Although similar, the terms ‘sacred text’ and ‘sacred scripture’ are not interchangeable. In my view, ‘sacred scriptures’ are physical materials that embody the transcendental words recognised as ‘sacred text’ in tangible form. Since the Abrahamic religions hold their scriptures in such high regard, the distinction between ‘sacred text’ and ‘sacred scripture’ becomes blurred within these traditions. By contrast, Indian religions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism seem to be more careful to maintain this distinction, as they attribute greater prestige to orality. Even when their sacred texts were written down, their main function was not usually to establish a connection between the author and the reader, i.e., to be read, but rather to be worshipped as relics. This article aims to introduce the Indian textual tradition as a possible counterpoint to the Judaeo-Christian approach. It provides a general overview of oral and manuscript culture in Indian religions and examines whether the high reverence attributed to the oral transmission, the lower prestige of the writing, and the worship of manuscripts can be understood as strategies to avoid those discrepancies, which are known as the ‘sins of reading’ (‘peccata lectionis’) in Western civilization.

Williram of Ebersberg presents his Latin-German Expositio in Cantica canticorum (ca. 1080) as an engagement with the text as ‘body’ which relates to the love poetry of the Song of Songs and realises it on the parchment in a specific layout. The essay argues that the unity of the text and commentary in the visual layout is transmitted differently from the eleventh to the sixteenth century and is an expression of a monastic manuscript culture.

This article explores the historical trajectory of the Javanese word utawi within the tradition of interlinear translation of Arabic Islamic texts from the 16th to the 19th century. While in contemporary usage—particularly within pesantren communities where this translation practice has largely survived—utawi serves as a marker of the mubtadaʾ (subject) in nominal sentences, earlier evidence reveals a more layered history. Based on close philological analysis of manuscripts, the study demonstrates that in the 16th and 17th centuries utawi was primarily employed to render the wāw al-istiʾnāf, an Arabic particle that signals the beginning of a new sentence or clause. Only gradually, especially during the 18th century, did utawi become stabilized as a marker of the mubtadaʾ, a pattern that continued into the 19th century and even today. This diachronic shift highlights not only the changing role of a single lexical item but also broader pedagogical and linguistic transformations in the Javanese Islamic tradition. By tracing these developments, the article contributes to a more precise understanding of the internal mechanics of interlinear translation and proposes that patterns of utawi usage can serve as valuable indicators for the dating of otherwise anonymous manuscripts. Ultimately, this study situates utawi as both a linguistic key and a historical witness to the intellectual practices that shaped Islamic learning in Java. Keywords: utawi, Arabic-Javanese interlinear translation, pesantren, Islamic manuscript culture, mubtadaʾ, wāw al-istiʾnāf.

Abstract As a form of art, literature is always concerned with human experience. The human agents inscribed in works of literature are commonly divided into several levels, the main categories being author, narrator (or lyrical subject), and character. As key concepts of literary studies, these are usually discussed based on modern definitions, and with good reason. This introduction to the special issue on “Author, Narrator, and Character in Japanese Literature to 1900,” however, takes a different approach and focuses on the historical dimension of these concepts. It traces changing notions of authorship in the textual traditions of court tales ( monogatari ) and women’s diary literature ( nikki bungaku ) from the Heian to the Edo period. It also examines the responsibility of scribes and readers as well as the authority of the text as an entity, considering characteristics of premodern Japanese manuscript culture. While a distinction between author and narrator was not perceived in the modern sense, there are exceptions to this rule. Furthermore, it can be shown that there is a close affinity between authors and certain characters. An analysis of different configurations of author, narrator, and character leads to the conclusion that these may be regarded as part of one continuum.

The manuscript culture of antiquity and the Middle Ages rendered texts permeable to foreign insertions –– known as interpolations –– as they were recopied. Despite how common interpolation is, however, it remains understudied, in part because of a lingering unsavory reputation, but also because scholars lack an adequate vocabulary to describe its permutations. This article offers a descriptive taxonomy of interpolation as a shared framework that will facilitate future investigations and cataloguing efforts.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a result of the Hindi–Nagari movement, many Indian languages such as Maithili, Bhojpuri and Magahi were reduced to dialects of Hindi. The recent surge in critical literature dealing with the Hindi public sphere barely pays attention to the historical processes that led to the marginalisation of Maithili despite having its own distinctive script, rich literary heritage, regional consciousness and millions of speakers spread over parts of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. This article argues that the coming of print in Mithila turned out to be detrimental to the distinctive identity of Maithili. While doing so, it examines the twentieth-century Maithili public sphere and demonstrates that the substitution of Mithilakshar, supposedly the original script of Maithili, for Devanagari in print was a curious tale of the disappearance of a fully developed script. The article engages with this complexity and, in the process, corrects the assumption that Maithili is the language of the upper caste of the region. Instead, it proposes that it was only after the advent of print and transition from oral and manuscript culture to print culture that Maithili began to be associated with the upper-caste elites.

Abstract This article will demonstrate the intersectional nature of manuscript and print, as well as the importance of the printing press to Recusant readers. The article will consider TCD 352 as a manuscript or notebook for whom the material and immaterial nature of the book changes as both the Counter‐Reformation movement intensifies and the anthologies and commonplace books proliferate, exploring the ways in which manuscript culture allows for adaptation, even of printed sources. Finally, the article will give particular attention to the Thomas More material copied in the manuscript, providing evidence that it was copied from the 1557 Collection by Rastell in a way that indicates a certain reverence for the materiality of that published work amongst Recusant readers.

This paper examines the Nanatsu-dera manuscript of the Dafangguang Rulai Xingqi Weimizang Jing (RXWJ) through the lens of scribal practices, with a focus on variant characters (yitizi, 異體字) and textual transmission. As a “separately produced scripture” (bie sheng jing, 別生經), the RXWJ was not included in the woodblock-printed editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon, which limited its circulation and made manuscript copies—such as the Nanatsu-dera manuscript—critical for reconstructing its textual evolution, transmission, and scribal modifications. A detailed paleographic investigation reveals scribal variants, orthographic fluidity, and phonetic substitutions, illustrating both intentional adaptations and unintentional errors in textual transmission. Comparative analysis with Dunhuang fragments and the Taishō Canon further contextualizes these variations, shedding light on the interpretive challenges scribes and readers face. The findings suggest that the Nanatsu-dera manuscript underwent three stages of transmission: (1) it originated from the Fifty-Fascicle edition circulating in China, (2) it was used as a base text (diben, 底本) for manuscript copying in Japan, and (3) it was subsequently re-copied and preliminarily collated by Japanese scribes. By tracing scribal variants and textual transmission through a paleographic approach, this research underscores the critical role of manuscript culture in preserving texts outside the canonical tradition, offering new insights into the mechanisms of Buddhist textual transmission and adaptation in medieval East Asia.

This study explores the literary practice of excerpting in Syriac manuscripts through a computational-quantitative analysis, contributing to the emerging field of Syriac material philology. The primary objective is to offer a "big picture" charting of Syriac excerpting as a non-authorial literary practice. Using digitized data from the British Library's Syriac manuscript collection, the study analyzes nearly 20,000 excerpts, introducing the Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) metric to quantify and compare excerpting practices across manuscripts. The results reveal that most manuscripts contain fewer than 20 excerpts, but a small number show much higher levels of excerpting, highlighting the immense intellectual and literary activities implicated in their production. These high-EPM manuscripts appear across multiple genres, indicating that excerpting was a widespread and essential cultural activity rather than confined to specific literary types. The study also finds that manuscripts with the highest EPM values are concentrated between the 6th and 9th centuries CE, corresponding with a period of intense literary compilation in late antiquity. This pattern reflects the importance of excerpting in knowledge organization, aligning with broader trends in the canonization of texts within Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman traditions. The research emphasizes the limitations of earlier cataloging approaches, which obscure non-authorial practices by focusing on authors and texts. By reorienting data through computational analysis, the study provides new insights into the role of excerpting in Syriac manuscript culture. This approach demonstrates the value of digital tools in material philology, uncovering patterns that bridge genres and timeframes, and identifying high-EPM manuscripts as key sites of intellectual and cultural activity in the Syriac literary tradition.

Abstract This article analyses the role of the Marshal partition (1247) in political discourse and manuscript transmission in early modern Ireland. It is argued that the early modern interest in the Marshal partition reflects the vulnerability and the identity crisis of the English of Ireland due to British and Irish politics and changing European ideas of power and peerage. Overall, this article uses the Marshal partition as a key to open a broader discussion about noble, political, and manuscript cultures in early modern Britain and Ireland and to advocate for a greater permeation of the ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ historiographical divide.

Manuscript conservation is vital for safeguarding cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and societal values. This study explores traditional manuscript storage and preservation practices in Jember Regency through a philological approach encompassing inventory, conservation, and digitization. Unlike previous research, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and solutions in manuscript conservation, highlighting the intersection of traditional and modern preservation techniques. It addresses two key research questions: (1) What is the current state of manuscript culture in Jember Regency? and (2) How are manuscripts traditionally preserved in this region? Employing a philological methodology, the study involves manuscript identification, conservation initiatives, and digital preservation strategies to ensure long-term accessibility. The findings reveal that traditional storage methods significantly impact manuscript longevity, necessitating an integrated approach that merges indigenous conservation practices with digital preservation. This research contributes to manuscript preservation efforts, particularly in Jember Regency, by underscoring the role of local communities in protecting historical documents. Furthermore, the knowledge embedded within these manuscripts provides invaluable historical and cultural insights, reinforcing their significance as a foundational source for future scholarship and heritage preservation.

Abstract: This essay argues that scholarship on Middle English manuscripts is in need of more comprehensive, large-scale studies to help address foundational questions, many of which can be answered in no other way than prioritizing breadth over the in-depth study of specific codices. In particular, I hone in on three lacunae in our knowledge about late medieval English manuscript culture that, I suggest, can only be redressed by largescale studies. First, I posit that scholars in our field are often ill-equipped to contextualize claims about any particular manuscript, given that we do not even have an approximate count of how many Middle English manuscripts survive. Second, I contend that we need large-scale studies in order to assess the relationship between Middle English and French and Latin in late medieval England. And third, I argue that such approaches could profitably be brought to bear on assessing bespoke versus speculative production. In closing, I point to the sorts of quantitative codicology practiced by continental European scholars as a model for Anglophone manuscript studies. Only by a willingness to learn from such methods will we begin addressing the fundamental lacunae that currently limit much of our understanding of late medieval English manuscript culture.

