Now in printLooking Back at the 'Manuscript of the Month'

19 August 2022

Photo: CSMC

Over the course of ten years, the essay series 'Manuscript of the Month' has brought together an array of rare, curious, sometimes puzzling, and always instructive written artefacts. All episodes from the years 2015 to 2017 are now available as a high-quality bilingual printed issue.

The Manuscript of the Month, which, since 2020, has been continued under the broader title Artefact of the Month, is an institution at CSMC. Started in 2012, there are now over 120 episodes of the series. Each month, it presents a written artefact whose story makes it special. This may but does not necessarily mean that it is at the heart of a certain research project at CSMC. Rather, Manuscript of the Month brings together a series of rare, noteworthy, sometimes puzzling, but always instructive finds that researchers have often made on the side paths of their work.

The essays in this series stem from their authors’ curiosity, which they want to pass on. Their addressees are not scholars, but all those who are interested in written artefacts without a professional background. Manuscript of the Month not only offers a particularly suitable introduction to CSMC’s research topics; the series also illustrates what is distinctive about the Centre: the starting point of all questions and analyses is always the written artefact as a physical object with a specific context of origin, material, and history of use, embedded in a social and cultural context.