You have no items in your shopping cart.
Close
Search
Filters

Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Traditions

This volume brings together contributions by scholars focussing on peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels, intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits.
Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
SKU (ISBN): 978-1-4632-4195-7
  • *
Publication Status: In Print
Publication Date: Jan 27,2021
Interior Color: Black
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 320
Languages: English
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4195-7
$114.95
Your price: $68.97
Ship to
*
*
Shipping Method
Name
Estimated Delivery
Price
No shipping options

Most scholars who employ manuscripts in their research tend to focus on the literary content itself. But what about the role of the scribe who typically remains at the periphery of research? How can we, in the words of the NT textual critic James Royse, “virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder” to understand the process by which our manuscripts were produced? Moreover, manuscripts often contain far more material than the words that form their primary texts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels (in the case of Semitic languages), intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These extratextual (or peritextual) elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits.

This volume brings together contributions by scholars focussing on such extra-, peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts written in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and other languages, to study the individuals who produced our manuscripts and how they shaped the transmission of literary texts they copied.

Most scholars who employ manuscripts in their research tend to focus on the literary content itself. But what about the role of the scribe who typically remains at the periphery of research? How can we, in the words of the NT textual critic James Royse, “virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder” to understand the process by which our manuscripts were produced? Moreover, manuscripts often contain far more material than the words that form their primary texts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels (in the case of Semitic languages), intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These extratextual (or peritextual) elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits.

This volume brings together contributions by scholars focussing on such extra-, peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts written in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and other languages, to study the individuals who produced our manuscripts and how they shaped the transmission of literary texts they copied.

Write your own review
  • Only registered users can write reviews
*
*
Bad
Excellent
*
*
*
*
ContributorBiography

GeorgeKiraz

George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, the Editor-in-Chief of Gorgias Press, and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He earned an M.St. degree in Syriac Studies from the University of Oxford (1991) and an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1992, 1996). He has published extensively in the fields of computational linguistics, Syriac studies, and the digital humanities. His latest books include The Syriac Orthodox in North America (1895–1995): A Short History (2019) and Syriac-English New Testament (2020).

George is an ordained Deacon of the rank of Ewangeloyo (Gospler) in the Syriac Orthodox Church where he also serves on several Patriarchal, Synodal, and local committees. He lives in Piscataway, NJ, with his wife Christine and their children, Tabetha Gabriella, Sebastian Kenoro, and Lucian Nurono.

SabineSchmidtke

Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has published extensively on Islamic and Jewish intellectual history, as well as the Muslim reception of the Bible and its early translation history into Arabic. Her works include Theologie, Philosophie und Mystik im zwölferschiitischen Islam des 9./15. Jahrhunderts: Die Gedankenwelten des Ibn Abī Ǧumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (um 838/1434-35–nach 906/1501) (Brill, 2000), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (OUP, 2016), and, together with Hassan Ansari, Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions (Lockwood Press, 2017). She is also the executive editor of Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (Brill) and, with Hassan Ansari, of Shii Studies Review (Brill).

Contributors. vii

Preface. xi

Connecting the Dots: Using Diaeresis as a Source of Infor­mation about Scribal Practices in Byzantine Egypt1

Elizabeth Buchanan 

Marginalia as Traces of Changing Knowledge Culture: The Circulation of Taqwīm Texts in the Late Mamluk Sultanate  33

Fien De Block 

The Manuscripts of Arabic Popular Siyar and Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan  47

Zuzana Gažákovà 

A Portable Majlis: On Publishing Reliable Editions in Ottoman Manuscript Culture  69

Aslihan Gürbüzel

Chapter Divisions and the Interpretation and Transmission of the Tosefta  83

Binyamin Katzoff

The Second-Hand Scribe: The Intellectual Environment of the Production of a Unique Tosefta Fragment from the Levant107

Binyamin Katzoff

Peritextual Encoding for the Metatron / Yahoel Theme in the Kabbalistic Sefer Ha-Ot, or “Book of the Sign,” by R. Abraham Abulafia (1240–1292)125

Aryeh M. Krawczyk 

Reading and Remembering in the Medieval Near East: The Syriac Shemohē Book (aka. the Syriac “Masorah”)141

Jonathan Loopstra 

Annotations in the Earliest Medieval Hebrew Bible Manu­scripts. 167

Elvira Martín-Contreras

An Illuminating Scribe: The ʿArza-dasht of Jaʿfar Bāysunghurī and Its Wealth of Information  189

Shiva Mihan 

Annotation Practices in a Syriac Exegetical Collection (MS Vat. Syr. 103)     225

Marion Pragt

Scribes and the Book of Revelation in Eastern New Testa­ments. 247

T. C. Schmidt

On the Sumerian Glossographic Tradition. 277

Szilvia Sövegjártó

Can Manuscript Headings Prove that there were Arabic Gospels before the Qurʾān?  289

Robert Turnbull

Customers who bought this item also bought
Picture of Jacob of Sarug's Homilies on Paul

Jacob of Sarug's Homilies on Paul

Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English. Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive. Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug’s homilies, this volume contains two of his homilies on Paul. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references. The volume is one of the fascicles of Gorgias Press’s Complete Homilies of Saint Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain all of Jacob’s surviving sermons.
$33.00 $19.80
Picture of Living the Quran with Joy and Purpose

Living the Quran with Joy and Purpose

The current volume is an annotated translation of selections from a noteworthy Muslim theologian Said Nursi (1876-1960) on the Quranic theme of oneness of God (tawhid). Given the scarcity of theological themes in Islamic literature in English as well as the lack of studies on Said Nursi, who wrote in Ottoman Turkish, the book is an important contribution to the field. It offers a contemporary peek into the view that faith in God could be profoundly meaningful and fulfilling spiritual path.
$45.00 $27.00
Picture of Watering the Garden

Watering the Garden

The essays collected in Watering the Garden are intended to honor Deirdre Dempsey, a distinguished biblical educator, translator, and scholar. The contributions to this Festschrift mirror Dempsey’s own scholarly interests, including biblical studies, with particular attention to the Old Testament and intertestamental literature, the theology of visual arts, the history of spiritual traditions, and modern theology. The content of the Festschrift closely follows Dempsey's own spiritual and scholarly journey and reflects the breadth and scope of her influence on the academy.
$114.95 $68.97
Picture of Seeing Islam as Others Saw It

Seeing Islam as Others Saw It

This seminal work continues to shape the thought of specialists studying the Late Antique crossroads at which Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Islamic histories met, by offering the field a new approach to the vexing question of how to write the early history of Islam. The new edition of the study produces the original text with the addition of a substantial forward in which Hoyland discusses how the field has developed over the two decades that proceeded the book’s first publication. Hoyland also shares some personal reflections on how his thinking has since developed and the potential impact of this on the findings of the original study. The book also includes new appendices that detail the later publications of the author.
$114.95 $68.97