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As some of the earliest extant examples of Chan writings survived in the Dunhuang library cave, they have been studied extensively in modern scholarship as witnesses of texts that were to leave a lasting impact throughout East Asia. This paper uses a codicological perspective to re-examine the so-called Stein manuscript of the Platform Sūtra kept at the British Library. This is one of the key sources for the study of early Chan, primarily because it contains what is often claimed to the be the earliest copy of the Platform Sūtra. The paper's aim is to demonstrate that the manuscript, in its physical reality, can tell us additional information beyond what has already been learned from the text in it. This entails a shift from a focus on the transmission of the text to its use in a concrete setting. On the one hand, the 'material' approach can offer insights into the identity and background of the persons and communities involved in copying and using such texts, and on the other, it can help to reassess the accepted dating of the manuscript. Among the key pieces of information not considered before is an ownership note written on the spine of the manuscript, pointing to a connection with educational setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Medieval Bulgarian Literature / Starobulgarska Literatura is the property of Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the circulation of manuscripts in the Mzab Valley in southern Algeria during the 9th–10th/15th–16th centuries in an attempt to identify the most prominent copyists in the region. The primary aim of the paper is to highlight the importance of manuscripts for the Mzab's Ibadi Muslim community in this period and to demonstrate its impact on the intellectual and cultural life of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of studies concerning the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, this article aims at retracing the history of an archive put together by the French scholar Auguste Bossoutrot (1856–1937). This archive gathered a quantity of materials on the Arabic and Berber languages collected during his life. In particular, some of the manuscripts contain parts of a long religious work in Berber (Kitāb al-Barbariyya), discovered in the island of Djerba (Tunisia) among the Ibadi community of the island towards the end of the nineteenth century. This text was firstly discovered and reported to the scientific community by another French scholar, A. De Calassanti-Motylinski (1854–1907), but his untimely death prevented him from publishing it and the whereabouts of the manuscripts that contained it remained unknown until the discovery of Bossoutrot's papers, which contained the longest extant copy of the work (about 900 pages). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The codicological and paleographic description of the Tver Gospel of 1478, a dated Tetraevangelia manuscript, has been performed. The place and time of the manuscript creation are indicated in the copyist’s record at the end of the book (f. 322v.). The Gospel is kept in the Fund of Rare Books of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, no. 8772. It is a manuscript in quarto, 322 ff., written in the same handwriting, decorated with miniatures, initials, the tri-color medallions, etc. The text is well structured. The Gospels of the apostles are separated from each other by colored miniatures of the evangelists, made in the artistic manner of the Tver School of Painting. The manuscript is written in a clear half-text of the second half of the 15th century on paper with a “bull’s head” watermark. The book was restored in the late 18th century and is well preserved. The value of the dated and geographically confined texts to historical linguistics and culture, history of Church literature, etc. has been established.

Introduction. The article considers a fairly common practice of compiling the codices of the original letters and other charters in Byzantium. Until now, this phenomenon in the history of the Greek book was completely unobserved. Methods. The methodological basis of the investigation is a combination of epistolography, text critics, prosopography, palaeography, and codicology. Analysis. The article investigates the codicology and the composition of a unique collection of the 16th century compiled by the well-known intellectual and publisher David Hoeschel of the letters of the Greek scholar Maximos Margunios. This extant example of the “book of letters” provides a completely new approach to the study of the famous collection of letters of the so-called Anonymous Teacher of the first half of the 10th century from the London manuscript British Library. Add. 36749. The study of this manuscript shows that this is either the original autograph of the Anonymous author himself, or its copy made by one of his students. The study of the manuscript and its historical context, in particular, make it possible to identify confidently one of the addressees of letters by the name of Ephraim with the famous scribe the monk Ephraim. In turn, all these observations make it possible to better understand one of the passages of the letter of courtier scholar Michael Psellos to his friend caesar Ioannes Doukas, in which Psellos writes that Ioannes makes a book out of his letters. Results. As a result, we have three examples of compiling a codex of letters as such: the earliest – the first half of the 10th century, a short narrative passage of the second half of the 11th century, and the ‘ethnographic’ example of the late 16th century. Thanks to the really existing post-Byzantine manuscript, we can better understand the history of the manuscript of the first half of the 10th century, and more accurately interpret the narrative of the 11th century.

