Decoding the material book: cultural residue  in medieval manuscripts

Kwakkel, Erik

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107588851.004

Cited by 30 publications

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“…The amount of decoration and the type of pigments used had their own story to tell, as did the type and size of script, the professional expertise of the scribe, the arrangement of the text on the page, the pricking, lineation, etc. (Caie 2008; CharzyĔska-Wójcik in press a., b.; Kwakkel 2015;Nichols 2008Nichols , 2009Nichols , 2013Nichols , 2015Taylor 2015). These and other physical features of the manuscript reveal the circumstances of its production and reception, and offer meaningful clues as to the status of the text, thereby also reflecting the status of the language in which the text was written.…”

Section: The (Lost) Significance Of Medieval Manuscriptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallax: Looking at the Medieval through the Modern Lens

Charzyńska-Wójcik

2016

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The objective of the paper was to articulate the gap between the medieval manuscript and its modern editions. It emphasises the need to study medieval texts in their natural context, i.e. against the manuscript codex as only then do they speak in full voice. While the usefulness of electronic editions is indisputable, a linguist working with a modern edition of a medieval text must be aware of how far it departs from the text it intends to represent. Therefore, wherever possible, it is advisable to examine manuscript scans which are now widely accessible on internet sites of the libraries housing manuscript resources. It is of paramount importance not only as a way of verifying corpus examinations but also because manuscript examinations complement the findings based on electronic data by offering invaluable clues encoded in the materiality of the manuscript. This postulate is relevant both for historical linguistic analyses and translation studies, and is equally valid for literary studies.

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