Purāṇa is a Sanskrit term reserved for a genre of Hindu narrative literature that grapples with themes like the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, the genealogies of gods and sages, the dynastic chronicles of royal figures, and the cyclical movement of time, among others. Purāṇas were recast into Persian genres throughout the second millennium CE, and a notable collection of Persian purāṇa manuscripts therefore survives today. This essay examines the paratextual elements of Persian purāṇa manuscripts with the aim of elucidating how the ethos of literary communities transcended religious and communal boundaries in early modern and colonial South Asia. In so doing, it reflects on the limits and challenges of deploying paratextual theory in the context of Persian and South Asian manuscript cultures.

Ogam is well known as a writing system invented for the Irish language and used extensively for inscriptions on stone monuments across Ireland and Britain between the late fourth and seventh centuries. Although the script has primarily been examined in the context of early medieval archaeology and epigraphy, its long afterlife as an integral part of Irish manuscript culture from the medieval to modern periods has also been acknowledged. The present contribution seeks to add to the existing scholarship on manuscript ogam by discussing the transmission of ideas about the script as a cryptic device into the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on a recently discovered notebook, National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh) Advocates’ Manuscript 50.3.11 (or ‘The Minchin Manuscript’), which consists almost entirely of healing charms written in ogam.

The Mongols’ Baghdad: Knowledge Transmission through Manuscript Cultures before and after the Conquest – Introduction

The Mongols’ Baghdad: Knowledge Transmission through Manuscript Cultures before and after the Conquest – Introduction

English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution. By Steven W. May

One of the manuscripts in the rich collection at Leiden University Library was written by a cavalry soldier named Kabudlu Mustafa Vasfi. He was a deli (irregu- lar horseman) in the Ottoman army in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and travelled to many places in the eastern Anatolian and Balkan regions. In 1834 Kabudlu wrote a work called Tevārīḫ, in which he discusses his travels and memories. In the manuscript, he states that he composed the tevārīḫ (chronicle) as an account of the cities he visited and the wars he witnessed. In this article, I discuss the reasons why a deli soldier would pen his memoirs by considering the context of Ottoman book culture in the nineteenth century. The place that chronicles, autobiographies and travelogues occupied in that period is worthy of greater attention, and they shed light on how the narratives of an Ottoman soldier were influenced during the trans- formation from manuscript culture to the era of the printing press. In that regard, by analysing the manuscript, which was written on the eve of print capitalism in Otto- man territories, I try to answer the question of why Kabudlu Mustafa Vasfi referred to his extraordinary travel notes as a chronicle (tevārīḫ). Besides examining two journeys, namely the travels of the author as well as the travels of the manuscript itself, I also discuss other travelogues, chronicles, memoirs and diaries from that period to dem- onstrate the importance of this ego-document written by an irregular soldier within the context of Ottoman literary traditions.

This paper presents the evolving work of the Decameron Collective, a group of women Canadian scholars and artists who, during the early COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022), built a body of creative works as an interactive, virtual gallery of visual, audio, and textual media inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). More than a gloss on Boccaccio’s text, Decameron 2.0 is a feminist project of collaborative and curational worldbuilding. We describe our practice of co-creating and curating, making a case for interdisciplinary praxis-led approaches of research-creation that embody both a mode of inquiry and a practice of feminist ethics and care. We describe the world of Decameron 2.0 – its courtyards, caves, and rooms of spells, and the affordances of the webGL spatial navigation that contributes to the intermediality within and between the works. The intertextual spatialization of works in Decameron 2.0 and the non-linear exploratory affordances of the virtual environment extend into our academic thinking/theorizing through centripetal and centrifugal frames. In homage to the polyphony of mediaeval manuscript culture, and as an intervention against the flattening of so much academic discourse, we use illustrations, hyperlinks, margins, page layout, and metacommentary. This paratextuality illustrates what we call thinking-together and honours the differences among our individual voices and perspectives. This paper contributes to current critical and cultural understandings of making, care, communication, and feminist practice and models how multi-institutional collaboration can be reshaped in the era of and after COVID-19.

Abstract The use of scalable vector graphics (SVG) in the study of pre-modern handwriting (palaeography) to date has been extremely limited, especially amongst scholars of the medieval Latin West and its manuscript culture(s). Informed by the author’s experience of using vector graphics for over a decade in researching and teaching medieval Latin palaeography in UK and EU Higher Education, this short article offers a starting point for further conversation. Following a general introduction and a concise survey of current practice, it discusses some basic SVG editing tools and exemplifies the utility of their application in three key areas of palaeographic study (tracing, analysis, and visualization) before highlighting, by way of conclusion, potential avenues of future development with the aim of enabling and encouraging colleagues to make greater use of SVG in their research and teaching.