The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311064598X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
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.

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311064598X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783110645934
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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 and Afro-American 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.

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts

The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110646129
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
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.

One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts

One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts PDF Author: Michael Friedrich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110495597
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
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.

Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes

Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes PDF Author: David Durand-Guédy
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111037193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
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 Medieval Manuscript Book

The Medieval Manuscript Book PDF Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107066190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

Thought Laboratories

Thought Laboratories PDF Author: Johannes Michael Junge Ruhland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This PhD dissertation develops incongruence as a critical category for the study of multi-text manuscripts. It argues that the makers of manuscripts in French, Occitan, and Franco-Italian between ca. 1250 and 1350 deployed incongruence to create "thought laboratories, " which are spaces for readers to engage in speculative thinking on targeted questions. In line with the habits of dialectical thinking of the time, readers were encouraged to reflect on the tensions that arise from the conflicting assessments, contradicting reasonings, and discrepant values found in the contents of multi-text manuscripts. This dissertation establishes the significant role of incongruence--defined as the dissonance in theme, tone, or logic between two or more co-present texts--in the production and reading of multi-text manuscripts of vernacular literature, which make up two thirds of vernacular books in the period 1250--1350. The introduction sets up the theoretical and historical framework for the dissertation by discussing the key notions of "text, " "book, " and "practice, " which it relates to literary studies, codicology, and anthropology. It defines thought laboratories as spaces of speculative thinking provided by multi-text manuscripts, and it proposes that incongruence was mobilized by the makers of manuscripts to direct readers' attention to points of contention with which they were invited to engage. Chapter 1 discusses how the inclusion of obscene parodic stanzas in a troubadour songbook from Italy creates a dialectical relationship between lyrics presented as canonical and parodic stanzas that deride them through their obscene imitations. The incongruence of the obscene stanzas within a songbook that presents its contents as cultural capital worth preserving and emulating invites inquiry into the formation of a canon and the role of songbooks in consecrating a cultural heritage. Chapter 2 examines a North-Eastern French manuscript that creates a debate between a cleric and the woman he woos. The debate thematizes clerical learning and the role of gender in claims to knowledge and assertions of sincerity, since the validity of the debaters' claims and their motivations are constantly questioned. Through the logical setup of the ending of the debate, which is incongruous with the logic of the debate that precedes it, readers face the difficulty of having to take sides in a debate they are supposed to judge impartially. When weighing the arguments, they get to perform the interrelation of gender and knowledge that the debaters expose. Chapter 3 considers the role of irony, discrepant character assessments, the presence of prose, and that of the Roman de Renart within a collection of Arthurian verse romances from North-Eastern France. By bending the expectations strongly associated with a very codified genre, these elements cast into relief the motivations that lie behind the glorification of chivalric heroes and the presentation of an ideal political order. Because several texts in this manuscript are interrupted or end ambivalently, it allows readers to think about alternative endings to the romances it contains. Chapter 4 examines a Northern Italian compilation of prose and verse historiographical material interspersed with didactic and sapiential texts. The incongruences of fact and of assessment, the incongruous co-presence of prose and verse, and the uneasy chronological ordering of texts draw attention to misfits in this collection. Readers, who are faced with a history in pieces, can reassemble texts into a history they deem more suitable, which leads to an interrogation of what constitutes suitable history. Through attention to the strategies of compilation, textual intervention, and illumination deployed by the makers of medieval manuscripts to direct the attention of readers, this dissertation argues for an intellectually engaged and creative way of reading vernacular literature in manuscripts between 1250 and 1350.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts PDF Author: Elaine Treharne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192843818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture PDF Author: Imre Galambos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110727102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
“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.

The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript

The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript PDF Author: Karen Pratt
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
ISBN: 3847107542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This collection of essays examines the various dynamic processes by which texts are preserved, transmitted, and modified in medieval multi-text codices, focusing on the meanings generated by new contexts and the possible reader experiences provoked by novel configurations and material presentation. Containing essays on text collections from many different European countries and in a wide range of medieval languages, this volume sheds new light on common trends and regional differences in the history of book production and reading practices.