One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts Studies in Manuscript Cultures Edited by Michael Friedrich Harunaga Isaacson Jörg B. Quenzer Volume 9 One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts Edited by Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke ISBN 978-3-11-049693-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049695-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-049559-1 ISSN 2365-9696 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Michael Friedrich, Cosima Schwarke, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. The book is published with open access at degruyter.com. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke Introduction – Manuscripts as Evolving Entities | 1 Marilena Maniaci The Medieval Codex as a Complex Container: The Greek and Latin Traditions | 27 Jost Gippert Mravaltavi – A Special Type of Old Georgian Multiple-Text Manuscripts | 47 Paola Buzi From Single-Text to Multiple-Text Manuscripts: Transmission Changes in Coptic Literary Tradition. Some Case-Studies from the White Monastery Library | 93 Alessandro Bausi Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts: The Ethiopian Evidence | 111 Alessandro Gori Some Observations on Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts in the Islamic Tradition of the Horn of Africa | 155 Gerhard Endress ‘One-Volume Libraries’ and the Traditions of Learning in Medieval Arabic Islamic Culture | 171 Jan Schmidt From ‘One-Volume-Libraries’ to Scrapbooks. Ottoman Multiple-Text and Compo- site Manuscripts in the Early Modern Age (1400–1800) | 207 Florinda De Simini Śivadharma Manuscripts from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva Corpus | 233 VI | Contents Sam van Schaik Manuscripts and Practices: Investigating the Tibetan Chan Compendium (P. Tib. 116) | 287 Donald Harper The Textual Form of Knowledge: Occult Miscellanies in Ancient and Medieval Chinese Manuscripts, 4th Century BCE to 10th Century CE | 305 Imre Galambos Composite Manuscripts in Medieval China: The Case of Scroll P.3720 from Dunhuang | 355 Index | 379 Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke Introduction – Manuscripts as Evolving Entities manuscripts […] do not stand still but develop.1 Johan Peter Gumbert The title of this collective volume pays tribute to the eminent Arabist Franz Rosen- thal (1914–2003). He described in one of his notes “From Arabic Books and Manu- scripts” a manuscript written in 1487–88 by a learned bookseller from Yemen, who had compiled the volume for his own use: The intellectual outlook of an-Nihmî is revealed by the contents of the manuscript which he wrote for himself. He appears to have considered it as the repository of what he thought was most valuable in the world of literature. Mysticism and philosophy take the first place, and there is a strong and unmistakable inclination for the occult sciences. But an-Nihmî also shows some historical and poetical interest. Above all, he displays a courageous willing- ness to make his choice of literary works with a remarkable disregard of religious barriers and traditions.2 This ‘Brief Communication’ on a ‘One-Volume Library of Arabic Philosophical and Scientific Texts in Istanbul’ was published in 1955 and, despite its promise of conceptual richness, only recently seems to have inspired further research. The same holds true for a short article by Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965), author of the famous eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science. In con- trast to copies mass-produced by the pecia system for the European universities since the 14th century, he had described manuscripts which consisted of more than one text and had been produced by or for an individual who desired to have ‘in a single volume a number of relatively brief treatises by different authors of his own selection’ as early as 1946: 3 Since this was his own affair, he might alter the word order or even the wording of his au- thors to make the meaning clearer or the style more acceptable to himself, or just because he was a bit careless and indifferent as to such matters. He might purposely omit some of || 1 Gumbert 2004a, 21. A few days before this book went into print, the editors learned of the passing away of Johan Peter Gumbert. We dedicate this volume to his memory. 2 Rosenthal 1955, 15. 