In this article, we present a methodological discussion of a study of the Exon Domesday Book, Exeter, Cathedral Library, ms 3500. Exon Domesday contains records for the south-west of England which were compiled for the Domesday survey and then reworked into Great Domesday Book as we know it today. Exon Domesday therefore provides a unique view into the workings of the early Anglo-Normans, providing us with crucial evidence of what they did, how and probably also why. However, the manuscript is extremely complex, being the work of a team of scribes working together under significant pressures of time. It is very irregular in composition, with quires ranging from one bifolium or even a singleton to those of twenty leaves. In order to understand the manuscript and its production, we have developed digital tools and approaches to help visualise and analyse the structure. Although they are based firmly in the research questions of the project, they are also founded on principles of codicology that we believe are applicable much more widely than just this project.

The Thun-Hohenstein album, long-known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch, is a bound collection of 112 drawings that visualize armoured figures at rest and in combat, as well as empty armours arrayed in pieces. The collection gathers drawings that span the period from the 1470s to around 1590. While most of the images were executed in Augsburg during the 1540s, the album’s three oldest drawings date to the late-fifteenth century. Two of these works, which form a codicological interlude between the first and second quires, find parallels in the illustrations of contemporaneous martial treatises. This article traces the pictorial lineages of these atextual images through comparative analyses of fight books produced in the German-speaking lands, and considers how the representational strategies deployed in martial treatises inflected the ways that book painters and their audiences visualized the armoured body. This exploration situates a manuscript from which one of the drawings derives, Peter Falkner’s Art of Knightly Defense, now in Vienna, within the Augsburg book painters’ workshops that would later give rise to the Thun album. Finally, this study considers how the transmission and representation of martial knowledge in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Augsburg contributed to the later depictions of armoured bodies that populate the album.

El presente trabajo aborda el análisis del manuscrito Ms. Lat. 83 que contiene la obra de san Gregorio Magno Moralia in Iob custodiado en la John Rylands Library de Manchester. Se trata de uno de los escasos códices conservados en escritura visigótica. Hasta la actualidad el único estudio monográfico existente proponía un análisis paleográfico y codicológico cuya revisión, aplicando la metodología paleográfica actual, ha dado lugar a numerosos cambios y nuevas propuestas, entre las que destacan una diferente actuación de los copistas que intervienen en el códice y por lo tanto, una nueva visión sobre la génesis de dicho manuscrito. This paper focuses on the analysis of the manuscript Ms. Lat. 83 containing the work of St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, found at the John Rylands Library at Manchester. It is one of the few extant codices in Visigothic writing. Until now, the only existing monographic study proposed a paleographic and codicological analysis. By applying current paleographic methodology we will advance changes and new proposals, of which we can highlight the different performance of the copyists who intervene in the codex and, therefore, present a new vision on the genesis of this manuscript.

