SMC 1

Script and writing were among the most important inventions in human history, and until the invention of printing, the handwritten book was the primary medium of literary and cultural transmission. Although the study of manuscripts is already quite advanced for many regions of the world, no unified discipline of ‘manuscript studies’ has yet evolved which is capable of treating handwritten books from East Asia, India and the Islamic world equally alongside the European manuscript tradition. This book, which aims to begin the interdisciplinary dialogue needed to arrive at a truly systematic and comparative approach to manuscript cultures worldwide, brings together papers by leading researchers concerned with material, philological and cultural aspects of different manuscript traditions.

Contents

Europe

Scribal Annotation as Evidence of Learning in Manuscripts from the First Byzantine Humanism:11
The “Philosophical Collection”
by Christian Brockmann

Orient and Africa

Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture37
by Alessandro Bausi
Arabic Manuscripts on the Periphery: Northwest Africa, Yemen and China79
by Florian Sobieroj
Multiglossia in West African Manuscripts: The Case of Borno, Nigeria113
by Dmitry Bondarev

South Asia

Indian Manuscripts 159
by Dominik Wujastyk
Gandharan Scrolls: Rediscovering an Ancient Manuscript Type183
by Stefan Baums
A Palaeographic Study of a Buddhist Manuscript from the Gilgit Region: A Glimpse into a Scribes’ Workshop227
by Gudrun Melzer

Central Asia

Tibetan manuscripts: Between History and Science275
by Agnieszka Helman-Ważny
Towards a Tibetan Palaeography: Developing a Typology of Writing Styles in Early Tibet299
by Sam van Schaik

East Asia

Punctuation Marks in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts341
by Imre Galambos
The Archive Inside: Manuscripts Found within Chinese Religious Statues359
by James Robson

Index375