SMC 36

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions.
The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume’s three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience.
The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors’ respective fields.

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FrontmatterI

ContentsV

Introduction 1
Antonella Brita, Janina Karolewski, Matthieu Husson, Laure Miolo, and Hanna Wimmer

Manuscripts for Performances

Making and Using Manuscripts in Theatre: The Material Dynamics of Two Nineteenth- Century Nathan der Weise Prompt Books 17
Alexander Weinstock and Martin Jörg Schäfer

Performative Aspects of Assyrian Celestial Divination and Babylonian Astronomical Diaries39
Mathieu Ossendrijver

Pocket-Sized Liturgy: A Fifteenth-Century Breviary from the Abbey of San Zeno Maggiore 55
Eva Ferro

Performing Multiplications Beyond the Text of Some Sanskrit Mathematical Commentaries 73
Agathe Keller

A Bibliophile Performing Eclipse Computations: Lewis Caerleon and His Notebook117
Laure Miolo

Manuscripts in Performances

Medieval Music Rolls, Scribes and Performance: The Extant Rolls of Thirteenth- Century English Polyphony189
Karen Desmond

Astronomical Computation as a Performance: Determining Planetary Positions with the Manuscript Erfurt, Angermuseum, 3134 211
Matthieu Husson and Samuel Gessner

The ‘Orchestration’ of Manuscripts: Ottonian Gospel Books from Bamberg Cathedral and Their Liturgical Use241
Jochen H. Vennebusch

Reading the Psalms: The Relationship between Visual Organisation and Ritual in Medieval Latin Psalter Manuscripts 273
Karin Becker

The Use of Anisong Manuscripts at Funerals in Northern Thailand and Laos 303
Silpsupa Jaengsawang

Manuscripts as Performers

The Palace as ‘Theatre of Knowledge’: Performing with Manuscripts in the Alfonsine Court337
Laura Fernández Fernández

Performing (with) Multiple-Text Manuscripts in the Making of the Ethiopian Sainthood: Matter and Devotion in Ethiopia between the Fourteenth Century and the Present Time371
Antonella Britta

Performing Renga with Manuscripts 425
Heidi Buck-Albulet

Liturgical Practice in the Light of Medieval Liturgical Books 453
Laura Albiero

Objects or Actors? Medieval Latin Manuscripts in Ritual Performances471
Felix Heinzer

Contributors511

Index of Written Artefacts515