Manuscript studies

Manuscript studies examines handwritten books as physical objects and historical witnesses, including how they were made, copied, transmitted, and used.

Codicology: The study of books as physical objects, including their materials, construction, and arrangement. It supplies the material analysis at the heart of manuscript studies.
Quire: A group of folded sheets nested together and sewn as a unit in a bound book. Quire structure can reveal a manuscript's assembly sequence and later rearrangements.
Critical edition: An edited text accompanied by evidence and analysis of its documentary witnesses and variants. Manuscript comparison supports editorial decisions about a work's wording.
Codex Sinaiticus: A fourth-century Greek Bible manuscript containing the oldest complete New Testament. Its surviving leaves and multiple textual hands support study of early biblical book production.
Classical philology: The historical study of ancient Greek and Latin language and literature through textual evidence. Its editorial traditions helped establish methods for comparing handwritten textual witnesses.
Paleography: The study of historical handwriting, especially how scripts developed and how written documents can be dated or localized. Reading and comparing scripts helps identify when and where manuscripts were written.
Bookbinding: The craft and structure of joining, covering, and protecting the leaves of a book. Bindings preserve evidence about a manuscript's manufacture, repair, and later use.
Stemmatics: A method for reconstructing relationships among textual witnesses through shared errors and variants. It uses copying patterns to infer how manuscript versions descend from one another.
Dead Sea Scrolls: A collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts found near the Dead Sea, mostly dating from the last centuries BCE and first century CE. Their fragments and variants illuminate manuscript transmission in ancient Judaism.
Benedictine Mabillon: A French Benedictine scholar whose work helped establish diplomatic study of medieval documents. His systematic analysis of scripts and documents shaped historical methods used in manuscript research.

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