Codicology
[citation needed] Unlike traditional palaeography, codicology places more emphasis on the cultural aspect of books.
Analysis of the work of the scribe, script styles and their variations, may reveal the book's character, value, purpose, date, and the importance attached to its different parts.
[6] Many incunabula, books printed up to the year 1500, were finished wholly or partly by hand, so they belong to the domain of codicology.
[6] The structure of a codex includes its size, format/ordinatio[6] (its quires or gatherings,[7] consisting of sheets folded a number of times, often twice- a bifolio[8]), sewing, bookbinding and rebinding.
[4][5] As these features are dependent on time and place, codicology determines characteristics specific to the scriptoria, or any production center, and libraries of codices.
The apparatus of books for scholars became more elaborate during the 13th and 14th centuries when chapter, verse, page numbering, marginalia finding guides, indexes, glossaries and tables of contents were developed.
[13] The Maurists contributed to historical and critical analysis of texts, and Jean Mabilon is considered the father of palaeography and diplomatics.
[14][better source needed] In 1819, Heinrich Stein established the Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, which published Monumenta Germaniae Historica and studies on medieval codices.
[15] In 1825, the librarian Adolph Ebert published a monograph on diplomatics, epigraphy and what he called Bücherhandschrifftenkunde - "the science of internal and external features of manuscripts".
To Traube, paleography deals with deciphering writing, interpreting abbreviations and finding textual errors, as well as dating and locating the manuscript.
[10] Charles Samaran proposed the term codicography in 1934, which he understood as parallel to bibliography, the study of printed books; making manuscript science separate from philology.
[3]: 6 Since the 1970s, various codicologists have claimed that codicology should be concerned with the history, usage and reception of a manuscript as a cultural and textual object.
[3]: 6 Maria Luisa Agati in "Il libro manoscritto da Oriente a Occidente" includes palaeographical features, decoration, and the history of libraries in her study.
The quantitative method can therefore provide an idea of the economy and culture of manuscript production at a particular time or place or a longer period, relating it to the history of the book.
However, his understanding of codicology is not lato sensu, but statistical- the selection of materials, fabrication of quires, number of volumes, prices, work invested, circulation - drawn from a group of manuscripts by time, place, type, etc.
[3]: 9–10 The progress in quantitative analysis of Latin, Hebrew, Byzantine and Arabic codices prompted research into whether technological practices were shared.
[3]: 11–13 Starting in the late 1980s, some scholars borrowed ideas from structuralist linguistics and studied the codex as a structure with "morphological" and "syntactic" dimensions, treating its constituent components and their relationships respectively.
Gumbert and other scholars formulated a syntax to identify codicological units and caesuras (discontinuities or boundaries) of a manuscript, formed by one or more quires, and their stages of production and interrelationships.
[3]: 13–14 While medieval authors may have practised rudimentary codicology, interest in the study of Arabic manuscripts in the West started in the late 18th century.
