Who Should Prepare a Catalogue of Manuscripts and for Whom? The Importance of Combining Codicological and Textual Approach in Manuscript Studies
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | A manuscript, and even more a multi-text manuscript, is a complex entity consisting of a physical component (the manuscript as a codex or a compound of more codices or codicological units) and an intangible one (the manuscript as a witness to one ore more texts), which intertwine a history (the object, produced to bear one or more texts, might have not always been like we know it today) and a tradition (the texts come from one or more models which were physical, in turn). Whatever the main focus and purpose, codicological or textual, of studying one or more manuscripts, the other approach cannot be overlooked, if not at risk of terrible blunders. Thus the textual scholar will have to consider his witness as a structural object with its own history, change and damage over time; while the codicologist will have to consider his codex as a text-bearing cultural artefact which, unless it is an authograph, has one or more models behind. A catalogue of manuscript cannot linger on details of textual transmission, however, as an access tool to book collections, it must provide useful information to all those scholars who deal with manuscripts studies. Through a few case studies, the talk will deal with concepts like the need of identifying texts in manuscripts or at least helping other scholars to identify them, perspective mistakes in describing the completeness or structure of a text, bibliographic deficiencies, codicological material evidence vs. diachronic approach in textual criticism, textual units of transmission and, most of all, the need of a multidisciplinary approach in manuscript studies. |
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