This work reframes Ernest Cadman Colwell’s magisterial essay “Scribal Habits in Early Papyri: A Study in the Corruption of the Text.”1 Fourteen essays expand the discussion of scribal habits beyond Greek New Testament Papyri to examine Near Eastern manuscripts and focus on the textualized contexts apart from the manuscript’s primary literary text (p. xii). Each study emphasizes what could be characterized as the material culture of a manuscript, what is called paratextuality or peritexts. On the one hand, the paratextual components can be contrasted with the work represented in the manuscript. On the other hand, peritexts are not autonomous but interact significantly with the principal content.This scholarly program is often labeled New Philology (or Editorial Theory), and it shifts the object of study for textual scholars in three important ways: it centers the study on (1) manuscripts themselves as actual cultural realia, (2) the scribes that produced these manuscripts, and (3) the users that interacted with these manuscripts. The goal is, in the words of J. R. Royse, to “virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder” and tell each manuscript’s “full story” (p. xiii). Since many, if not most, extant (especially literary) texts from the ancient Near East are not written by an original author, scholars would do well to consider the place of subsequent contributors to these works and more carefully attend to the details actuated in New Philology.Kiraz and Schmidtke should be commended for producing such a far-reaching, expansive volume. It contains a veritable smorgasbord of scribal practices and realizations. By incorporating such a diverse group of texts from different times, places, and languages, the editors provide a tableau onto which the reader can imagine their own engagement with textual material. Users of this volume will find serendipity not only in the examination of previously known manuscripts but also in those farther afield of their primary research interests. While several threads weave through many of the essays, the wide breadth of topics, time periods, and cultures precludes generalized criticism. Perhaps the best encapsulation is to share some of my own interactions as someone interested in biblical and broader ANE studies. Both the descriptions and reflections on each essay are necessarily terse.Elizabeth Buchanan describes the factors leading to the use of diaresis in an archive of Greek manuscripts in the sixth century AD from Aphrodito, Egypt. Generally, the amanuenses, notaries, and contract writers used the dots inconsistently. However, their use increased noticeably if the writer himself spelled his name with diaresis or if it was found in certain formulaic date structures. Other common customary expressions, however, are less likely to incorporate the dots. It is intriguing to consider how this paratextual element could provide additional information on paleographic dating, scribal training methods, and even individual identification for unattributed documents.Fien de Block examines marginal notations on Ibn al-Majdī’s taqwīm texts from the late Mamluk Sultanate describing timekeeping and the astronomic position of the seven heavenly luminaries. One is led to consider from their marginalia how these texts were used as didactic instruments and helped some users conjecture about astrology. De Block points to the general notion that to their detriment many tend to study mathematical texts not as artifacts with historical contexts but purely as content. Yet content inescapably has a textualized context. A similar preoccupation could be said to motivate certain modernistic tendencies in textual criticism of other literary works.Zuzana Gažákovà describes the textualization of the Arabic oral narratives, called sīra šaʿbīya. Supplemented annotations point to their use as memory aids in public performance or for private use. While it is broadly assumed that nearly all literature in the ANE originates in oral recitation, these texts demonstrate actual data at this liminality.Aslihan Gürbüzel focuses on “middle authors” in the Ottoman reading culture. These annotators created a type of portable majlis that appended paratextual marginalia serving as a place of dialogue to guide the reader between different editions of a work (p. 74). Middle authors were considered as authoritative and contributed to the standardization in the manuscript tradition. This cultural practice challenges the outmoded ideas that “original” authors alone imbue authority and that textual standardization only occurred after the technological innovation of print.Binyamin Katzoff contributes two essays. The first examines the application of standardized chapter divisions in the Mishnah to the corresponding sections of the Tosefta in the Erfurt manuscript. These functional divisions place boundaries on how Tosefta is studied, understood, and interpreted as well as the overall view of its dependence on Mishnah rather than as an independent work. The second essay describes the ways that a contemporary “second-hand” scribe corrected a Tosefta manuscript to the standard textual tradition found in the Vienna manuscript. These emendations demonstrate the diversity of scribal opinion. But they also suggest the progression away from the idea that “different manuscripts of a work transmitted identical content in nearly similar language” toward the view that there existed a correct and exact wording of the legal rulings (p. 121). Both essays illustrate scribal habits that were often diverse but simultaneously indicate legitimizing attempts to revise their diverse manuscript evidence to produce more standardized editions.Aryeh Krawczyk uncovers ways that a thirteenth-century author encoded kabbalistic messages with paratextual elements. In Sefer ha-Ot, R. Abraham Abulafia used gematria of 26, 52, 78, and 91 to indicate references to Metatron/Yahoel. These peritexts include enlarged letters, marginalia, and other sigla that annotate these values. Such devices operate above the grammatical level of language and create meaningful—albeit concealed—messages in apparent “scribal errors” (e.g., the ketiv-qere of מזה in Exod. 4:2, pp. 128–32).Jonathan Loopstra presents Syriac shemohē manuscripts that represent some of the earliest evidence of vocalization and punctuation of the Bible, dating from the time of the Syriac Renaissance. Based on their similarity to the medieval Hebrew compellations (cf. serugin manuscripts), these booklets are commonly labeled the Syriac “Masora.” They provide excerpted lists of vocalized words, interpretive glosses, punctuation, and other paratextuality. They appear to have served (at some level) as memory aids for recitation, but the manuscripts also evidence multiformity and variant readings eschewing a single, standardized textual tradition (p. 161).Elvira Martín-Contreras describes the paratextual annotations, the so-called Masora marginalia, found in the earliest extant medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts. Their location, function, format, content, and purpose are introduced as components of a manuscript culture responsible for creating and transmitting multiple-text manuscripts (p. 186). Most importantly, she concludes that the differences between the manuscripts are not incidental but must be evaluated individually to consider how the diversity of the annotations constitute meaningful scribal differences rather than simply seeing them as deficient witnesses to an assumed comprehensive MT tradition.Shiva Mihan offers a study of ʿArża-dāsht, a Persian document from the Timurid dynasty. In addition to a discussion of artists and scribes in the atelier of Prince Baysunghur, Mihan provides information about scribal work rates at that time to further hone the dating of the manuscript.Marion Pragt examines a ninth-century compilation of Syriac commentaries in the marginal notes of a scribe named Simeon to demonstrate how it was read and used as an early witness of Eastern Christian exegesis on the Song of Songs.T. C. Schmidt presents various scribal practices relating to the book of Revelation in the Eastern Christian traditions to promote its authoritative status in a context of broad canonical suspicion.Szilvia Sövegjártó portrays the oldest material of the volume—the lexical and phonetic annotations used as interpretive aids in the Sumerian glossographic tradition. While these explanations are often ignored in cuneiform textual scholarship as insignificant textual information, Sövegjártó argues that it demonstrates important evidence concerning the education and hermeneutical knowledge of Old Babylonian scribes.Finally, Robert Turnbull engages one of the evidential claims for a pre-Islamic Arabic Gospel. He rebuffs Anton Baumstark’s proof that the liturgical rubrics found in early Gospel manuscripts demonstrate a pre-Islamic translation as having “relied too heavily on a single defective manuscript” (p. 303). Yet his collocation of fifteen manuscripts of the Jerusalem lectionary cycle do show important evidence for the history of Christian liturgy, particularly in the years after the Arab conquest.