Studies in Manuscript Cultures‘Tied and Bound’: New Volume of SMC Out Now

24 August 2023

Photo: De Gruyter

The new volume of ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted by different manuscript cultures to achieve the cohesion of codicological units, thus offering a comparative frame to understand a phenomenon that is of essential importance in the study of manuscripts.

Every manuscript culture has developed physical and technical methods of its own to keep writing surfaces, covers, and other book components together, thus producing ‘codicological units’. Regardless of the way in which the cohesion of a codicological unit is actually achieved, we may subsume all of these strategies under the common term of ‘binding’. Binding deeply impacts the materiality of manuscripts, and the physical determination of a codicological unit also has consequences regarding the perception and arrangement of text. Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding makes the first attempt at an overview of binding across several manuscript cultures.

The volume consists of twelve case studies, structured in three parts. The first part, ‘Overviews and traditions’, hosts surveys and overviews, in some cases the first systematic analysis ever attempted, of binding in the relevant manuscript culture. The second part, ‘Features of binding’, provides specific, fresh perspectives on particular binding issues. The third part, ‘Legacy of binding’, explores phenomena of changes dynamically taking place in some book forms’ bindings.

Edited by Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich, Tied and Bound is the 33rd volume of the Series Studies in Manuscript Cultures. Like all previous volumes, it is available open access and can be downloaded from our website.