M. B. Parkes: Pages from the Past: Medieval Writing Skills and Manuscript Books. Edited by P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim

Abstract

The reason for not listing how many pages this book comprises and to rely instead on the number of chapters consists of the basic nature of this book, a collection of articles previously published by M. B. Parkes between 1992 and 2007 in a number of venues and here reproduced by P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim in recognition of Parkes’s outstanding contributions to palaeography and codicology. There is no need here to reminisce on Parkes’s specific accomplishment since any scholar in those two fields is well familiar with his work, both in the form of monographs and articles. The present collection deals with the following topics: (1) scribes and scripts; (2) punctuation; (3) readers; and (4) book provision. All these articles have proven their timeless value, and this collection thus makes available all at once some of Parkes’s most eminent investigations pertaining to medieval and early modern manuscripts and their production from the seventh to the seventeenth century. Of course, many of his fundamental ideas and observations can also be found well compiled and synthesized in one of his latest books, such as Their Hands Before Our Eye: A Closer Look at Scribes (2008), while here the editors have put together some truly outstanding gems of Parkes’s most important research in specific respects. It is not clear what the occasion for this republication might have been, since Parkes retired already in 1997, while the editors do not mention any particular birthday or any other event. They also refrain from giving us a biography or a bibliography of Parkes’s work, though they nicely round-off this anthology with an index of all manuscripts referred to and with a general index. Since there is no continuous numbering system throughout the book, each article is identified by a Roman numeral, which thus makes it easy to trace the concrete mention in the text.