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EUROPEAN AND ASIAN PAPERS IN MALAY MANUSCRIPTS Introduction [178]One of the advantages of discussing the materials on which manuscripts are written (as opposed for example to discussing language or script) is that any findings can usually be extended to the manuscripts produced in other traditions. The reasons seem to be the failure to distinguish between manuscripts and lithographs, or manuscripts and photocopies; and between manuscripts in Malay and those in Arabic or Acehnese; and scholars seem to borrow manuscripts from each other, further blurring the size of actual collections. At the workshop the participants agreed on a number of Malay/Indonesian terms relating to the physical characteristics of manuscripts that could be employed, such as I cap kertas i (for watermarks), I kertas acuan garis i (for laid paper) and I jilidan i (for binding) (Jones [36]: 70).[174] Russell's articles (Jones [64], [65]) were summarised in a paper, 'Watermarks in Indonesian and Malay manuscripts, some developments in theory and practice' (Jones [66]), presented at the 2011 ASEASUK conference in Cambridge. The data must be regarded as provisional: the dates especially may have to be revised when the manuscripts have been studied more carefully; also, the data may not be representative of Malay manuscripts as a whole; for one thing, there is in it a preponderance of manuscripts written on paper made in Britain, and quite possibly the list contains a disproportionate number of manuscripts "copied to order", giving quite possibly a shorter interval between the making and the use of the paper than would be true of manuscripts in general. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this paper is to study the poetic language of the Cantares de Dzitbalché. Despite its importance in the literary field, the texts contained in this Maya manuscript have received little interest from the rhetorical point of view. However, the use of parallelisms and other figures of semantic deepening make this work a masterful example of Maya poetry. Likewise, it is possible to observe in the texts an influence of the Hispanic tradition at the morphosyntactic and thematic level, which will also be analyzed and discussed throughout the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The old printed books of the historic library of Zagreb cathedral (today housed in the Metropolitanska knjižnica u Zagrebu or Metropolitan Library, Zagreb) were given a special kind of binding around 1692. The bookbinder glued onto the covers of the printed books pieces of medieval parchment codices in a very special way. The binding that resulted (generally referred to as “Metropolitanski uvez” or “Metropolitan binding” in the Croatian literature on the subject) resembles half-leather binding, the crucial difference being that, with the books of the cathedral, parchment was used instead of paper. Around 1692, when Aleksandar Mikulić, the bishop of Zagreb (1688–1694), had a new building erected for the cathedral library, between 2000 and 3000 books were bound in this particular way, to safeguard the printings. In this paper, I give a detailed description of this special type of binding and also survey the history of the cathedral library. Between 1692 and 1846, when Zagreb canons were allowed under strict conditions to borrow books from the collection, several volumes went their way. According to present knowledge, outside the Metropolitanska knjižnica, at least 5 libraries in Croatia and 3 in Hungary have preserved altogether 70 books bound in this way. For this reason, I introduce a new term for the type of binding, namely “Mikulić binding”, as the majority of the books kept outside the Metropolitanska knjižnica were never stored in this modern collection, but in the library of Zagreb cathedral, which had existed only until 1906. I give a short history of the collections where books bound in this way are preserved; publish detailed bibliographical descriptions of the volumes in question; identify the manuscripts found on the bindings; and try to reconstruct the itinerary of the books with the help of the possessors’ notes. I was finally able to identify 21 codices surviving on bindings in either a small or relatively large number of fragments; these manuscripts had been used as raw material by the 17th-century bookbinder working at Zagreb. One of these manuscripts is the 13th-century notated breviary of Esztergom (Strigonium), which was identified in 258 fragments on bindings in the Metropolitanska knjižnica in 2019. My recent research has discovered 14 further fragments taken from this invaluable codex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Hymn of the Bride is found in Chapters 6–7 in the first Act of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. The manuscripts containing it show a particular history of the text which does not always coincide with that of the rest of the Act. For instance, family gamma (Γ) often presents a summarized version of the first two Acts, thus heavily shortening the Hymn. A study of the text is essential to establish a new edition with translation, which is the aim of the project in which this study is embedded. However, analysis of the manuscripts omitting or summarizing the Hymn is also relevant for other goals, such as a proper understanding of the interrelationships between the different manuscripts and of the interest in the text, and its use by early Christian communities and by later readers. Consequently, in this paper, I will analyse the particularities of such a textual tradition and offer a few conclusions that will, in turn, contribute to the broader analysis of the Acts of Thomas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on manuscripts from early medieval Septimania and Catalonia has become quite sophisticated, but significant and detailed work remains to be done. The ongoing digitization of thousands of manuscript fragments, preserved especially in public, ecclesiastical, and private archives and libraries in Catalonia, will furnish a rich collection of unknown items that will allow for the reconstruction of lost testimonies of the region's religious culture from the ninth century onwards. This paper shows how modern fragmentology, based on systematic digitization and comparison of scattered pieces, enables us to rediscover and write the history of the Carolingian homiletic collections in the south-western periphery of the Carolingian empire formed by Septimania and Catalonia—both in general and in the specific case of the autochthonous Homiliary of Luculentius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines a copy of the Qur'ān from India, now in the India Office Collections at the British Library. The manuscript, registered as IO Loth 4, belongs to the reasonably large group of early Qur'āns that date to the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While some of these manuscripts have charted histories, what is not widely known is that early Qur'āns also made their way to India. There they have their own special histories, meanings and associations. In attempt to address the long 'after-life' of these manuscripts, this paper will examine a single example that arrived in India in the Mughal period and was eventually presented to the Library of the East India House by Lord Dalhousie in 1853. While not the earliest of the Qur'āns brought to India, it nonetheless dates to the circa ninth century CE, making it older than any surviving manuscripts in Sanskrit or Prakrit in India proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a chapter of an Old Salentino medieval text is edited and analyzed, for the first time, as a source of linguistic information. The so-colled Grigoriu is an anonymous vernacular translation of the Tetrastichae Sententiae, a 4th century Greek poetic work by Gregory of Nazianzus. The Old Salentino translation, written in the Greek alphabet, survives in a unique manuscript, the codex Vaticano Greco 2252, copied in Terra d'Otranto around the 1330s. The Sententiae are here translated along with the commentary on the text by Nicola / Nilo Dossapatre, written in the 12th century. A linguistic analysis shows the importance of the data provided by the Vatican manuscript for the reconstruction of the historical grammar of the Salentino dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incorporating the two leaves within the "canon" of the other accepted Book of Mormon manuscript leaves offers yet another piece to the puzzle of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon manuscript. This paper has not stressed any one particular aspect of the Chicago leaves of the Book of Mormon manuscript - instead relying on a varied approach to understand the totality of the manuscript. Archivists at Chicago had undertaken their own analysis of the leaves in the early 1980s and felt that the handwriting matched other verified samples from Oliver Cowdery, the principal scribe for both the original and the printer's manuscripts of the Book of Mormon. [Extracted from the article]