Manuscript Cultures
Studies in Manuscript Cultures‘Manuscript Albums and their Cultural Contexts’: New Volume of SMC Out Now
22 November 2023
Photo: De Gruyter
The new volume of ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. As usual, it is available open access.
Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. Manuscript Albums and their Cultural Contexts: Collectors, Objects, and Practices – whose contributors come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history – explores a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women.
This volume is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.
Edited by Janine Droese and Janina Karolewski, Manuscript Albums and their Cultural Contexts is the 34th volume of the Series Studies in Manuscript Cultures. Like all previous volumes, it is available open access and can be downloaded from our website.