditions of production and traces of the manuscripts’ use are taken into consideration, with particular attention to their material aspects.

The case studies presented in this volume help illuminate the rationale for the founding of libraries in an age when books were handwritten, thus contributing to the comparative history of libraries. They focus on examples ranging from the seventh to the seventeenth century emanating from the Muslim World, East Asia, Byzantium and Western Europe. Accumulation and preservation are the key motivations for the development of libraries. Rulers, scholars and men of religion were clearly dedicated to collecting books and sought to protect these fragile objects against the various hazards that threatened their survival. Many of these treasured books are long gone, but there remain hosts of evidence enabling one to reconstruct the collections to which they belonged, found in ancient buildings, literary accounts, archival documentation and, most crucially, catalogues. With such material at hand or, in some cases, the manuscripts of a certain library which have come down to us, it is possible to reflect on the nature of these libraries of the past, the interests of their owners, and their role in the intellectual history of the manuscript age.

The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts’ places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

This volume is the first to attempt a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary analysis of the manuscript cultures implementing the pothi manuscript form (a loosely bound stack of oblong folios). It is the indigenous form by which manuscripts have been crafted in South Asia and the cultural areas most influenced by it, that is to say Central and South East Asia. The volume focuses particularly on the colophons featured in such manuscripts presenting a series of essays enabling the reader to engage in a historical and comparative investigation of the links connecting the several manuscript cultures examined here. Colophons as paratexts are situated at the intersection between texts and the artefacts that contain them and offer a unique vantage point to attain global appreciation of their manuscript cultures and literary traditions. Colophons are also the product of scribal activities that have moved across regions and epochs alongside the pothi form, providing a common thread binding together the many millions of pothis still today found in libraries in Asia and the world over. These contributions provide a systematic approach to the internal structure of colophons, i.e. their ‘syntax’, and facilitate a vital, comparative approach.

This volume explores and calls into question certain commonly held assumptions about writing and technological advancement in the Islamic tradition. In particular, it challenges the idea that mechanical print naturally and inevitably displaces handwritten texts as well as the notion that the so-called transition from manuscript to print is unidirectional. Indeed, rather than distinct technologies that emerge in a progressive series (one naturally following the other), they frequently co-exist in complex and complementary relationships – relationships we are only now starting to recognize and explore.
The book brings together essays by internationally recognized scholars from an array of disciplines (including philology, linguistics, religious studies, history, anthropology, and typography) whose work focuses on the written word – channeled through various media – as a social and cultural phenomenon within the Islamic tradition. These essays promote systematic approaches to the study of Islamic writing cultures writ large, in an effort to further our understanding of the social, cultural and intellectual relationships between manuscripts, printed texts and the people who use and create them.

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’.

Manuscripts provide rich documentary evidence for understanding the history of cultural life across the breadth of Europe and Asia down through the Middle Ages. Many illustrate engagement between and across languages, in both similar and contrasting ways from east to west. The demarcation of manuscript studies into single-language academic disciplines has often obscured this reality, privileging one constituent part or contributing language from each manuscript rather than exploring the combination as a nuanced and complex whole. This volume seeks to examine manuscripts as integrally united artefacts, respecting the diversity of their constituent elements.

Case studies are presented of twelve manuscripts with evidence for various levels of inter-language exchange and collision, from horizons as diverse as the Atlantic West, Carolingian Europe, the Byzantine world, the Silk Road cultures, and east Asia. The essays function individually as discrete contributions, but together they highlight a range of overlapping themes, illustrating language interaction in global religions, pedagogical exchange, and secular society-building.The analogies as well as the concrete points of connection between them underline the value of a cross-disciplinary approach.

Manuscripts have played a crucial role in the educational practices of virtually all cultures that have a history of using them. As learning and teaching tools, manuscripts become primary witnesses for reconstructing and studying didactic and research activities and methodologies from elementary levels to the most advanced.
The present volume investigates the relation between manuscripts and educational practices focusing on four particular research topics: educational settings: teachers, students and their manuscripts; organising knowledge: syllabi; exegetical practices: annotations; modifying tradition: adaptations.
The volume offers a number of case studies stretching across geophysical boundaries from Western Europe to South-East Asia, with a time span ranging from the second millennium BCE to the twentieth century CE.

“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

Although fragments from music manuscripts have occupied a place of considerable importance since the very early days of modern musicology, a collective, up-to-date, and comprehensive discussion of the various techniques and approaches for their study was lacking. On-line resources have also become increasingly crucial for the identification, study, and textual/musical reconstruction of fragmentary sources. Disiecta Membra Musicae. Studies in Musical Fragmentology aims at reviewing the state of the art in the study of medieval music fragments in Europe, the variety of methodologies for studying the repertory and its transmission, musical palaeography, codicology, liturgy, historical and cultural contexts, etc. This collection of essays provides an opportunity to reflect also on broader issues, such as the role of fragments in last century’s musicology, how fragmentary material shaped our conception of the written transmission of early European music, and how new fragments are being discovered in the digital age. Known fragments and new technology, new discoveries and traditional methodology alternate in this collection of essays, whose topics range from plainchant to ars nova and fifteenth- to sixteenth-century polyphony.

