"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"--

In the first chapter of this work, I provide an introduction to the current discussion of scribal habits. In Chapter Two, I discuss Abschriften-or manuscripts with extant known exemplars-, their history in textual criticism, and how they can be used to elucidate the discussion of scribal habits. I also present a methodology for determining if a manuscript is an Abschrift. In Chapter Three, I analyze P127, which is not an Abschrift, in order that we may become familiar with determining scribal habits by singular readings. Chapters Four through Six present the scribal habits of selected proposed manuscript pairs: 0319 and 0320 as direct copies of 06 (with their Latin counterparts VL 76 and VL83 as direct copies of VL 75), 205 as a direct copy of 2886, and 821 as a direct copy of 0141. I discuss in Chapter Four the need to better understand the scribal habits of manuscripts written by scribes who wrote in their non-native language. Additionally, I conclude that 205 and 2886 are, in fact, not copies of one another. In the conclusion, I argue that there is no common scribal habit shared by all scribes except that this study has not found a scribe who adds more words than they lose. Additionally, textual critics should place greater emphasis on the roles played by patrons and readers of the text rather than on scribes alone.

This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as the ‘Masoretic Tradition’. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources. They focus on traditions of vocalisation signs and accent signs, traditions of oral reading, traditions of Masoretic notes, as well as Rabbinic and exegetical texts. The contributors include established scholars of the field and early-career researchers.

Hebrew manuscripts are considered to be invaluable documents and artefacts of Jewish culture and history. Research on Hebrew manuscript culture is progressing rapidly and therefore its topics, methods and questions need to be enunciated and reflected upon. The case studies assembled in this volume explore various fields of research on Hebrew manuscripts. They show paradigmatically the current developments concerning codicology and palaeography, book forms like the scroll and codex, scribes and their writing material, patrons, collectors and censors, manuscript and book collections, illuminations and fragments, and, last but not least, new methods of material analysis applied to manuscripts. The principal focus of this volume is the material and intellectual history of Hebrew book cultures from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, its intention being to heighten and sharpen the reader’s understanding of Jewish social and cultural history in general.

This book investigates the scribal habits of P45, P46, P47, P66, P72, and P75, the six most extensive early New Testament manuscripts. All the singular readings in these six papyri are studied along with all the corrections.

In the history of the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth century has often been considered an anomaly, characterized by political dissent and social conflict. In this book, Aslıhan Gürbüzel shows how the early modern period was, in fact, crucial to the formation of new kinds of political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. By uncovering the histories of these new political voices and documenting the emergence of a robust public sphere, Gürbüzel challenges two common assumptions: first, that the ideal of public political participation originated in the West; and second, that civic culture was introduced only with Westernization efforts in the nineteenth century. Contrary to these assumptions, which measure the Ottoman world against an idealized European prototype, Taming the Messiah offers a new method of studying public political life by focusing on the variety of religious visions and lifeworlds native to Ottoman society and the ways in which they were appropriated and repurposed in the pursuit of new forms of civic engagement.

The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate, around worshipping at saints' graves, medical procedures, smoking tobacco, and other everyday practices. Fueling these debates was a new form of writing—the pamphlet, a cheap, short, and mobile text that provided readers with simplified legal arguments. These pamphlets were more than simply a novel way to disseminate texts, they made a consequential shift in the way Ottoman subjects communicated. This book offers the first comprehensive look at a new communication order that flourished in seventeenth-century manuscript culture. Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in Islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture.