Keeping Note(book)s
Research Field G
People write notes in different contexts and for different reasons: to remember information, to organise their thoughts and activities, or to prepare drafts of more systematised projects. As brief written observations or thoughts related to everyday activities, notes take the form of ephemeral manuscripts such as a slip of paper with a shopping list. When producers keep notes of this type for longer periods of time, they may compile them in manuscripts especially made for such purpose, as, for example, notebooks, diaries, and logs. Understood in a different way, namely as an exegetical annotation or comment on a work, the process of writing a note may lead to the modification of an extant written artefact by the addition of new content in the open spaces of a manuscript of any kind. An example for this is the addition of exegetical ‘paracontent’ around the core text of a codex. Different aspects of the production, transmission, and preservation of either type of notes and the artefacts that contain them are the focus of RFG.
David Durand-Guédy, Jürgen Paul and Silpsupa Jaengsawang study the dynamics at play in the production of written artefacts that were conceived as open or ongoing projects. In the Introduction to the edited volume on Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes, David Durand-Guédy and Jürgen Paul have layed out some of the universal aspects of the material and contents of notebooks, diaries, and related written artefacts. Adopting a codicological approach, Jürgen Paul also discusses possible formats, visual organisations, and multilayered dimensions in Central Asian notebooks in a paper included in the same volume. Together with a cross-disciplinary team of UWA researchers, Silpsupa Jaengsawang (forthcoming) investigates the complex production processes of leporello and whirlwind paper manuscripts from Thailand containing secular and religious texts accompanied by indistinct notes, scribbles, and growing entries added from time to time by different scribes.
Christian Brockmann, José Maksimczuk, Olivier Bonnerot, and Katerina Grigoriadou investigate the complexities of adding long apparatuses of exegetical notes in open areas of Byzantine manuscripts. Combining approaches from the humanities (codicology, palaeography, textual criticism) and the natural sciences (the chemical composition of the ink), they have obtained insights into the different stages of production of the notes (two papers forthcoming).
Said Aljoumani and Benedikt Reier have investigated the use of notes compiled as preparatory material for more and more systematised content in a paper that examines a rediscovered type of document: audition attendance lists of a public reading of the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. They discuss in depth the role of the attendance lists in the production process of a better-known type of document, the audition certificates. A similar research question is pursued by José Maksimczuk with regard to Greek manuscripts. In two papers, he explores the philological connections between a lost manuscript transmitting a corpus of exegetical notes on Aristotle’s Categories (today preserved in three codices) and Georgios-Gannadios Scholarios’ long commentary on that treatise. Focusing on a corpus of palm-leaf and mulberry paper manuscripts of liturgical content that were used as drafts for printed books, Silpsupa Jaengsawang (forthcoming) has reconstructed the different steps in the printing process by analysing the numerous notes the printers wrote in the manuscripts.
Spokesperson: José Maksimczuk