Fakes and forgeries are objects of fascination. This volume contains a series of thirteen articles devoted to fakes and forgeries of written artefacts from the beginnings of writing in Mesopotamia to modern China. The studies emphasise the subtle distinctions conveyed by an established vocabulary relating to the reproduction of ancient artefacts and production of artefacts claiming to be ancient: from copies, replicas and imitations to fakes and forgeries. Fakes are often a response to a demand from the public or scholarly milieu, or even both. The motives behind their production may be economic, political, religious or personal – aspiring to fame or simply playing a joke. Fakes may be revealed by combining the study of their contents, codicological, epigraphic and palaeographic analyses, and scientific investigations. However, certain famous unsolved cases still continue to defy technology today, no matter how advanced it is. Nowadays, one can find fakes in museums and private collections alike; they abound on the antique market, mixed with real artefacts that have often been looted. The scientific community’s attitude to such objects calls for ethical reflection.

The application of statistical techniques to the study of manuscript books, based on the analysis of large data sets acquired through the archaeological observation of manuscripts, is one of the most original trends in codicological research, aiming not only to reconstruct on a sound basis the methods and processes used in book manufacture and their tendential evolution in space and time, but also to interpret them as the result of a dynamic interplay between various and often incompatible needs (of cultural, technical, social and economic nature) that book artisans had to reconcile in the best possible way.

The present collection of essays in English translation was guided by the desire to offer a multifarious well-articulated picture of the application of statistical methodology to the various aspects of manuscript production, namely analysis of materials, characterization of book types, manufacturing techniques, planning and use of layout characterization of scripts and scribal habits.

The volume aims to present to a wider readership a series of significant papers which have appeared over the last fifteen years, by means of which the statistical approach continues to demonstrate its vast potential.

The so-called ‘Canon Tables’ of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of the early, late antique, and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West, the invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring, organizing, and navigating the Four Gospels united in a single codex – and, in doing so, building upon and bringing to completion previous endeavours – the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly complex combination of text, numbers and images, that became an integral and fixed part of all the manuscripts containing the Four Gospels as Sacred Scripture of the Christians and can be seen as exemplary for the formation, development and spreading of a specific Christian manuscript culture across East and West AD 300 and 800.

In the footsteps of Carl Nordenfalk’s masterly publication of 1938 and few following contributions, this book offers an updated overview on the topic of ‘Canon Tables’ in a comparative perspective and with a precise look at their context of origin, their visual appearance, their meaning, function and their usage in different times, domains, and cultures.

The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge previous knowledge and trigger further developments.

With a vast selection of highly representative case studies – from India, Islamic Asia and Spain to Ethiopian cultures, from Ancient Christian to Coptic, and Medieval European domains – this volume deals with manuscripts planned or growing and resulting in time to comprise ‘more than one’. Whatever their contents – the natural world and related recipes, astronomical tables or personal notes, documentary, religious and even highly revered holy texts – codicological and textual features of these manuscripts reveal how similar needs received different answers in varying contexts and times.

Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into the factors behind uniformity and variation in Judeo-Arabic in Hebrew script, South Palestinian Christian Arabic, New Persian, Aljamiado of the Spanish Moriscos, Ottoman Turkish, a single multilingual Ottoman manuscript, Sino-Arabic in northwest China, Malay Jawi in the Moluccas, Kanuri and Hausa in Nigeria, Kabyle in Algeria, and Ethiopian Fidäl script as used to transliterate Arabic. One of the findings of this volume is that different domains of manuscript cultures have distinct paths of standardisation, so that orthography tends to develop its own standardisation principles irrespective of norms applied to layout and script types. This book will appeal to readers interested in manuscript studies, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, and history of writing.

The volume contains a critical review of data, results and open problems concerning the principal Greek and Coptic majuscule bookhands, based on previous research of the author, revised and updated to offer an overview of the different graphic phenomena. Although the various chapters address the history of different types of scripts (i.e. biblical majuscule, sloping poitend majuscule, liturgical majuscule, epigraphic and monumental scripts), their juxtaposition allows us to identify common issues of the comparative method of palaeography.

From an overall critical assessment of these aspects the impossibility of applying a unique historical paradigm to interpret the formal expressions and the history of the different bookhands comes up, due to the fact that each script follows different paths.