3 Thorndike 1946, 93–96. © 2016 Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 2 | Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke the text which did not seem to him worth the trouble of copying, or condense it a little, or expand it a little, or embody a previous marginal note in the text, or add a new note of his own, or make such other alterations as he chose. He might know the authors and titles of the works which he was copying so well that he would not bother to record them. He might insert anonymously a composition of his own. So, while the exemplar [in the pecia system] was a single text which aimed to be standard divided into handy pieces, the ordinary learned Latin manuscript is often a composite of different treatises in all sorts of permutations and combinations, not merely of selection and arrangement of the component treatises, but in the characteristics and peculiarities of the text of each. […] Such manuscripts combine within one cover a working library with a laboratory notebook or a clinical record of cases. Or they may reflect the professional interests of a lawyer or logician or theologian or astronomer and astrologer. Others are commonplace books dis- playing a miscellaneous literary interest. In all these instances what is left out may be as significant and revealing as what is included. The personal liberties which the maker of the new manuscript has taken with the old texts also have their import. There is a field open to conjecture not only why certain treatises have been included but why this or that particular extract from a past work was made. If the manuscript was not put together for professional purposes and does not deal with any one special field of knowledge exclusively, its combi- nation of subjects provides further food for thought as to the type of mind back of this con- glomeration of ideas. Why were these treatises on different topics thus brought together? This last question may also to be asked in the case of manuscripts written in different hands or of which the component parts were bound together at a later date. Why were they bound together? […] There may further be significance in the order in which related works occur, although, as far as my knowledge goes, there is likely to be more variety than uniformity in this respect. This article is worth being quoted in length, since it elegantly sketches a research programme which after seventy subsequent years later is still in the process of be- ing implemented. Both ‘one-volume library’ and ‘working library’ convey the same idea of an individual collection of texts in one book that contains all its scribe or patron might need for professional or other purposes. In some cases such a ‘one- volume library’ might even represent a real library or parts of it. While Rosenthal was mainly concerned with the texts of his manuscript, Thorndike already indicated the basic distinction between text and material object: some manuscripts were produced as one book with two or more texts, while others were ‘bound together later’ and consisted of formerly independent ‘component parts.’4 At the same time, this ‘codicological distinction’ becomes blurred again || 4 This distinction resembles the one given much earlier by the German medievalist Edward Schröder (1858–1942) in 1939 who distinguished between ‘Sammelhandschriften’ and ‘Miszel- Introduction – Manuscripts as Evolving Entities | 3 when Thorndike calls both types ‘composite manuscripts’, which as a category is clearly motivated by his textual approach.5 The same observation is applicable to catalogue entries and literary studies where, up to the present day, categories such as ‘miscellany’, ‘recueil’ or ‘Sammelhandschrift’ are sometimes used for both,6 even though certain fields have conventions for their distinction.7 * In the 1980s, scholars of European medieval literatures showed a growing inter- est in ‘miscellanies’ and the concept of ‘miscellaneity.’ Concepts such as mou- vance (Zumthor 1972)8 and variance (Cerquiglini 1989)9 had led to increasing un- easiness with modern scholars’ approach to manuscript evidence, which, in their editions, was usually reduced to one text with the help of a stemmatological || lanhandschriften’: ‘[Miszellanhandschriften sind durch] Einreihung und Zusammenbinden, je- denfalls aber durch Mitwirkung mehrerer Schreiber zustandegekommen’, 169–70. Schröder sug- gested this classification already in 1924: ‘Von diesen sammelhandschriften im engern sinne, […], möchte ich unterscheiden die miscellanhandschriften, in denen man stücke ganz verschie- denen charakters […] zusammenfasste’ (1924, viii.). It was taken up by Arend Mihm, another Ger- man medievalist, in 1967 who introduced the terms ‘Faszikel’ for the components for the latter and ‘Zäsur’ for the borders between them, where discontinuity is observable. For an independent approach see the works by Pamela Robinson starting in 1978 with “The ‘Booklet’: Self-contained units in composite manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period” until up to 2008: “The Format of Books – Books, Booklets and Rolls”. – Further digging would probably unearth more observa- tions of this kind, long before the more recent interest in codicology.