A manuscript was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in an indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as opposed to the printed version of the same thing.
Before the arrival of prints, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, music notation, explanatory figures, or illustrations.
Terminology
The word "manuscript" derives from the (from , hand and from , to write), and is first recorded in English in 1597. An earlier term in English that shares the meaning of a handwritten document is "hand-writ" (or "handwrit"), which is first attested around 1175 and is now rarely used. The study of the writing (the "hand") in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography (or paleography). The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts,Harper, Douglas. "Manuscript". Online Etymology Dictionary. . Accessed 10-11-2007. Accessed 10-11-2007. while the forms MS., ms or ms. for singular, and MSS., mss or mss. for plural (with or without the full stop, all uppercase or all lowercase) are also accepted."ms", "ms." and "MS" in The Free Dictionary (American Heritage 2011 and Random House Kernerman Webster's 2010). . Accessed 12 March 2016."MSS", "mss" and "mss" in The Free Dictionary (American Heritage 2011, Collins 2014 and Random House Kernerman Webster's 2010). . Accessed 12 March 2016. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, a doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages".
A manuscript may be a codex (i.e. bound as a book), a scroll, or bound differently or consist of loose pages. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.
Format Format: Scroll; Codex
Parts Leaf (books) (or fragments thereof) Cover Flyleaf (blank sheet) Colophon (publication information) Incipit (the first few words of the text) Decoration; illustrations Dimensions (Book size) Shelfmark or Signature in holding library (as opposed to printed Catalog number). Paper size number often precedes signature number with a circulus (degree symbol) following, but many libraries prefer spelling out the word (sometimes only in abbreviation) of the paper size (e.g. Fol[ia]., Qu[arto], Oct[avo, etc.). Some libraries use an equal sign instead of the circulus and may change the side on which the paper size number appears (8=3456 vs 3456=8) for indexing purposes. works/compositions included in same ms codicological elements: deletions method: erasure? overstrike? dots above letters? headers/footers page format/layout: columns? text and surrounding commentary/additions/glosses? interpolations (passage not written by the original author) owners' marginal notations/corrections owner signatures dedication/inscription censor signatures collation (quires) (binding order) foliation page numeration binding manuscripts bound together in a single volume: convolute: volume containing different manuscripts fascicle: individual manuscript, part of a set (called a convolute).
Materials paper parchment papyrus to preserve text ink writing implement used pencil to help with the writing process pastedown (blank paper for inside cover)
Paleographic elements script (one or more) dating line fillers rubrication (red ink text) ruled lines catchwords historical elements of the ms: blood, wine etc. stains condition: smokiness evidence of fire mold wormed
Reproduction
The mechanical reproduction of a manuscript is called facsimile. Digital reproductions can be called (high-resolution) scans or digital images.
History
Before the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press, all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. In the west, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls (volumen in Latin) or books (codex, plural codices). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper.
In Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, palm leaf manuscripts, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, were used dating back to the 5th century BCE or earlier, and in some cases continued to be used until the 19th century. In China, bamboo and wooden slips were used prior to the introduction of paper. In Russia, birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived.
Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by the late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes there. When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were sometimes made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.
The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy-wrappings, discarded in the middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried (Nag Hammadi library) or stored in dry caves (Dead Sea Scrolls). Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia.
Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively humid Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those.
Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late 19th century. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different versions of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript.
In Southeast Asia, in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate, softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with a metal stylus. In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900 AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers. This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In Burma, the kammavaca, Buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In Italy some important Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in Bulgaria. Technically, these are all inscriptions rather than manuscripts.
In the Western world, from the classical period through the early centuries of the Christian era, manuscripts were written without spaces between the words (scriptio continua), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters. Hebrew manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called majuscule, those using all lower case are called minuscule. Usually, the majuscule scripts such as uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be cursive, that is, use little or no pen-lift.
Islamic world
Islamic manuscripts were produced in different ways depending on their use and time period. Parchment (vellum) was a common way to produce manuscripts. Manuscripts eventually transitioned to using paper in later centuries with the diffusion of paper making in the Islamic empire. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia, its use and production spread to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa during the 8th century.
Africa
4,203 of Timbuktu's manuscripts were burned or stolen during the armed conflict in Mali between 2012 and 2013. 90% of these manuscripts were saved by the population organized around the NGO "Sauvegarde et valorisation des manuscrits pour la défense de la culture islamique" (SAVAMA-DCI). Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022. An international consultation on the safeguarding, accessibility and promotion of ancient manuscripts in the Sahel was held at the UNESCO office in Bamako in 2020.
Western world
Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use the codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity. Parchment or vellum, as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus, which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present almost exclusively in the very dry climate of Egypt,Examples for papyri that have survived outside Egypt include the Dead Sea Scrolls (in a dry climate), the Herculaneum papyri (buried during the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius) and the Ravenna papyri, which have survived in Italy although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins, the quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin.Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it was made from sheepskin.
Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means "of calf"/ "made from calf". For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane" is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing.
Scripts