Manuscript


A manuscript was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from the rendition as a printed version of the same.
Before the arrival of prints, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, music notation, explanatory figures, or illustrations.

Terminology

The word "manuscript" derives from the , and is first recorded in English in 1597. An earlier term in English that shares the meaning of a handwritten document is "hand-writ", which is first attested around 1175 and is now rarely used. The study of the writing in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography. The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS., ms or ms. for singular, and MSS., mss or mss. for plural are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, a doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages".
A manuscript may be a codex, a scroll, or bound differently or consist of loose pages. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.

Format

  • Format: Scroll; Codex

    Parts

  • Leaf
  • Cover
  • Flyleaf
  • Colophon
  • Incipit
  • Decoration; illustrations
  • Dimensions
  • Shelfmark or Signature in holding library. Paper size number often precedes signature number with a circulus following, but many libraries prefer spelling out the word of the paper size. Some libraries use an equal sign instead of the circulus and may change the side on which the paper size number appears for indexing purposes.
  • works/compositions included in same ms
  • codicological elements:
  • * deletions method: erasure? overstrike? dots above letters?
  • * headers/footers
  • * page format/layout: columns? text and surrounding commentary/additions/glosses?
  • * interpolations
  • * owners' marginal notations/corrections
  • * owner signatures
  • * dedication/inscription
  • * censor signatures
  • collation
  • foliation
  • page numeration
  • binding
  • manuscripts bound together in a single volume:
  • * convolute: volume containing different manuscripts
  • * fascicle: individual manuscript, part of a set.

    Materials

  • paper
  • parchment
  • papyrus to preserve text
  • ink
  • writing implement used
  • pencil to help with the writing process
  • pastedown

    Paleographic elements

  • script
  • dating
  • line fillers
  • rubrication
  • ruled lines
  • catchwords
  • historical elements of the ms: blood, wine etc. stains
  • condition:
  • * smokiness
  • * evidence of fire
  • * mold
  • * wormed

    Reproduction

The mechanical reproduction of a manuscript is called facsimile. Digital reproductions can be called scans or digital images.

History

Before the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press, all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. In the west, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls or books. Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper.
In Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, palm leaf manuscripts, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, were used dating back to the 5th century BCE or earlier, and in some cases continued to be used until the 19th century. In China, bamboo and wooden slips were used prior to the introduction of paper. In Russia, birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived.
Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by the late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes there. When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were sometimes made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.
The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy-wrappings, discarded in the middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried or stored in dry caves. Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia.
Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively humid Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those.
Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late 19th century. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different versions of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript.
In Southeast Asia, in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate, softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with a metal stylus. In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900 AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers. This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In Burma, the kammavaca, Buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In Italy some important Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in Bulgaria. Technically, these are all inscriptions rather than manuscripts.
In the Western world, from the classical period through the early centuries of the Christian era, manuscripts were written without spaces between the words, which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters. Hebrew manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called majuscule, those using all lower case are called minuscule. Usually, the majuscule scripts such as uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be cursive, that is, use little or no pen-lift.

Islamic world

were produced in different ways depending on their use and time period. Parchment was a common way to produce manuscripts. Manuscripts eventually transitioned to using paper in later centuries with the diffusion of paper making in the Islamic empire. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia, its use and production spread to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa during the 8th century.

Africa

4,203 of Timbuktu's manuscripts were burned or stolen during the armed conflict in Mali between 2012 and 2013. 90% of these manuscripts were saved by the population organized around the NGO "Sauvegarde et valorisation des manuscrits pour la défense de la culture islamique". Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022. An international consultation on the safeguarding, accessibility and promotion of ancient manuscripts in the Sahel was held at the UNESCO office in Bamako in 2020.

Western world

Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use the codex format, which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity. Parchment or vellum, as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus, which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present almost exclusively in the very dry climate of Egypt, although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins, the quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it was made from sheepskin.
Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means "of calf"/ "made from calf". For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane" is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing.