Lacuna (manuscripts)
.JPG)
A lacunainscription, text, painting, or musical work. A manuscript, text, or section suffering from gaps is said to be "lacunose" or "lacunulose".
Weathering, decay, and other damage to old manuscripts or inscriptions are often responsible for lacunae - words, sentences, or whole passages that are missing or illegible.
Palimpsests are particularly vulnerable. To reconstruct the original text, the context must be considered. In papyrology and textual criticism
, this may lead to competing reconstructions and interpretations. Published texts that contain lacunae often mark the section where text is missing with a bracketed ellipsis. For example, "This sentence contains 20 words, and [...] nouns," or, "Finally, the army arrived at [...] and made camp."
Notable examples
- In the Cotton Vitellius A. xv, the Old English poem Beowulfcontains the following lacuna:
This particular lacuna is always reproduced in editions of the text, but many people have attempted to fill it, notably editors Wyatt-Chambers and Dobbie, among others, who accept the verb "waes" (was). Malone (1929) proposed the namehyrde ich thæt [... ...On]elan cwen.
— Fitt 1, line 62Babylonian creation myth, has never been recovered.- The didactic Latin poem Astronomica (Marcus Manilius, c. AD 30–40) contains a lacuna in its fifth book; some believe that only a small portion is missing, while others believe that whole books are lost.
- Cantar de mio Cid contains several lacunae.[4]
See also
- Unfinished work
- Leiden Conventions
- Redaction
- Lost literary work
Notes
References
- ^ Harper, Douglas. "lacuna". Online Etymology Dictionary.
- Perseus Project.
- ^ G. Jack, "Beowulf: A Student Edition", Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1994. Pp.31–32, footnote 62.
- ISBN 9780521249928– via Google Books.
 | This article about a manuscript is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |