Manuscript
A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or
Before the arrival of prints, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps,
Terminology
The word "manuscript" derives from the
A manuscript may be a
Parts
- Cover
- Flyleaf (blank sheet)
- Colophon (publication information)
- incipit (the first few words of the text)
- decoration; illustrations
- dimensions
- Shelfmark or Signature in holding library (as opposed to printed Catalog number)
- works/compositions included in same ms
- codicologicalelements:
- deletions method: erasure? overstrike? dots above letters?
- headers/footers
- page format/layout: columns? text and surrounding commentary/additions/glosses?
- interpolations (passage not written by the original author)
- owners' marginal notations/corrections
- owner signatures
- dedication/inscription
- censor signatures
- collation (quires) (binding order)
- foliation
- page numeration
- binding
- manuscripts bound together in a single volume:
- convolute: volume containing different manuscripts
- fascicle: individual manuscript, part of a convolute
Materials
- paper
- parchment
- papyrus to preserve text
- ink
- writing implement used
- pencil to help with the writing process
- pastedown(blank paper for inside cover)
Paleographic elements
- script (one or more)
- dating
- line fillers
- rubrication (red ink text)
- ruled lines
- catchwords
- historical elements of the ms: blood, wine etc. stains
- condition:
- smokiness
- evidence of fire
- mold
- wormed
Reproduction
The mechanical reproduction of a manuscript is called facsimile. Digital reproductions can be called (high-resolution) scans or digital images.
History
Before the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press, all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. In the west, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls (volumen in Latin) or books (codex, plural codices). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper.
In
Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by the late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes there. When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were sometimes made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.
The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within
Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively humid Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those.
Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia,
In
In the Western world, from the
Islamic world
Islamic manuscripts were produced in different ways depending on their use and time period. Parchment (vellum) was a common way to produce manuscripts.[11] Manuscripts eventually transitioned to using paper in later centuries with the diffusion of paper making in the Islamic empire. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia, its use and production spread to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa during the 8th century.[12]
Africa
4,203 of
Western world
Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use the codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by
Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means "of calf"/ "made from calf". For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane" is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing.[17]
Scripts
Caroline Minuscule arrived in England in the second half of the 10th century. Its adoption there, replacing Insular script, was encouraged by the importation of continental European manuscripts by Saints Dunstan, Aethelwold, and Oswald. This script spread quite rapidly, being employed in many English centres for copying Latin texts. English scribes adapted the Carolingian script, giving it proportion and legibility. This new revision of the Caroline minuscule was called English Protogothic Bookhand. Another script that is derived from the Caroline Minuscule was the German Protogothic Bookhand. It originated in southern Germany during the second half of the 12th century.[20] All the individual letters are Caroline; but just as with English Protogothic Bookhand it evolved. This can be seen most notably in the arm of the letter h. It has a hairline that tapers out by curving to the left. When first read the German Protogothic h looks like the German Protogothic b.[21] Many more scripts sprang out of the German Protogothic Bookhand. After those came Bastard Anglicana, which is best described as:[17]
The coexistence in the Gothic period of formal hands employed for the copying of books and cursive scripts used for documentary purposes eventually resulted in cross-fertilization between these two fundamentally different writing styles. Notably, scribes began to upgrade some of the cursive scripts. A script that has been thus formalized is known as a bastard script (whereas a bookhand that has had cursive elements fused onto it is known as a hybrid script). The advantage of such a script was that it could be written more quickly than a pure bookhand; it thus recommended itself to scribes in a period when demand for books was increasing and authors were tending to write longer texts. In England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many books were written in the script known as Bastard Anglicana.
Genres
From ancient texts to medieval maps, anything written down for study would have been done with manuscripts. Some of the most common genres were bibles, religious commentaries, philosophy, law and government texts.
Biblical
"
Book of hours
A
Liturgical books and calendars
Along with Bibles, large numbers of manuscripts made in the Middle Ages were received in Church[clarification needed]. Due to the complex church system of rituals and worship these books were the most elegantly written and finely decorated of all medieval manuscripts. Liturgical books usually came in two varieties. Those used during mass and those for divine office.[17]
Most liturgical books came with a calendar in the front. This served as a quick reference point for important dates in Jesus' life and to tell church officials which saints were to be honored and on what day.
Modern variations
In the context of
In other contexts, however, the use of the term "manuscript" no longer necessarily means something that is hand-written. By analogy a typescript has been produced on a typewriter.[24]
Publishing
In book, magazine, and music publishing, a manuscript is an
Film and theatre
In film and theatre, a manuscript, or script for short, is an author's or dramatist's text, used by a theatre company or film crew during the production of the work's performance or filming. More specifically, a motion picture manuscript is called a screenplay; a television manuscript, a teleplay; a manuscript for the theatre, a stage play; and a manuscript for audio-only performance is often called a radio play, even when the recorded performance is disseminated via non-radio means.
Insurance
In insurance, a manuscript policy is one that is negotiated between the insurer and the policyholder, as opposed to an off-the-shelf form supplied by the insurer.
Preservation
About 300,000 Latin, 55,000 Greek, 30,000 Armenian and 12,000 Georgian medieval manuscripts have survived.[25] National Geographic estimates that 700,000 African manuscripts have survived at the University of Timbuktu in Mali.[26]
Repositories
Major U.S. repositories of medieval manuscripts include:
- The Morgan Library & Museum= 1,300 (including papyri)
- Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale = 1,100
- Walters Art Museum = 1,000
- Houghton Library, Harvard = 850
- Van Pelt Library, Penn = 650
- Huntington Library = 400
- Robbins Collection = 300
- Newberry Library = 260
- Cornell University Library = 150
Many European libraries have far larger collections.
Because they are books, pre-modern manuscripts are best described using bibliographic rather than archival standards. The standard endorsed by the
See also
Examples
- Gandhāran Buddhist texts – Ancient Buddhist texts
- Dead Sea Scrolls – Ancient Jewish manuscripts
- Spitzer Manuscript – oldest Sanskrit philosophical manuscript known (2nd-century CE)
- Archimedes Palimpsest – Greek parchment codex manuscript
- Codex Zouche-Nuttall – Pre-Columbian document of Mixtec pictography
- Codex Arundel – Book by Leonardo da Vinci
- Sinkang Manuscripts – Series of Chinese leases, mortgages, and other commerce contracts
- Heiligenstadt Testament – 1802 Letter written by Ludwig van Beethoven
General
- Calligraphy – Visual art related to writing
- Conservation and restoration of illuminated manuscripts – Care and treatment of decorated texts
- Manuscript culture – Culture depending on hand-written manuscripts
- Miniature (illuminated manuscript) – Picture in an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript
- Music manuscript – Handwritten sources of music
- Palm-leaf manuscript – Manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves
Notes
- ^ Examples for papyri that have survived outside Egypt include the Dead Sea Scrolls (in a dry climate), the Herculaneum papyri (buried during the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius) and the Ravenna papyri, which have survived in Italy
References
- ^ "Definition of MANUSCRIPT". Merriam-Webster. Archived from the original on 18 October 2017. Retrieved 15 April 2018.
- ^ "manuscript". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ "Manuscript". Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 6. 1933. p. 145.
- ^ Harper, Douglas. "Manuscript Archived 28 February 2008 at the Wayback Machine." Online Etymology Dictionary. November 2001. Accessed 10-11-2007.
- ^ "Medieval English Literary Manuscripts Archived 9 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine." www.Library.Rtruuochester.Edu. 22 June 2004. University of Rochester Libraries. Accessed 10-11-2007.
- The British Library. Accessed 12 March 2016.
- ^ "ms", "ms." and "MS" Archived 13 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine in The Free Dictionary (American Heritage 2011 and Random House Kernerman Webster's 2010). Accessed 12 March 2016.
- ^ "MSS", "mss" and "mss." Archived 13 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine in The Free Dictionary (American Heritage 2011, Collins 2014 and Random House Kernerman Webster's 2010). Accessed 12 March 2016.
- ^ "MSS" Archived 13 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine (MS. and ms., MSS. and mss.) in Dictionary.com LLC(Random House 2014 and Collins 2012). Accessed 12 March 2016.
- ^ Zhixin Shi; Srirangaraj Setlur; Venu Govindaraju. "Digital Enhancement of Palm Leaf Manuscript Images using Normalization Techniques" (PDF). Amherst, US: SUNY at Buffalo. Archived (PDF) from the original on 16 June 2010. Retrieved 23 June 2009.
- OCLC 830505350.
- OCLC 830505350.
- ^ a b "Le sort des manuscrits anciens du Mali au centre d'une conférence internationale à Bamako". United Nations (in French). 28 January 2015. Retrieved 25 September 2023.
- ^ a b "Mali : les précieux manuscrits de Tombouctou – Jeune Afrique". JeuneAfrique.com (in French). 21 January 2022. Retrieved 25 September 2023.
- ^ "The Brave Sage of Timbuktu: Abdel Kader Haidara | Innovators". Culture. 21 April 2014. Archived from the original on 18 March 2021. Retrieved 25 September 2023.
- S2CID 154362112. (see p. 416, table 1)
- ^ a b c d e f g Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
- ISBN 9780802077288.
- ^ Brown, Michelle P. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. Toronto,1990.
- ^ Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. "English Protogothic Bookhand." In Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 146–147.
- ^ Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. "German Protogothic Bookhand." In Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 149–150.
- ^ Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1983), xxvii
- ^ "Learn: Basic Tutorial". Les Enluminures. Archived from the original on 28 May 2019. Retrieved 28 May 2019.
- ^ Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, archived from the original on 22 February 2015, retrieved 22 February 2015.
- OCLC 872222210.
- ^ "700,000 ancient African books survived in Timbuktu University, Mali". 12 July 2020. Archived from the original on 21 November 2020. Retrieved 14 March 2021.
- ^ Pass, Gregory. Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2002.
External links
- British Library Glossary of manuscript terms, mostly relating to Western medieval manuscripts
- Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg
- Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh
- Chinese Codicology
- Digital Scriptorium
- Shapell Manuscript Foundation
- Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- The Sarasvati Mahal Library, has the richest collection of manuscripts in Sanskrit, Tamil, Marathi and Telugu
- The Schøyen Collection – the world's largest private collection of manuscripts of all types, with many descriptions and images
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. .
- Newberry Library Manuscript Search Archived 17 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine
- Getty Exhibitions
- Polish manuscripts in Sweden
- Medieval Manuscript Leaves, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries
- Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral – Digital facsimile of the 8th-century St Chad Gospels and Cathedral's 15th-century Wycliffe New Testament, 2010. Includes the ability to overlay images captured with 13 different bands of light, historical images (starting in 1887), and multispectral visualizations. Also includes sixteen interactive 3D renderings. College of Arts & Sciences, University of Kentucky
- Historical Image Overlays – See how an early medieval manuscript is aging
- Introduction to codicology : Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Roman and Arabic Mss by Philippe Bobichon