Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes

✍ Scribed by David Durand-Guédy; Jürgen Paul

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 554
• Series: Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 30
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Some manuscripts have been produced for the personal use of their scribe only; whereas a number of them are valued as autographs, most have been ephemeral and were discarded. Personal manuscripts were not written for a patron, commissioner, or client. They are personal copies, anthologies, florilegia, personal notes, excerpts, drafts and notebooks, as well as family books, accountancy notebooks and many others; these forms often being mixed with one another.
This volume introduces a number of such manuscripts in a comparative perspective, from Japan to Europe through the Middle East, with a focus on the Near and Middle East.
The main concern is the possibility of identifying typical features of such manuscripts in terms of materials, visual organization and content. In attempting this, both the conditions of production and traces of the manuscripts’ use are taken into consideration, with particular attention to their material aspects.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Data Overload and Information Management in the Mamluk Period (1250–1517)
Between Reading and Writing: Manuscript Collections of Excerpts in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Raison d’être and Use of Stand-alone formulae in Early Medieval European Legal Manuscripts
The Livre de Raison of Jean Teisseire
The bayāḍ of Hindūšāh Naḫǧawānī: A Collection of Excerpts from Mongol Iran
aṣ-Ṣafadī’s taḏkira and its Holograph in Princeton University Library
The Diary of a Shintō Priest in Medieval Japan
The Autograph Manuscripts of Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1045 AH / 1635 CE): Classification and Preliminary Study
User-Production of Hebrew Manuscripts Revisited: the Case of Manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Huntington 200
Mufti Notebooks: Two ǧung Manuscripts from Late Nineteenth-Century Bukhara
Legal Consultants in the Time of the Severan Dynasty: Papyri and the Emperor’s Law
Autographic Manuscripts of the Arabic Speaking World created for the Scribe’s Own Use
A Collector’s Edition of the Past: Personal Collections of Mesopotamian Royal Inscriptions from the Old Babylonian Period
Jewish Exemplars and Hebraist Copies of Hebrew Manuscripts
The Types of Text Compiling as Practiced by Ṣaḥḥāflarşeyḫi-zāde Esʿad Efendi (1789–1848)
List of Contributors
Indexes