Alessandro Bausi Books

The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge previous knowledge and trigger further developments. With a vast selection of highly representative case studies – from India, Islamic Asia and Spain to Ethiopian cultures, from Ancient Christian to Coptic, and Medieval European domains – this volume deals with manuscripts planned or growing and resulting in time to comprise ‘more than one’. Whatever their contents – the natural world and related recipes, astronomical tables or personal notes, documentary, religious and even highly revered holy texts – codicological and textual features of these manuscripts reveal how similar needs received different answers in varying contexts and times.

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as „the general system of the formation and transformation of statements“ in his „Archaeology of Knowledge“ (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the „archival turn“. In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and „grounding“ them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).

The present volume contains twelve chapters authored by specialists of Asian, African and European manuscript cultures reflecting on the cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts. Assuming that ‘codicological units’ exist in every manuscript culture and that they are usually composed of discrete elements (such as clay tablets, papyrus sheets, bamboo slips, parchment bifolios, palm leaves), the issue of the cohesion of the constituents is a general one. The volume presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve this cohesion by manuscript cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium bce to the present). This comparative view provides the frame for the understanding of a phenomenon that appears to be of essential importance for the study of the structure of written artefacts. Regardless of the way in which cohesion is realised, all strategies and devices that allow the constituents to be kept together are subsumed under the term ‘binding’. Thus, it is possible to highlight similarities, convergences, and unique physical and technical methods adopted by various manuscript cultures to face a common challenge.

This volume contains selected papers from the international conference Manuscripts and Texts, Languages and Contexts, which was held at the University of Hamburg in July 2014. The conference was organized by three projects funded by the European Union within the 7th Research Framework Programme IDEAS, all dealing with the written heritage of Ethiopia and Eritrea: Ethio-SPaRe: Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia, Salvation, Preservation and Research (PI Denis Nosnitsin, Hamburg), TraCES: From Translation to Creation: Changes in Ethiopic Style and Lexicon from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (PI Alessandro Bausi, Hamburg), and IslHornAfr: Islam in the Horn of Africa, A Comparative Literary Approach (PI Alessandro Gori, Copenhagen). With the focus on the written tradition, the articles cover the main themes of traditional Ethiopian studies. Texts and their contents but also material aspects of the manuscript witnesses as well as their broader historical context were taken into consideration. The volume contains a detailed index of persons, titles, places, and languages that facilitates access to the contents.