Literary Snippets

Colophons Across Space and Time

Edited by George Anton Kiraz & Sabine Schmidtke

The colophon, the ultimate or “crowing touch” paragraphs of a manuscript or a book, provides readers with a the historical context in which the scribe produced the manuscript (or the publisher, a book). At its most fundamental level, the colophon gives us the “metadata” of the manuscript: who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to histories: wars, earthquakes, religious events, legal agreements, etc. This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time.

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Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC

Availability: In stock

SKU (ISBN): 978-1-4632-4400-2

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Publication Status: In Print

Series: Gorgias Handbooks 64

Publication Date: Nov 16,2023

Interior Color: Black with Color Inserts

Trim Size: 7 x 10

Page Count: 463

Languages: English

ISBN: 978-1-4632-4400-2

Price: $120.00

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Late antique scholars and medievalists who work on manuscripts as primary sources are very much familiar with the art of the colophon. But the history of the colophon dates back much further than late antiquity, to ancient history when scribes in ancient Mesopotamia chiseled colophons on cuneiform tablets as early as the third millennium BCE. At their inception, colophons were writing production records: who wrote what, when and where? Ancient colophons even provide statistics: how many lines were written in a particular work? As we enter late antiquity, colophons take on a life of their own and begin to acquire literary properties—snippets but nevertheless literary objects. They developed into an art form with distinctive formulaic phraseology. In some traditions, scribes began to record historical events that occurred just before or during the production of a manuscript, events that otherwise would be lost to history. Readers and users also began to insert colophons in existing manuscripts, creating a plethora of colophon types.

How are we to approach the study of colophons and what can they tell us about communities at large, or about individual scribes? And what of the colophon itself as an object? One can drill into its text as any other piece of literature, studying various aspects of its literary style and function, as well as linguistic features that distinguish colophon texts from the main text found in a manuscript. This is particularly interesting in multilingual environments, or when the scribe’s mother tongue is connected to the primary text of the manuscript in a diglossic relationship. Here, the colophon is an essential linguistic source into how the scribe’s native tongue interacts with the higher literary register of the manuscript text.

This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time. Whatever you would like to get out of colophons, we hope that there will be at least one paper here that will draw your attention. If not, there are enough literary snippets quoted to keep you entertained.

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	Contributor	Biography
	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).
	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.

Towards a Discipline of Colophonology and Colophonography - George Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke (1)
Manuscripts Offered for the Dods: Dedicatory Colophons from Mesopotamia - Szilvia Sövegjártó (5)
The Colophons of Ashurbanipal, King of the World - Jon Taylor, Enrique Jiménez, Babette Schnitzlein, Sophie Cohen (23)
Sacred and Profane: Colophons and Paratexts Embedded into the Text of Medieval Samaritan Pentateuch Manuscripts - Evelyn Burkhardt (43)
Opening Formulas by Scribes in Talmudic Literature - Menachem Katz and Hillel Gershuni (61)
Hebrew Printing and Printers’ Colophons in the Cairo Genizah: Networking Book Trade in Europe and the Ottoman Empire - Nick Posegay (79)
This Torah, A Sign of Good Things to Come: Tradition, Religion, and Politics in the Colophons of Two Tenth-Century Sibling Scribes - Robert Vanhoff (107)
Early Christian Arabic Colophons from the Palestinian Monasteries: A Comparative Analysis - Miriam L. Hjälm and Peter Tarras (119)
The Literary and Language Value of the Armenian Colophons - Khachik Harutyunyan (169)
In Colophons and Margins of the Syriac Liturgical Manuscripts - Ephrem Aboud Ishac (187)
Nun-Scribes and Their Colophons: Female Self-Identification and Remembrance in Early Modern Italy - Melissa Moreton (201)
A Collection of Fragmentary Colophons: Manuscripts from the Monastery of Saint Macarius - Youhanna Nessim Youssef (227)
Colophons of Medieval Armenian Manuscripts as Sources for Women’s History - David Zakarian (241)
Marqus of Aleppo, a Seventeenth-Century Forgotten Scribe: A Biography Reconstructed From the Colophons - Habib G. Ibrahim (255)
Colophons in Arabic and Persian Treatises on the Mathematical Sciences and Related Subject Matters - Hamid Bohloul and Sonja Brentjes (285)
Translation and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Tunisia: Colophons in the Works of ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sharafī from Sfax - Víctor de Castro León (325)
Stylistic Features of Fourth/Tenth-Century Arabic Colophons, With Particular Attention to Scribal Biographical Details - F. Redhwan Karim & Yousry Elseadawy (353)
Windows into the World of Persian-Speaking West Syrians: A Study of Colophons in Three Early Persian Biblical Manuscripts - Ali B. Langroudi (377)
Times of Disintegration and Calamities: Aẓhar and His Mysterious Colophons - Shiva Mihan (397)
“A Scholarly Copyist”: Early Ilkhanid Intellectual Networks Through the Prism of Two Colophons - Aslisho Qurboniev and Gowaart Van Den Bossche (431)

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