Reading a Manuscript Catalogue

While often taken for granted as a skill medievalists possess, making sense of a manuscript catalogue is not a simple act - usually requiring a knowledge of a complex technical and conceptual vocabulary (often abbreviated from Latin). This exercise seeks to teach students how to see the practical use of manuscript catalogues and how to make sense of a typical manuscript catalogue description (in English).

Exercise:

Tracking down the manuscripts of Richard of Poitiers?

Bibliography

[currently under development - in process of drafting]

• Scragg, Donald. “Reading a Manuscript Description.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts, edited by Orietta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne, 39–48. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

• A key reference work is the Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts, by Gregory A. Pass put together for the Bibliographic Standards Committee: Rare Books and Manuscripts Section.

• Suarez, Michael F. ‘Book History from Descriptive Bibliographies’. In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Leslie Howsam, 199–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139152242.015.

• IMS, chps 8 and 9; pp. 117-134.

• Jeffrey Pomerantz, "Introduction," Metadata (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015): p. 1-18 (on slack)

• Shailor - Introduction and Principles of Cataloguing Medieval Manuscripts

• A Handlist of Manuscripts in the Schoenberg Collection (UPenn)

• Eric Johnson and Scott Gwara. "The Butcher’s Bill”: Using the Schoenberg Database to Reverse-Engineer Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Books from Constituent Fragments

  • The Schoenberg Database can be consulted online here.

• Take a quick look at Ottawa in Conway and Fagin-Davis, Directory of Collections in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings (on slack);

  • The Conway and Fagin-Davis work is a supplement to the DeRicci census – an excellent description of whose process of development is described in Nigel Ramsay's article "Towards a Universal Catalogue of Early Manuscripts: Seymour de Ricci’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada." In Manuscript Studies 1.1.

Digitized Manuscript Project (with well developed prose description)

• Look at the Codex Gigas itself, but pay more attention to the codicological description offered (palaeography, illustration....). Start here: http://www.kb.se/codex-gigas/eng/short/

Working with Fragments:

• Scott Gwara, Otto Ege's Manuscripts (on slack)

• Lost Manuscripts: pilot project to build catalogue for fragments. About, Terminology, Sample Fragment

• Fragmentarium: another pilot project. Case Studies, Timeline

• First issue of the Fragmentarium journal. Read one article to see how scholars use fragments as part of a larger historical question.