Paleography and Codicology lectures

Codicology is the study of the codex, that is, the manuscript book made of folios sewn together in quires then bound, as opposed to the roll (which we didn't talk about).  I view codicology as the study of the handwritten text as a form of material cultural production; in my lecture I address questions such as these:  What sort of artifact is a manuscript book?  How does it differ from a printed book?  What are its materials?  Its mode of production?  What can we discover about its writing and copying?  Its audience?  The reception of the texts it contains?  How would we do that?  And why would we care?

Paleography is the study of ancient writing:  the handwriting used is usually the most immediately alienating element in your first encounter with a manuscript, or with a new kind of manuscript:  you can't READ it.  I give a lightning fast history of Western scripts in the Roman alphabet (with a few additional letters) based largely in Chapter 5 of Greetham's book, although many of my examples of the scripts are different, and I focus more than he does on the practicalities of reading old writing -- so we finish this part of the lecture by working on deciphering some early English scripts together in class.

I finish with some pointers on how to find, get access to, and work with unpublished writings.