For the first time, strong links between three copies of the 'Morisco Qur'an' (in Arabic [Aix 1367], Aljamía [BRAH T5], and a bilingual Arabo-Aljamía version [BRAH T19]) have been described. They involve codicological, linguistic, and aesthetic features common to these manuscripts and lead to the identification of a single Aljamiado translation transmitted by the same copyist in two different codices (BRAH T5 and BRAH T19). This result allows us to demonstrate the coherent and systematic nature of the work of the Morisco copyists and provides the possibility of establishing a stemma codicum of some of the Aljamiado translations of the Qur'an. The relationship of these manuscripts with an Arabic copy of the 'Morisco Qur'an' makes it possible to conclude that these three copies were produced around 1609 ce, the year in which the Moriscos' final expulsion from Spain began. These links illuminate our understanding of the production and uses of these Morisco copies of the Qur'an at a very late date, enriching the field of Qur'anic studies in medieval and early modern Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a full transcription and discussion of eighteen early Genizah fragments of Saadya's Bible translation made of parchment (sixteen from the Pentateuch and two from the book of Daniel) and copied by the scribe Samuel b. Shechaniah b. Amram. Seventeen of them are long narrow pieces of parchment of uneven size, and some are two or more pieces sewn together. These fragments were bound in the form of a rotulus, that is, the pages are attached across their upper and lower margins to form a roll that is read vertically. The fragments are undated; nevertheless, codicological considerations, including their form and method of binding, the material onto which they were copied, and the type of handwriting allow us to assume that they were copied already in the tenth century, or at least no later than the beginning of the eleventh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editing manuscripts is the most fundamental type of research in academic research. Taleb-e Amoli is among the most well-known poets in the eleventh century AH. His sonnets, which include more than half of his songs, contain nearly 13000 verses. Although Taheri Shahab (in 1968) has corrected and published Taleb-e-Amoli's Divan (collection), in order to correct, it is necessary to use all the authentic sources and copies available. Issues such as not using numerous available manuscripts, not reporting inaccurate versions and alternatives in the printed version, and wrong selections lead the authors of this paper while introducing a valid manuscript not used in the previous correction of this work, to criticize and investigate the previous correction of the book. This re-examination attempts to address some of these shortcomings and misreading by researching the text and using the new manuscript. As a result of the present study, a number of new sonnets and verses were added to Taleb’s collection. This completes the shortcomings of the printed version as far as possible. Recording the duplicate version and some new vocabulary is another result of this study. In addition, research into the work makes a new introduction to the stylistic features of Taleb's sonnets and other related topics to be made easier for scholars of Persian poetry and literature to ensure proper judgment and interpretation about Taleb's collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the field of medieval cartography, the Psalter World Map (BL, Add. MS 28681, fol. 9r) has come to stand in scholarship as an exemplar of the medieval world view. While the World Map has received wide attention, its relationship to the List Map on the verso and the psalter manuscript as a whole has been less discussed. A close material analysis of folio 9 reveals that the two maps were pasted into a frame which had been cut out of the folio. Thus, the maps were constructed separately from the psalter text itself. Moreover, a codicological examination of the first ten folios of the manuscript shows multiple moments of rearrangement and intervention, reinforcing the importance of material analysis in the study of maps and manuscripts. The new information concerning the insertion of the World Map and the List Map into folio 9 opens up unexplored possibilities regarding their place of origin and dating since they can no longer be tied to the 1262 date of the manuscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fascinating yet still underexplored world of manuscripts hailing from Southeast Asia, including the nation-state of Indonesia, has received some impetus in recent years, thanks to the new appreciation for this written heritage by state and non-state actors both within and without the country. Traditionally perceived as a dry (and hardly scientific or 'intellectual') subject that was the preserve of a small circle of specialist librarians, codicology (and Asian codicology in particular) has become a vibrant discipline, with several teams of scholars and projects worldwide focusing on manuscripts as objects, as well as on 'manuscript cultures'. These projects and approaches duly recognise the role of manuscripts (and not only texts) as prime carriers of cultural and civilisational values across time and space, as well as their relevance for the culture and identity of contemporary societies. This essay reviews some recent publications on Indonesian manuscripts catering to researchers as well as the wider public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes another look at Cod. 86 of the Biblioteca Capitolare in Trient/Trento, which was also analysed by Tobias Daniels in MIÖG 122 (2014). By means of a codicological-palaeographic autopsy of the manuscript, neglected in the paper just mentioned, and pointing out hitherto unknown details in the student career of one of the two scribes, it can be shown that Daniels' dating of the production of a part of the manuscript has to be revised, and that Vienna and its university milieu as the presumed place of production may be doubted. Therefore, it cannot be accounted a witness to an early reception of Piccolomini's work in Vienna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the unedited Durham Latin Prose "Brut" chronicle and its manuscript tradition in light of the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript. The Durham "Brut" covers the history of England from its legendary origins through the English victories over Scotland and France in 1346–47. The chronicle's later years are related to those in two other important late-medieval chronicles, the Anonimalle Chronicle and the Lanercost Chronicle , and for a short section of John of Washington's later chronicle. Only one witness of the Durham "Brut" was known until 2011, when another was identified with a 1347–48 continuation in a seventeenth-century hand. This article identifies an additional medieval witness that also includes the