Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices

✍ Scribed by Anthony Grafton; Glenn W Most

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 400
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry.

✦ Table of Contents

How to do things with texts: an introduction Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most
1. Reliable books: Islamic law, canonization, and manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) Guy Burak
2. Obscurity Ineke Sluiter
3. Allegoresis and etymology Glenn W. Most
4. Classifying the Rigveda on the basis of ritual usage: the deity-of-the-formula system Paolo Visigalli
5. Maryadam Ullanghya: The boundaries of interpretation in early modern India Christopher Minkowski
6. Making sense of Suetonius in the twelfth century Robert A. Kaster
7. From Philology to Philosophy: Zhu Xi as a reader-annotator Lianbin Dai
8. Gods on clay: ancient Near Eastern scholarly practices and the history of religions Aaron Tugendhaft
9. An unknown medieval Coptic Hebraism? On a momentous junction of Jewish and Coptic biblical studies Ronny Vollandt
10. Picturing as practice: placing a square above a square in the central Middle Ages Megan McNamee
11. Inimitable sources: canonical texts and rhetorical theory in the Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions Filippomaria Pontani
12. Excerpts versus fragments: deconstructions and reconstitutions of the Excerpta Constantiniana Andras Nemeth
13. Johann Buxtorf makes a notebook Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg
14. World bibliographies: libraries and the reorganization of knowledge in late Renaissance Europe Paola Molino.