Demonstrates the wealth and diversity of India's manuscript traditions and communicates a lasting impression of India as a multifarious and multicultural society that holds knowledge and knowledge systems in high regard. This title introduces manuscripts, books, and related documents that span a timescale of almost two millennia of Indian history. The Word is Sacred; Sacred is The Word: The Indian Manuscript Tradition' sets out to demonstrate the wealth and diversity of India's manuscript traditions and to communicate a lasting impression of India as a'
The National Mission For Manuscripts, Through Its Nationwide Documentation Efforts, Is Engaged In Preserving And Rendering Accessible India'S Knowledge Cultures. The Mission'S Seminar Series, Samrakshka, Which Began In February 2005, Presents Various Regional And Local Practices Employed In The Creation And Preservation Of Manuscripts.
This volume, the outcome of a seminar organized at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, marks an important advancement in the study of South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts which are predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries. Nevertheless, they continued a manuscript culture for around two millennia and had a profound impact on traditions of knowledge and culture. After an introductory essay (by J.E.M. Houben and S. Rath) addressing theoretical and historical issues of text transmission in manuscripts and in India’s remarkably strong oral memory culture, it contains twelve contributions dealing with South Indian manuscript collections in India and Europe (mainly of Vedic and Sanskrit texts) and with problems related to the scripts, the dating of manuscripts and India's literary and intellectual history. Contributors include: G. Colas, A.A. Esposito, M. Fujii, C. Galewicz, J.E.M. Houben, H. Moser, P. Perumal, K. Plofker, S. Rath, S.R. Sarma, D. Wujastyk, K.G. Zysk
Illustrations: 6 B/W & 3 Colour Illustrations Description: The National Mission for Manuscripts was established as a five-year mission in February 2003 by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India with the purpose of locating, documenting, presenting and disseminating the knowledge content of India s handwritten manuscripts, said to be the largest collection of handwritten knowledge documents anywhere in the world. While looking ahead to reconnect with the knowledge of the past, the Mission is in the process of trying to re-contextualize the knowledge contained in manuscripts for the present and the future generations. The Mission launched a lecture series titled Tattvabodha in January 2005. Since then, a monthly lecture series in Delhi and other centres in the country, Tattvabodha has established itself as a forum for intellectual discourse, debate and discussion. Eminent scholars representing different aspects of India s knowledge systems have addressed and interacted with highly receptive audience over the course of the past year and a half. The present volume comprises the first ten lectures under Tattvabodha. A glance at the list of contributors will reveal that the Mission has had the privilege of hosting the finest exponents of Indian culture and the compilation of their lectures makes for invaluable literature. The contributors are listed in alphabetic order: M. K. Byrski, R. Champakalakshmi, Lokesh Chandra, D. P. Chattopadhyaya, G. N. Devy, Irfan Habib, Sheldon Pollock, Namwar Singh, M. S. Valiathan and Kapila Vatsyayan.
Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication. Edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant, it gathers together the contributions of seventeen scholars involved in Biblical, Early Jewish and Christian studies. The volume attests to the spreading of digital humanities in these fields and presents fundamental analysis of the rise of visual culture as well as specific test-cases concerning ancient manuscripts. Sophisticated visualisation tools, stylometric analysis, teaching and visual data, epigraphy and visualisation belong notably to the varied overview presented in the volume.
This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex--its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesKathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo--scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts--focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.
In spite of all the papers that others have written about the manuscript, there is no complete survey of all the approaches, ideas, background information and analytic studies that have accumulated over the nearly fifty-five years since the manuscript was discovered by Wilfrid M. Voynich in 1912. This report pulls together all the information the author could obtain from all the sources she has examined, and to present it in an orderly fashion. The resulting survey will provide a firm basis upon which other students may build their work, whether they seek to decipher the text or simply to learn more about the problem.