continuation. This article examines all three manuscripts together to track their development through both layout and a word by word comparison of a section of the text (Edward III's 1346 invasion of Normandy). This article will serve as a starting point for future editors of this neglected but important chronicle, written during a time of great change in English culture and national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It can be safely claimed that there is no medieval script that has been seen, analyzed, and debated more than that of the mysterious and as-yet-unread Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408). For centuries, bibliophiles, linguists, codicologists, art historians, and amateur cryptologists have pored over the manuscript, examining it from every angle, debating every wormhole, arguing over every stain and crease. Some things we know: the invented script is comprised of carefully-written glyphs without precedent or obvious model; forensic material evidence has determined that the parchment, ink, and pigments date from the early 15th century; the provenance trail is nearly unbroken from the seventeenth century to today. But we still don't know how to read it, in spite of new theories flying across the internet on a near-weekly basis. "Voynichologists" disagree as to some of the most important and basic questions about the manuscript. How many letterforms are there? How many scribes can be identified? Are there ligatures, majuscules, abbreviations, and other scribal conventions? These questions have never been satisfactorily answered. Using digital paleographic methodologies including the Archetype (DigiPal) application and other annotation tools, this project will revisit the paleographic analyses of the Voynich glyphs to propose answers to some of these questions and discuss how these answers open avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses some problems pertaining to the spread of Sinitic Buddhism, especially of the Huayan Chan tradition in Xixia. These include issues of the transmission of the teaching as well as codicological and conceptual problems of the dissemination of the publications of Huayan Chan texts in Xixia. The paper presents evidence that the Chan Buddhist content available to the Tanguts was not limited to Huayan Chan, but included some knowledge of the Song-period Chan Buddhism. The paper introduces the previously unknown Tangut composition Suiyuan ji and discusses its structure as well as aspects of its contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of En la España Medieval is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Literatura Medieval is the property of Instituto Universitario de Investigacion en Estudios Medievales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Historía da Sociedade e da Cultura is the property of Revista de Historia da Sociedade e da Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Volume 6 of Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian, published in 2016, includes two copies of a text entitled by the editors * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo 鄭文公問太伯 (Duke Wen of Zheng Asks Tai Bo). The two copies of this single text are extremely similar, both in terms of content and in terms of calligraphy, but also display certain occasional differences and one systematic difference in the positioning of the "city" (yi 邑) signific (bushou 部首) within characters. This leads the editors to argue that they "were copied by a single scribe on the basis of two separate source texts." This is the first time we have seen such evidence of scribal practice, and it is crucial for the question of manuscript production in early China. In the present study, I first present a codicological description of these two manuscript versions of * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo, followed by a full translation of their text. Then I consider their implications for the question of manuscript production in ancient China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cumhuriyet Ilahiyat Dergisi / Cumhuriyet Theology Journal is the property of Cumhuriyet Universitesi, Ilahiyat Fakultesi / Cumhuriyet University, Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Nkaragrutʻiwn Tnōrinakan tełeacʻ is the name given to the collection of manuscripts containing descriptions of monuments located in Palestine, primarily those considered Christian holy places. Closely resembling modern travel books or tourist guides to archeological sites, these manuscripts were compiled with the intent of acquainting Armenian pilgrims with the Sacred Shrines in the Holy Land during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One particular Armenian manuscript, housed in the monastic library of the Mekhitarist Fathers in Vienna, is a very interesting and important “guidebook”, richly illustrated and written by the monk Eremia of Adana at the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem in 1697. The manuscript contains travel information regarding 80 sites, complete with 81 pictorial compositions. Most of the depictions are of Christian holy places, but there are also a number of representations of Jewish and Muslim sites. Eremia offers a comprehensive guided tour of each of these monuments which during his time were scattered over the territory of Palestine, with many still being in existence today. The proposed subject has tremendous significance for Armenologists and Byzantinologists in the fields of miniature art, iconography, geography, topography, archeology, and history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The readings on the history of Peter’s time seem to be quite stable. These included works written in Petrine time, some of which were published in the first quarter of the 18th century, the chronological tables of Peter the Great’s reign, often with a poetic preface, as well as biographical works by P.N. Krekshin and A. Katiforo, created in Elizabethan time and distributed as copies. The first biographical works about the tsar-reformer were often supplemented by handwritten copies of printed decrees, communiques, letters and other documents. In addition, handwritten miscellanies, consisting exclusively of letters and decrees of Peter the Great, were distributed. In the late 18th – early 19th century handwritten miscellanies about Peter the Great became a subject of interest among collectors and academics. Therefore, at present, these manuscripts can be found in various collections in archives and libraries. The collection’s being part of the family fund gives the researcher an opportunity to talk more confidently about owner and the purposes of compilation. The collections lack necessary historical convoy, and it is very difficult to trace the origin of the manuscript. Codicological research provides an opportunity to clarify the origin, the sociocultural milieu and the further archival being of the miscellanies about Peter the Great.