Particular attention is also devoted to the use of Greek majuscules in the writing of ancient Christian books. A modern and critical awareness of palaeographic method may help to place the individual witnesses in the context of the main graphic trends, in the social and cultural environments in which they developed, and in a more accurate chronological framework.  

This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at the production, circulation, fruition and preservation of manuscripts in different areas and across time. Edited by the team of the Cambridge-based Sanskrit Manuscripts Project and including contributions of the researchers who collaborated with it, it covers a wide range of topics related to South Asian manuscript culture: from the material dimension (palaeography, layout, decoration) and the complicated interactions of manuscripts with printing in late medieval Tibet and in modern Tamil Nadu, to reading, writing, editing and educational practices, from manuscripts as sources for the study of religious, literary and intellectual traditions, to the creation of collections in medieval India and Cambodia (one major centre of the so-called Sanskrit cosmopolis), and the formation of the Cambridge collections in the colonial period. The contributions reflect the variety of idioms, literary genres, religious movements, and social actors (intellectuals, scribes, patrons) of ancient South Asia, as well as the variety of approaches, interests and specialisms of the authors, and their impassionate engagement with manuscripts.

Hebrew manuscripts are considered to be invaluable documents and artefacts of Jewish culture and history. Research on Hebrew manuscript culture is progressing rapidly and therefore its topics, methods and questions need to be enunciated and reflected upon.

The case studies assembled in this volume explore various fields of research on Hebrew manuscripts. They show paradigmatically the current developments concerning codicology and palaeography, book forms like the scroll and codex, scribes and their writing material, patrons, collectors and censors, manuscript and book collections, illuminations and fragments, and, last but not least, new methods of material analysis applied to manuscripts.

The principal focus of this volume is the material and intellectual history of Hebrew book cultures from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, its intention being to heighten and sharpen the reader’s understanding of Jewish social and cultural history in general.

During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy.

However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption.

The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions.

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing.

Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions.

The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).

The number of manuscripts produced in the Indian sub-continent is astounding and is the result of a massive enterprise that was carried out over a vast geographical area and over a vast stretch of time. Focusing mainly on areas of Northern India and Nepal between 800 to 1300 CE and on manuscripts containing Sanskrit texts, the present study investigates a fundamental and so far rarely studied aspect of manuscript production: visual organisation.

Scribes adopted a variety of visual strategies to distinguish one text from another and to differentiate the various sections within a single text (chapters, sub-chapters, etc.). Their repertoire includes the use of space(s) on the folio, the adoption of different writing styles, the inclusion of symbols of various kind, the application of colours (‘rubrication’), or a combination of all these.

This study includes a description of these various strategies and an analysis of their different implementations across the selected geographical areas. It sheds light on how manuscripts were produced, as well as on some aspects of their employment in ritual contexts, in different areas of India and Nepal.

Composite and multiple-text manuscripts are traditionally studied for their individual texts, but recent trends in codicology have paved the way for a more comprehensive approach: Manuscripts are unique artefacts which reveal how they were produced and used as physical objects.

While multiple-text manuscripts codicologically are to be considered as production units, i.e. they were originally planned and realized in order to carry more than one text, composites consist of formerly independent codicological units and were put together at a later stage with intentions that might be completely different from those of its original parts. Both sub-types of manuscripts are still sometimes called "miscellanies", a term relating to the texts only. The codicological difference is important for reconstructing why and how these manuscripts which in many cases resemble (or contain) a small library were produced and used.

Contributions on the manuscript cultures of China, India, Africa, the Islamic world and European traditions lead not only to the conclusion that "one-volume libraries" have been produced in many manuscript cultures, but allow also for the identification of certain types of uses.

India has been the homeland of diverse manuscript traditions that do not cease to impress scholars for their imposing size and complexity. Nevertheless, many topics concerning the study of Indian manuscript cultures still remain to receive systematic examination. Of Gods and Books pays attention to one of these topics - the use of manuscripts as ritualistic tools. Literary sources deal quite extensively with rituals principally focused on manuscripts, whose worship, donation and preservation are duly prescribed. Around these activities, a specific category of ritual gift is created, which finds attestations in pre-tantric, as well as in smārta and tantric, literature, and whose practice is also variously reflected in epigraphical documents. De Simini offers a first systematic study of the textual evidence on the topic of the worship and donation of knowledge. She gives account of possible implications for the relationships between religion and power. The book is indsipensible for a deeper understanding of the cultural aspects of manuscript transmission in medieval India, and beyond.

As records of the link between a manuscript and the texts it contains, paratexts document many aspects of a manuscript’s life: production, transmission, usage, and reception. Comprehensive studies of paratexts are still rare in the field of manuscript studies, and the universal categories of time and space are used to create a common frame for research and comparisons. Contributions in this volume span over three continents and one millennium.

This book is about Tangut translations of Chinese literary texts. Although most of the extant Tangut material comprises Buddhist texts, there are also many non-religious texts, which are mostly translations from Chinese. The central concern is how the Tanguts appropriated Chinese written culture through translation and what their reasons for this were. Of the seven chapters, the first three provide background information on the discovery of Tangut material, the emergence of the field of Tangut studies, and the history of the Tangut state. The following four chapters are devoted to different aspects of Tangut written culture and its connection with the Chinese tradition. The themes discussed here are the use of Chinese primers in Tangut education; the co-existence of manuscript and print; the question how faithful Tangut translators remained to the original texts or whether they at times adapted those to the needs of Tangut readership; the degree of translation consistency and the preservation of the intertextual elements of the original works. The book also intends to draw attention to the significant body of Chinese literature that exists in Tangut translation, especially since the originals of some of these texts are now lost.

In Arabic and Islamic studies, the subject of variance in general and that of textual variation in particular has not been investigated exhaustively so far.
In the present book the variation in texts of the “closed transmission” will be studied, focusing on a small corpus of didactic and model poems, with a view to establishing what degree of text stability and change was allowed by the medium manuscript. Categories of variance (relating to work-titles, text, number of verses and their sequence, page-layout, context) and the means of controlling them in the manuscripts of the poems are identified and detailed descriptions of the copies are given.
The monograph also includes a presentation of some major traits of the cultural background to the study of Arabic didactic poetry and of its dissemination in which memorization has played a crucial role.
The intended readers, editors and other users of manuscripts, are helped to acquaint themselves with the methods employed in the manuscripts to control variation and they are given an overview of the large spectrum of Arabic didactic poetry and of its place in the traditional culture of learning in Islamicate societies.

This book investigates the nature of regional variation in the early Chinese writing system through bamboo manuscripts and inscriptions dating from the late pre-imperial China (5th-3rd centuries BCE). Diachronic and synchronic comparisons of graphic details show that none of the well-recognized regional varieties developed independently from one another. Furthermore, differences in graphic components can be accounted for as alternations of graphs that are compatible in their semantic or phonetic values. The phonological systems underlying various regional orthographies unanimously point to a single coherent sound system with some mixture of dialect pronunciations. This strongly suggests that all the late pre-imperial regional scripts derived from a kind of orthographic meta-system based on one spoken standard language. This orthography and its phonological systems should reasonably be dated to ca. 9th century BCE, just about the time when the earliest known Chinese lexicography "Book of Scribe Zhou" (ca. 830 BCE) was written. The conclusions of this book have further implications on reading and understanding manuscript texts in general as well as on using them as data for linguistic studies.

The ancient Tamil poetic corpus of the Caṅam ("The Academy") is a national treasure for Tamilians and a battle-ground for linguists and historians of politics, culture and literature. Going back to oral predecessors probably dating back to the beginning of the first millennium, it has had an extremely rich and variegated history. Collected into anthologies and endowed with literary theories and voluminous commentaries, it became the centre-piece of the Tamil literary canon, associated with the royal court of the Pandya dynasty in Madurai. Its decline began in the late middle ages, and by the late 17th century it had fallen into near oblivion, before being rediscovered at the beginning of the print era. The present study traces the complex historical process of its transmission over some 2000 years, using and documenting a wide range of sources, in particular surviving manuscripts, the early prints, the commentaries of the literary and grammatical traditions and a vast range of later literature that creates a web of inter-textual references and quotations.

This study is based on a manuscript which was carried by a Chinese monk through the monasteries of the Hexi corridor, as part of his pilgrimage from Wutaishan to India. The manuscript has been created as a composite object from three separate documents, with Chinese and Tibetan texts on them. Included is a series of Tibetan letters of introduction addressed to the heads of monasteries along the route, functioning as a passport when passing through the region. The manuscript dates to the late 960s, coinciding with the large pilgrimage movement during the reign of Emperor Taizu of the Northern Song recorded in transmitted sources. Therefore, it is very likely that this is a unique contemporary testimony of the movement, of which our pilgrim was also part. Complementing extant historical sources, the manuscript provides evidence for the high degree of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity in Western China during this period.

Script and writing were among the most important inventions in human history, and until the invention of printing, the handwritten book was the primary medium of literary and cultural transmission. Although the study of manuscripts is already quite advanced for many regions of the world, no unified discipline of ‘manuscript studies’ has yet evolved which is capable of treating handwritten books from East Asia, India and the Islamic world equally alongside the European manuscript tradition. This book, which aims to begin the interdisciplinary dialogue needed to arrive at a truly systematic and comparative approach to manuscript cultures worldwide, brings together papers by leading researchers concerned with material, philological and cultural aspects of different manuscript traditions.