The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

Chapter 4 considers another major actor in the learning of musical knowledge, besides the patrons: professional scholars. While it is true that musical treatises were for the most part commissioned for the elites, once a text was out in the market, anyone with an interest in the subject and a small amount of money in their pocket could acquire a copy. Professional scholars pursued music as a part of their training in mathematics. I center my discussion around the studies of one such scholar of music at the madrasa of Mustansiriyya, who was a student of al-Urmawi himself. I analyze a rare manuscript that contains marginal notes written by this scholar who studied the subject matter under the master. This rare manuscript grants us a unique perspective into how scholars actually went about learning their subject matter.

This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

This chapter offers a survey of some basic information on the life and writings of Manganeios Prodromos. It concludes with an annotated edition and translation of a poem dedicated to Manuel I Komnenos as an example of how his verse might be presented to readers today.

A retrospective look at the 1980 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium “Beyond Byzantium” noting its groundbreaking aspects, omissions, and the evolution of the field in subsequent years. A particular emphasis is the increasing breadth of topics in the study of the Byzantine Near East as scholarly interest has moved beyond primarily philological and religious topics. The community of scholars interested in these traditions has also changed. At the 1980 Symposium several presenters were clergy who came to the field via the study of biblical languages. Few were women. Today the field is much more diverse, with many active scholars who belong to Near Eastern Christian communities. Manuscripts are used to illustrate cultural exchanges among Eastern Christian traditions and to highlight issues of ownership and removal of cultural heritage from its original context. A particular emphasis is placed on liturgical manuscripts as a source of information about language acquisition.

From the perspective of Constantinople, Jerusalem was part of the Byzantine periphery. Even so, its Chalcedonian Orthodox liturgy influenced Constantinople because Jerusalem was the setting of biblical events. In Jerusalem, liturgy was intrinsically connected to movement in processions and holy places, creating a distinctive Eucharistic liturgy, local calendar, and particular lectionary. After the Christological controversies and the Arab conquest, this liturgy proved a unifying factor, grounding the identity of Jerusalem’s Church. Nevertheless, Jerusalem’s liturgy eventually underwent a process of “Byzantinization,” abandoning local practices and adopting Constantinople’s liturgy. Ironically, however, this only occurred once Jerusalem was beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Despite the absence of imperial policy to propagate the Byzantine Rite abroad, the reconquest of Antioch facilitated liturgical Byzantinization by disseminating liturgical manuscripts from Constantinople to Antioch and then Jerusalem. The liturgical rites these books contained were, however, received and adopted in Jerusalem only gradually. Thus, the destruction of holy sites after the Arab conquest only explains the historical circumstances in which liturgical Byzantinization occurred. Fundamentally, liturgical Byzantinization occurred because local Greek, Georgian, Syrian, and Arab scribes working near Jerusalem and faithful to Constantinople selected which liturgical texts were recopied and preserved, and which were abandoned. Throughout this process, these scribes acted as guardians of the liturgical tradition of Jerusalem, and increasingly peripheral in the eyes of Byzantium.

A discussion of where, why and how parchment material was preserved in the Middle Ages, distinguishing broadly between books kept in libraries and documents kept in archives. The distinction between outgoing and incoming archives and a case study of two documents of the emperor Frederick II.

This chapter introduces the wide-ranging textual culture which grew up in medieval Iceland and generated the enormous variety of Old Norse-Icelandic written texts. It details the present-day locations of the major collections of Icelandic manuscripts and gives an account of how these manuscripts were preserved and what proportion of them may have been lost. An account of the origins of manuscript production in Iceland and its subsequent history follows, with criteria for dating manuscripts and discussion of different scripts. The effect of the introduction of the printing press is noted. Recent new approaches to manuscript studies, including codicology and greater attention to paper manuscripts and the physical processes of manuscript-making, are also covered. The chapter moves on to address digitization and the standardization of online texts, and concludes with discussion of what the future may hold for manuscript studies, including collaboration between palaeographers and scientists such as geneticists, ecologists and chemists, and the emergence of a new discipline of biocodicology, enabling a holistic examination of the interplay between many different environmental factors.

A number of individual manuscripts which show unique or singular arrangements of ordines romani are discussed, located to Worms under Bishop Bernharius, and the instigation of a circle of bishops around Arn of Salzburg, who shared ordines with each other and with monasteries under their patronage. The chapter discusses the relation of these texts to pilgrim travel literature, from clergy who had been to Rome and observed and questioned the Roman clergy.

This chapter introduces the rich intersections between Latin literature and Roman material culture. Why should Latin scholars concern themselves with ancient objects? How might study of Roman physical remains inform an understanding of Latin literature? In what ways do attitudes towards Roman material remains align with disciplinary approaches to interpreting Latin literature? The chapter proceeds in seven interconnected parts. The first examines the materiality of Roman texts, introducing the picture-poems of Optatian. This leads to cultural ideas about words and images – and not least to the artefactual nature of manuscripts in both roll and codex. Late-antique ‘illustrated’ manuscripts take us to the rhetorical phenomenon of ‘ecphrasis’. Ecphrasis has been much discussed in recent years; but there remains a reluctance to look across the landscapes of art and text: a residual blindness to the ‘cyclical’ dynamics between visual and verbal media. The point leads to an analysis of words and images displayed in a shared environment, as well as some of the Roman rhetorical conceptual underpinnings. It also leads, in the final section, to variables of education, learning and literacy.

In this final chapter, the presentation of the ordo romanus manuscripts is discussed. Their use of innovative script forms and patterns of script use to highlight points of interest to their compilers is analysed. The characteristics of their physical format and layout are used to suggest potential uses and users. Finally, the employment of Latin in the texts is discussed, showing how certain scribes saw no problem recording the ordines in a form of Latin later characterised as ‘debased’. This questions the assumed notion of a wholesale reform of Latin and liturgical Latin in particular. The deployment of Greek in several ordines is also discussed, as a counterpart.

This chapter provides an introduction to mediaeval Latin. After demonstrating the impossibility of providing any sort of meaningful survey of so extensive, varied and underexplored a literary field, I model two different ways of approaching the subject. One is through microhistory, where one looks at texts with certain generic, formal or geographic characteristics in a diachronic fashion from their classical ancestors to their Renaissance progeny always keeping in view contiguous material in other genres and in languages other than Latin. The other is the history of style, where one looks synchronically at texts produced in widely different regions and in different generic categories to obtain a broader vista of the way Latin as a literary language changed over time. One way to do this is to look at mannerism, or deliberate obscurity of style for rhetorical effect, as a persistent feature of Latin literature from late antiquity on, in a dialectic with classicism on the one hand, and biblical simplicity on the other. This leads to a revisionist view of the earliest stages of humanistic poetry in Trecento Italy, as growing organically from pre-existing mediaeval stylistic canons.