Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time

Late antique scholars and medievalists who work on manuscripts as primary sources are very much familiar with the art of the colophon. But the history of the colophon dates back much further than late antiquity, to ancient history when scribes in ancient Mesopotamia chiseled colophons on cuneiform tablets as early as the third millennium BCE. At their inception, colophons were writing production records: who wrote what, when and where? Ancient colophons even provide statistics: how many lines were written in a particular work? As we enter late antiquity, colophons take on a life of their own and begin to acquire literary properties—snippets but nevertheless literary objects. They developed into an art form with distinctive formulaic phraseology. In some traditions, scribes began to record historical events that occurred just before or during the production of a manuscript, events that otherwise would be lost to history. Readers and users also began to insert colophons in existing manuscripts, creating a plethora of colophon types.
How are we to approach the study of colophons and what can they tell us about communities at large, or about individual scribes? And what of the colophon itself as an object? One can drill into its text as any other piece of literature, studying various aspects of its literary style and function, as well as linguistic features that distinguish colophon texts from the main text found in a manuscript. This is particularly interesting in multilingual environments, or when the scribe’s mother tongue is connected to the primary text of the manuscript in a diglossic relationship. Here, the colophon is an essential linguistic source into how the scribe’s native tongue interacts with the higher literary register of the manuscript text.
This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time. Whatever you would like to get out of colophons, we hope that there will be at least one paper here that will draw your attention. If not, there are enough literary snippets quoted to keep you entertained.