Twenty-six years after the first edition and translation by Sydney Anglo in 1991 of the anonymous manuscript Le Jeu de la hache , many elements can still be significantly improved. This paper offers a completely new critical edition of the text, and a major revision of the translation. This article includes a detailed glossary as well as notes to discuss the many ambiguous passages in the original text. Finally, the studies of the language, the vocabulary, the dialect, the writing style and the physical document make it possible to refine the dating of the manuscript to the third quarter of the fifteenth century, between 1460 and 1485, and its origin, probably Flanders or Wallonia in the entourage of the dukes of Burgundy.

The article is devoted to the identification of two storage units in the Lviv National Vasyl Stefanyk Scientific Library of Ukraine, which are parts of the once-single Ruthenian Didactic Gospel and, thus, originate from the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The identification is made on the basis of the text, the handwriting of the scribe, the number of lines per sheet, and the time of the manuscript creation (1635).

Ever since its rediscovery in 1831 and the first report issued on it in 1846, the CodexpurpureusRossanensishas attracted the attention of scholars, chiefly on account of its decorative and textual characteristics. Far less commonplace are studies specifically dedicated to the analysis of the codex’s material and graphic aspects. The present contribution stems from the opportunity―generously provided to the authors―to study the original codex, and also from a desire to closely re-examine its codicological and palaegraphical features, with the aim of producing an updated statusquaestionisenhanced with some new critical insights.

This paper presents an unpublished Bible dating from the second half of the 13th century, acquired from Montecassino’s Abbey in 1882, where it was held in the Private Archive (Montecassino, Archivio Privato dell’Abbazia, 3). The manuscript mirrors the features of the so-called ‘Paris Bible’, with very few exceptions, although it also exhibits some characteristics typical of Bibles produced in Italy during the 13-14th centuries. The analysis of its material and textual features, in particular the manner of its illumination, links this bible to a group of manuscripts presumably produced in the Roman area in the third quarter of the 13th century (now held in collections in Paris, Bologna, Assisi, and Vatican Apostolic Library in Rome).