Manuscripta Biblica – serie

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.

The present volume provides a comparative look at the contents and layout features of secondary annotations in biblical manuscripts across linguistic traditions. Due to the privileged focus on the text in the columns, these annotations and the practices that produced them have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. The vast richness of extant verbal and figurative notes accompanying the biblical texts in the intercolumns and margins of the manuscript pages have thus been largely overlooked. The case studies gathered in this volume explore Jewish and Christian biblical manuscripts through the lens of their annotations, addressing the various relationships between the primary layer of text and the secondary notes, and exploring the roles and functions of annotated manuscripts as cultural artifacts. By approaching biblical manuscripts as potential "notepads", the volume offers theoretical reflection and empirical analyses of the ways in which secondary notes may shed new light on the development and transmission of text traditions, the shifting engagement with biblical manuscripts over time, as well as the change of use and interpretation that may result from the addition of the notes themselves.

Author portraits are the most common type of figural illustration in Greek manuscripts. The vast majority of them depict the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Being readily comparable to one another, such images illustrate the stylistic development of Byzantine painting. In addition, they often contain details which throw light on elements of Byzantine material culture such as writing utensils, lamps, domestic furniture, etc. This corpus offers catalogue descriptions of all evangelist portraits that survived from the Middle Byzantine period, i.e. from the mid-ninth to mid-thirteenth century. Items are arranged in roughly chronological order and are grouped according to common compositional types: readers will thus be able to trace iconographic similarities by going through a series of adjacent entries and to distinguish period styles by browsing through larger blocks of entries. The book thus provides, in effect, a selective survey of middle-Byzantine painting. A surprisingly large number of Byzantine evangelists portraits remain unpublished: seventy-five of the miniatures reproduced in this volume have never appeared in print before.

Despite the significant work carried out on the text, transmission, materiality, and scribal habits preserved in the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri since their acquisition by Beatty ninety years ago in 1931, these early copies of Jewish scripture and the New Testament have, for the most part, belonged primarily to textual critics. The goal of this book is to resituate this important collection of manuscripts in broader contexts, examining their significance in conversation with papyrology as a discipline, in the context of other ancient literary traditions preserved on papyri, and in discussion with the intellectual and cultural history of collecting, colonialism, and scholarly rhetoric. The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, and other papyrological collection with which they are inextricably bound, remind us of the critical value of examining old manuscripts afresh in their historical, scholarly, and intellectual contexts. These studies are relevant for all scholars who work with manuscripts and ancient texts of any variety.

Bible Missals are manuscripts that integrate liturgical prayers for the Mass with the scriptural texts of the Latin Vulgate. Long overlooked by scholars, Bible Missals offer important evidence for the development of the medieval liturgy and the liturgical use of scripture by medieval Christians. This monograph is the first comprehensive analysis of the codicology and contents of Bible Missals. Mostly produced in the first half of the 13th century by professional book makers in centers like Paris and Oxford, these hybrid manuscripts were customized for secular, monastic, and mendicant patrons. This monograph focuses on Dominican Bible Missals, the largest group within the repertoire, providing detailed codicological descriptions of each manuscript and analyzing their texts for the Order of Mass and selected liturgical formularies, including prayers for the feast of St. Dominic. For medieval Christians, the words and events of scripture were continually called to mind and reenacted in the sacramental rites of the Mass. Bible Missals provide important material evidence for this interplay between word and sacrament.

Ce volume, issu d’un colloque organisé à Aix-en-Provence par Élodie Attia en 2018, offre des regards croisés sur la production de bibles latine, grecque et hébreu, typologiquement semblables, au cours du Moyen-Âge. Il explore d’abord différentes façons dont les bibles complètes en un ou plusieurs volumes, issues de la même production (pandectes), ont été produites suivant les lieux et les époques, avec un accent sur leur complexité structurelle. Les bibles complètes sont rares dans toutes les traditions considérées, mais d'un grand intérêt, aussi en raison des défis techniques que leur production posait aux artisans. Les Bibles partielles représentent une façon différente de transmettre le texte biblique, qu’il s’agisse de parties de la Bible, assemblées et réassemblées de façon plus ou moins originales, ou de la conception de nouveau types (comme les «　Pentateuque-Megillot-Haftarot », produits dans le monde ashkénaze avant 1300). Les Bibles à commentaires　sont une catégorie très variée, illustrée ici par deux exemples: d’abord les pandectes produites par Théodulfe (†　821), dans lesquelles les notes marginales s’apparentent à un apparat critique　; ensuite des manuscrits hébreux contenant des commentaires exégétiques systématiques, dans des mises en page sophistiquées qui varient aussi suivant leurs domaines de production. Enfin, la présentation de nouveaux fragments d’un très ancien rouleau de la Genèse et de l’Exode de la Guéniza du Caire permet de souligner son insertion dans la tradition massorétique, et de faire une place aux bibles partielles sur rouleaux. Cet ouvrage montre tout l’intérêt d’une approche comparatiste des bibles anciennes et représente, espérons-le, une étape supplémentaire vers une perception plus englobante d’une histoire de la Bible.