Palaeography and Codicology: January 2009

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Palaeography and Codicology
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chapter 7
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PA LAEO GRAPHY
A N D C O D I C O LO GY
...............................................................................................................
ralph w. mathisen
7.1 Introduction: Terminology

and History
..........................................................................................................................................
The world of early Christianity was a world of texts, ranging from scriptural and
patristic to calendars, charters, private letters, and even graffiti. Documents were
written on many different kinds of materials in several different languages, primar-
ily Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but others as well. The study of ancient and medieval
texts comprises several different scholarly disciplines. For example, texts written on
durable materials such as stone, bone, metal (such as bronze and lead), pottery, or
clay are subsumed under the field of epigraphy, whereas numismatics deals with
the specialized category of the inscriptions and iconography of coins and medals.
Characteristically, epigraphic and numismatic documents are rather short, often
just several lines, as in the case of epitaphs, legal documents, or graffiti. Longer
documents, such as books, were written on more perishable materials, such as
papyrus, parchment, vellum, and even wax tablets. The study of these documents,
including identifying their dates, classifying their different types of scripts, and
reading their texts, is known generically as palaeography, from the Greek words
for ‘ancient writing’. All of the palaeographic documents written in antiquity and
the Middle Ages were written by hand, the Latin for which, ‘manu scripta’, gives its
name to manuscripts. The discipline of Latin palaeography was established by Jean
Mabillon and the Benedictine monks of St Maur in the late seventeenth century
palaeography and codicology 141
for the purpose of establishing the age of Latin manuscripts based on their hand-
writing and other internal considerations (Mabillon 1681; Metzger 1981: 3). Shortly
thereafter, the first to study Greek palaeography was the Benedictine monk Bernard
de Montfaucon (1708). The study of both Greek and Latin palaeography was greatly
furthered by the publication of many manuscript facsimiles beginning in the mid-
nineteenth century, and of indexes of manuscript catalogues and microfilm cata-
logues in the twentieth century. The study of papyrus documents has its own sub-
discipline, papyrology. Codicology (from codex, the name for a manuscript book),
on the other hand, studies the materials from which books were constructed, the
way in which books were assembled, and the manner in which texts were laid out
on the page (Metzger 1981: 3; Thompson 1894: passim). And diplomatics studies the
provenance (origin) of charters and archival documents. Taken together, codicology
and palaeography have much to tell us about how early Christian writings were
preserved from antiquity until the modern day.
7.2 Palaeographic Materials

..........................................................................................................................................
Some ancient documents, such as charters or personal letters, required but a page
or two. But longer documents, such as books of scripture or biblical commentaries,
could occupy hundreds of pages, and required some means of connecting pages
together to create a liber (Greek biblion or biblos) or book. Materials that were used
for bookmaking included papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, and vellum. They were
fabricated into books in two formats: the scroll and the codex.
7.2.1 Writing Surfaces and their Formats

(i) Papyrus
The earliest form of perishable writing material was papyrus, made as early as 3,000
bce from a species of sedge, also known as bulrush or paper reed, that grew along
the banks of the Nile. In order to create writing material, the outer skin of the
hollow papyrus stem was peeled off, and the inner pith was split, flattened, and cut
into strips up to 15 inches long. The strips were laid side by side vertically, slightly
overlapping, with another layer of strips laid horizontally, edge-to-edge on top. The
two layers were moistened, pounded together, and then dried under pressure in the
sun. The gum released by the fibres helped to fuse the strips into a uniform sheet.
The sheets were smoothed with pumice dust and trimmed. A standard papyrus
sheet, or charta, therefore, was square, the length and width, often around 10 inches,
being a bit less than the length of the original strips.
142 ralph w. mathisen
(ii) The scroll

The earliest form of book, the papyrus scroll, Greek tomos or Latin volumen (‘rolled
up’), was created by gluing many papyrus sheets together, with the horizontal layers
on the same side, to create rolls up to 35 feet long, the maximum manageable length.
The volumen was wound around an omphalos (dowel) made of wood, metal, or
bone. The side with the horizontal layer of strips, being smoother, became the
writing side, or recto. The back, or verso, was usually left blank, although it too
could be used if writing material ran short. The text on Greek papyrus scrolls
was written with a reed pen and arranged in columns generally 2–3.5 inches wide
with half-inch margins, about 18–25 letters per line and anywhere from 25 to 50
lines per column. The horizontal plant fibres provided guide lines. When a scroll
was unrolled, left to right, only about four columns of text would be visible at
a time. The standard size of the volumen determined the standard length of the
individual sections (or ‘books’) of lengthy literary works. Multi-volume books were
kept together in capsae (cylindrical containers) (Thompson 1894: 183 ff.).
(iii) Wax tablets

A ubiquitous writing surface was a tablet, usually wooden but sometimes ivory,
with its surface covered with wax, often black or green. Tablets were usually strung
together in pairs (diptychs) or triplets (triptychs). The wax was inscribed with a
metal stylus that had a sharp point for writing on one end and a knob or flattened
spatula on the other end that could be used for smoothing the wax for erasures or
reuse. Tablets, being less expensive to manufacture than papyrus, were useful for
rough drafts, letters, copies of documents, account books, and a multitude of other
daily purposes. The satirist Horace referred to the use of tablets to write rough drafts
when he commented (Satires, 1. 10. 72–3), ‘Turn your stylus often, again and again,
if you are going to write anything worthy of being read.’ For lengthy documents,
several diptychs could be bound together with leather thongs, creating a book-like
document called a codex (or caudex), a word meaning ‘tree trunk’.
(iv) Parchment and vellum

The most expensive kinds of writing material were parchment and vellum, which
were made from the treated skins of animals such as sheep, cattle, and goats.
According to Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 13. 21), this kind of material orig-
inated when one of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt refused to supply papyrus for
the library of Pergamum. A king Eumenes, probably Eumenes II (197–160 bce),
developed writing material made from animal skins known as membrana (Latin
for animal skin) or charta Pergamena (whence the word ‘parchment’). Technically,
parchment was made from sheepskin, and vellum (from the Latin word vitellus, or
calf) from rather tougher materials such as calf or goat skin. But both terms are
often used generically to refer to all types of writing materials made from animal
skins, ranging from paper-thin uterine lambskin to board-hard cow skin. For the
sake of convenience, the term ‘parchment’ will be used in this discussion to refer to
both parchment and vellum.
The production of parchment began by soaking the skins in a lime bath to
remove fat and loose flesh and to loosen the hair. A skin then was stretched on
a wooden frame and scraped with a lunellum, a crescent-shaped knife, to smooth
it, to remove the hair and any other adherences, and to keep the skin supple as
it dried. Once the skin was dry, the two sides, and especially the hair side, were
rubbed smooth with pumice. The same process could make the skin thinner and
stretch it out farther. The flesh side, which was more absorbent, then was dressed
with pounce (from pumex, or pumice), gum sandarac mixed with pumice, to
make it less absorbent so that the ink would not run. The hair side, on the other
hand, was pounced with chalk and pumice to whiten it. Pounce was also used to
reduce greasiness. In spite of this treatment, the hair and flesh sides often could be
differentiated: the flesh side tended to be white and a bit concave (it shrank more),
whereas the hair side often was yellowish and showed traces of the hair follicles. The
treated skins were then trimmed to make large rectangular sheets, or folia, with the
leftover scraps being used for labels, ties, or even tiny pages. Thick skins could even
be split into two layers, and folia also could be dyed for special purposes.
(v) The codex

Parchment books were constructed differently from papyrus books. Parchment
sheets were stacked in layers, folded in two, and sewn together along the fold, creat-
ing a codex with four times as many pages (front and back) as original parchment
sheets. The word codex gives its name to codicology, which is the study of books in
codex form. Codex also gives its name to ‘codification’, for this was the book format
that eventually was used for large collections of written texts. By the first century
bce, parchment codex notebooks were being used, like codices made from wax
tablets, for rough drafts, keeping accounts, and so on. In the following century, the
codex came into increasing use as a means of copying literary works. Each group of
folded pages with a common internal fold is known as a ‘quire’ or ‘gathering’. Early
codices were of a single-quire format, but the bigger the book, the more clumsy this
method was; fatter books were liable to crack at the spine, and the outer pages had
to be much wider than the inner ones. Thus, it was eventually found more practical
to bind several quires into books of whatever length one desired. The sixteen-page
length, the ‘quaternion’ (tetradēs in Greek), made from four folded sheets, became
standard; although one also encounters quires of other sizes, ranging from binions
(two sheets) and ternions (three sheets) on up. Beginning in late antiquity, the
bottom of the last page of each quire was often marked with a sequential quire
number, or ‘signature’, for example, ‘Q III’, or ‘the third quaternion’. These numbers
facilitated binding, and also are very helpful in reassembling books that have come
apart or survive only in a fragmentary state.
Each page in a codex has a front (top) side, the ‘recto’ (on the right side of a pair
of pages) and a back (bottom) side, the ‘verso’ (on the left of a pair of pages). Sheets
were initially numbered by folia, often in the upper right corner of the recto side.
Thus, the pages on the front and back of each leaf have the same folio number: the
recto page is given the superscript ‘r’ and the verso the superscript ‘v’. Only later did
it become common to number individual pages. The pages of parchment codices
were organized so that each spread (a set of facing pages) consisted of flesh or hair
sides of the parchment sheets, so that like-tinted pages faced each other.
(vi) Paper
Paper was not used at all during the early Christian period. The Arabs learned to
manufacture paper from cotton, linen, or even silk fibres from the Chinese by the
mid-eighth century, but it did not begin to be used in Europe until the late eleventh
century, in Spain. Thence its use passed gradually into the rest of Europe, where it
began to be used for books as of about 1400 ce. Paper books were almost invariably
in the codex format. After the spread of printing and the need for bulk quantities
of writing material, parchment was largely replaced by paper, remaining in use only
for high-quality books or other specialized uses, such as modern ‘sheepskins’, a
word still applied to school diplomas.
7.2.2 Predominance of Parchment and the Codex Format

(i) Choice of writing material
Papyrus remained the writing material of choice until into the fourth century. It was
relatively inexpensive, produced in large quantities, and readily available thanks to
the freely functioning Roman trade networks. But the utility of parchment became
increasingly clear for several reasons. Papyrus was available only from Egypt, and,
while initially very sturdy, it became very friable with age. It did not stand up to
damp climates or hard use. For example, in the late fifth century a friend of Ruricius
of Limoges wrote to him: ‘As you directed, I have found the saint Augustine . . . It
is a papyrus book and insufficiently strong to bear mistreatment, because, as you
know, papyrus is quickly consumed by age. Read it, if you wish, and copy it (Ep.
‘Litterae sanctitatis’). As a consequence of its perishable nature, most extant papyrus
documents come from the sands of Egypt; only a very few survive from elsewhere.
Parchment, on the other hand, could be made anywhere, was rewritable, and was
very durable. Although liable to fire, mildew, and mice, it was otherwise virtually
indestructible. As of the fourth century, there began a transition from the use of
papyrus to that of parchment, especially for documents that would receive heavy
use. Some resisted the change. Galen, for example, claimed that parchment’s glare
caused eye-strain (Opera 3, 18). But, gradually, parchment replaced papyrus as the
writing material of choice, especially in the western world. Availability considera-
tions also came into play. By the fifth century, with the de facto split of the Roman
Empire into eastern and western halves and a rise in Mediterranean piracy, papyrus
was less and less available in the West. As a result, an increasingly large number of
original parchment documents survive from the fifth century and later. The vast
majority of these are church-related.
(ii) Choice of book format

At the same time that parchment was superseding papyrus, the codex format was
also gaining in popularity. The codex had several advantages over the scroll: it
could be written on both sides and still have the pages stay in sequence; it made
cross-referencing and paging back and forth easier; it was more portable, and it was
easier to store on shelves. Whereas the scroll was well suited to accessing a sequential
group of pages, the codex was better for random access among passages scattered
throughout a book. For Christian purposes, the codex was clearly superior. In the
church, the codex facilitated flipping easily from one scriptural passage to another,
a process that would have necessitated a clumsy and time-consuming rolling and
unrolling of a 35-foot scroll. It has also been suggested that a desire to distance
themselves from the Jewish scroll also may have been a reason why early Christians
preferred the codex format: in Christian iconography, the Hebrew prophets are
represented holding scrolls and the Evangelists holding codices. By the second
century ce the codex had replaced the scroll in Christian circles. During the fourth
century the triumph of Christianity also encouraged the general replacement of the
scroll by the codex. The emperor Constantine, for example, requested Eusebius of
Caesarea ‘to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, to be written on prepared
parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional
transcribers’ (Vit. Const. 4. 36: NPNF2 ).
(iii) Exceptions
The papyrus codex and parchment rotulus
Generally speaking, papyrus was used in scroll format, and parchment in codex
format, but there were exceptions. Parchment was also used for scrolls, as in the
Pergamum Library and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And papyrus was adapted to the
codex format, although its loss of suppleness over time made it increasingly difficult
to turn the pages. In papyrus codices, horizontally and vertically oriented pages
were organized to face each other.
The use of the scroll, meanwhile, did not die out completely, but survived, as the
rotulus, into the Middle Ages. Rather than being made of sheets glued side by side,
the rotulus was created by gluing or sewing parchment sheets top to bottom, and
was unrolled vertically rather than horizontally. It was used primarily for storing
records that were suited to this kind of format, such as genealogies and pedigrees,
year-by-year chronicles, or lists of saints. Exultet rolls contained liturgical texts on
one side and illustrations, upside down, on the other, so that when the texts were
read in church, the congregation would be able to see the illustration on the other
side.
Exotic materials
In addition to the use of papyrus, wax tablets, and parchment, other, more exotic
materials were used for documents that palaeographers occasionally have to deal
with. These include wood, as manifested in the Vindolanda tablets and the Tablettes
Albertini, and slate, as seen in documents originating in Visigothic Spain.
7.3 Producing a Codex

..........................................................................................................................................
Most manuscripts produced in the early Christian period and later were not origi-
nal works but rather copies of earlier works, such as books of scripture or works
of esteemed patristic authors. Creating a manuscript from scratch was a time-,
labour-, and resource-intensive business.
7.3.1 Personnel
During the early Christian centuries, documents could be written either by pro-
fessional copyists (scribes) or, very often, by the person who intended to use the
document. Until the third century, it was common for Christians to copy their own
documents. According to Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. eccl. 6. 23; Haines-Eitzen 2000,
ch. 2), for example, Origen used as copyists ‘girls who were skilled in elegant writ-
ing’. There was a great demand for copies of Christian texts, exacerbated by spates of
persecutions when scriptures were confiscated by government authorities, resulting
in the need to re-create, re-copy, and re-circulate new copies. But once Christianity
became politically acceptable in the fourth century, and increasingly large numbers
of well-to-do individuals converted, the production and reproduction of Christian
texts became a major occupation of professional and amateur scribes alike. A pro-
fessional scribe (scriba, notarius, or amanuensis) was paid according to the quality of
the work and by the number of lines. During the Middle Ages, much of the copying
of Christian texts took place in the scriptoria (writing rooms) of monasteries and
episcopal chanceries, and was performed by ecclesiastical scribes skilled in manu-
script production. The production of an entire codex was a time-consuming affair
requiring personnel with many different skills, including not only scribes, but also
rubricators (heading-makers), illuminators, binders, lectors (readers), correctors,
and librarians.
7.3.2 Pre-production Issues

When a codex book was created, several considerations had to be borne in mind
before the copying process could begin. How large would the pages be? How
many pages of writing material would be required? The number of pages would be
determined both by the size of the page and by the size of the margins on each page
(wide margins would leave room for comments and additions, small margins would
make most efficient use of the parchment). The gatherings were arranged ahead of
time, but were not actually sewn together until after the pages had been written,
meaning that much planning had to be given to how the pages would be laid out.
Decisions had to be made about the placement of text, headings, and illustrations,
and about the number of columns, lines per page, and characters per line.
(i) Size considerations

Parchment codices were made in standardized sizes that were based upon the size of
a sheep. A single sheet created from an average-sized sheepskin was a folio. Folding
a folio in half created a bi-folium of four pages, front and back. Gatherings made
from bi-folia are said to be in ‘folio’ format. Smaller-sized books could be created
from cutting folia in half, and then folding these half-folia. This created books in
‘quarto’ format (four leaves from each folio sheet). Likewise, quarto sheets could
be cut in half and folded to create books in ‘octavo’ format (eight leaves per folio
sheet). Because, on average, all sheep were a standard size, ‘folio’ (roughly 12 by 19
inches), ‘quarto’ (9 1/2 by 12 inches), and ‘octavo’ (6 by 9 1/2 inches) formats likewise
were (and continue to be) of similar sizes everywhere. Even smaller page sizes could
be created by making additional folds, or just by using parchment scraps.
The choice of which size to use was often determined by the type of document be-
ing copied. Books considered to be of greater importance, or for public use, usually
merited a larger format. For example, the largest extant early biblical manuscript,
the fourth-century Greek Codex Sinaiticus, weighs in at a whopping 43 by 38 cm (17.2
by 15.2 inches). Other extant fifth- and sixth-century biblical manuscripts average
about 27 by 20 cm (11 by 8 inches). Pocket editions for private use, on the other
hand, could be tiny: a fifth-century Greek gospel measures only 67 mm (2.6 inches)
on a side, and the written space of a small Latin copy of the gospel of John of c.500
ce measures only 71 by 51 mm (2.8 by 2.0 inches) (McGurk 1994: 7–9).
(ii) Availability of writing material

The actual production of a manuscript book began with the collection of a sufficient
amount of writing material. A large book in folio format, such as a complete Bible,
could require 1,000 pages, or 250 folia, that is, the skins of 250 sheep. This made
book production a very expensive business.
Palimpsests
If fresh parchment was not available, as was often the case, then obsolete or worn-
out books could be recycled. The existing writing was laboriously washed (with a
mixture of oat bran and milk) or scraped (with powdered pumice) off the pages,
and a new layer of writing laid down atop the old. This created a ‘palimpsest’
(from the Greek Meaning, ‘scraped again’). During the sixth and seventh centuries
in particular, there was a great trade in reused parchment in the Latin West. The
cannibalization of old manuscripts for writing material became so endemic that
Byzantine Church Councils forbade the destruction of good copies of scriptural or
patristic documents for this purpose. But the practice continued. Many of the liter-
ary works of classical antiquity survive only as palimpsests, such as a fourth-century
copy of Cicero’s De republica, written over in the seventh century by Augustine’s
On the Psalms (Vaticanus Latinus 5757). Some documents even survive as double
palimpsests, as in the case of a fifth-century (or later) copy of Granius Licinianus
which was overwritten in the sixth century (or later) with a Latin grammatical
treatise and then overwritten in the eleventh century with a Syriac translation of
the sermons of John Chrysostom (British Library, Add. MS 17212). In the nineteenth
century, scholars seeking to read palimpsests attacked (and often destroyed) them
with chemicals such as tincture of gall or ammonium hydrosulphate. More recently,
non-destructive methods, such as ultraviolet light or digital imaging, have proved
more successful in reading the underwriting.
(iii) Surface preparation: ruling

To enable a scribe to align the text, a parchment sheet was ruled horizontally (ruling
lines) and vertically (bounding lines) with impressed lines made with a blunt metal
or bone stylus drawn along a rule, a method known as ‘hardpoint’. In order to
duplicate ruling lines within a manuscript and avoid re-measuring every leaf, it
was common to place pin-pricks through a stack of leaves and then to ‘connect the
dots’ on each leaf. As of the twelfth century, ruling lines were also made with a metal
point, a writing implement with a metal tip (such as lead) that left trace marks on
a document. Ink was also used for ruling later in the Middle Ages.
Fig. 7.1 Palimpsest of Cicero, De Republica. The large fourth-century uncial

letters of the Cicero text, the primary script, lie underneath the seventh-century
letters of the secondary script, Augustine’s On the Psalms.
Source: Steffens 1903: pl. 13.
7.3.3 Writing the Text

(i) Writing implements and inks
In antiquity, the writing implements for both papyrus and parchment were a reed
pen (Greek kalamos, Latin calamus) and black ink. In the sixth century the reed was
generally replaced, especially for writing on parchment, by the quill pen. The quill
was taken from the long flight feather of a bird, often a goose. Indeed, the word pen
derives from penna, Latin for feather. The nib, or point of the pen, could be cut with
a knife to produce different kinds of lines for different kinds of writing: thin points
were generally better for informal cursive scripts, and thicker ones for formal book
hands. Black ink was initially made from a mixture of carbon (often obtained from
soot), gum, and water. After about 300 ce, black ink made by adding green vitriol
(ferrous sulfate) to tannin obtained from gall nuts (often oak galls) and carbon
came into use. The sometimes corrosive action caused by the tannic acid and the
oxidation of the iron gave ink its Latin name, encaustum (‘burnt in’), a reference also
to its indelibility. This permanent, water-resistant ink, which over time faded to a
rust brown colour, became the standard European black ink until the nineteenth
Fig. 7.2 Capitalis quadrata used in a fourth- or fifth-century copy of Vergil’s

Aeneid.
Source: Thompson 1894: 185.
century. Red ink, made from cinnabar (mercury sulphide) or minium (lead oxide,
or ‘red lead’), was used for titles and headings, which had the generic name ‘rubrics’
(from Latin rubrica, or red earth). For deluxe documents, purple (from the shell of
the murex), gold, or silver ink could be used on purple-dyed parchment to create a
codex purpureus, such as the sixth-century Rossano Gospels, or the Codex Argenteus,
a sixth-century Gothic Bible.
Painted illuminations and historiated initials (large initial letters containing a
painting) could be applied with brushes made from frayed reeds or animal hairs.
Paints were made from animal, vegetable, and mineral compounds mixed with
a binding medium such as egg white. Along with red, made from the minerals
discussed above, blue could be made from azurite, and green from malachite (both
forms of copper carbonate), yellow from saffron, and white from white lead (lead
carbonate). Some of these compounds were quite toxic, and great care had to be
taken in their use.
(ii) Sections of a codex

The contents of a codex had several sections in addition to the actual text. Some
manuscripts were preceded by a table of contents, either of different works in a
single manuscript or of the sections of a single work. Individual documents and
sections within works were often preceded by a heading (title) and descriptive
lemma, often written in red letters (rubrics). The first words of a text proper are
known as the incipit, and the concluding words as the explicit. After the explicit
sometimes comes a colophon, or subscription, personal comments of the scribe
perhaps giving his or her name, the date, or expressing relief at having finally
completed the task: e.g., ‘Finit. Gratias Deo’. Marginal or intertextual notes known
as scholia (or marginalia) could be added at any time during or after the initial
writing process.
Fig. 7.3 Rustic capitals used in the Carmen de bello Actiaco, pre–79 CE from Herculaneum. Note
the slashes used as paragraph punctuation.
Source: Steffens, 1910: pl. 3.
(iii) Writing the text

Scripts
One of the primary activities of palaeographers is the identification of different
types of scripts, which not only allows a text to be read, but also, very often, helps a
text to be dated and localized. In Greek and Latin antiquity, there were initially two
basic types of script: block capital and cursive. Capitals (or maiuscules, or ‘upper
case’) were derived from the block letters used in inscriptions, and were used for
formal documents, such as literary texts, intended to be permanent. They were
thus the first ‘book hands’. Capital letters were inscribed (with few exceptions)
as separate letters between two actual or imaginary parallel lines so that all the
letters are the same height. The most severe style of capital script, known as capitalis
quadrata, monumentalis, or elegans, was modelled directly on lapidary capitals, and
used curved lines only where the letter form requires them (as in Latin O or S),
often with serifs. Quadrata was used for the most deluxe editions. Capitalis rustica,
or rustic capital, on the other hand, could be written rather more quickly, with
rather slender, wavy strokes (Thompson 1894: 183).
Cursive, or ‘running’, style, on the other hand, was a shorthand way of writing the
capital letters, and was used for everyday, non-literary documents, such as letters,
accounts, and receipts. It used ascenders that extended above the bodies of the
letters and descenders that fell below. It was varied in style and notoriously illegible,
as attested in a passage from Plautus’s play the Pseudolus (1. 25–30) from the late
third century bce:
Pseudolus. By Pollux, I believe that no one but the Sibyl could read these letters;
no one else could interpret them.
Calidorus. Why do you speak negatively about these lovely letters and lovely
tablets written with a lovely hand?
Pseudolus. Or, I beg you by Hercules, do they reflect the hands of a chicken? For
certainly a chicken has written them.
Cursive capitals developed into miniscule letters (lower case) called ‘new Ro-
man cursive’ during the Roman imperial period. Miniscule cursive made use of
Fig. 7.4 Cursive capitals from a wall inscription from Pompeii, first century
CE, with lines from Ovid (Amores, 1. 8. 97) and Propertius (4. 47), beginning
‘SVRDA SIT ORANTI TVA’.
ligatures (connected letters), and can be even more difficult to read than cursive
capitals.
Circa the third century ce, a new form of book hand, uncial, developed. It was
comprised primarily of maiuscules that made greater use of rounded forms (as seen
in the m) along with some rather miniscule forms (as with e, h, and q), both of
Fig. 7.5 New Roman cursive used in an imperial rescript on papyrus dated to
the fifth century, beginning ‘portionem ipsi debitam resarcire’.
Fig. 7.6 An uncial copy of the book of Acts, chapter 28, from the mid-sixth
century.
which made the writing process quicker and more efficient. Uncial then remained
a standard Latin book hand until the eighth century ce and even later.
Toward the end of the fifth century, another book hand, known either as half-
uncial or semi-uncial, developed. It retained some uncial characteristics, such as
rounded letter forms, the capital letters F, N, and T, and the uncial forms for E, H,
and U/V. But the other letters were miniscules, drawn from the cursive tradition,
with ascenders and descenders. There was also greater use of ligatures, such as N-T
or L-I combinations, all of which made for greater writing speed.
Fig. 7.7 Half-uncial copy of the In Constantium imperatorem of Hilary of Poitiers, dating to
509/510 CE, with quaternion marking at bottom right.
Source: Steffens 1903: no. 17.
Fig. 7.8 Greek cursive papyrus dated to 355 CE; the manumission of a slave.
Greek scripts developed similarly to Latin. The same capital (maiuscule) letters
used in inscriptions were also used on papyrus, although not to nearly as great an
extent as in Latin. With a few exceptions, Greek cursive used the Greek maiuscule
letters, making use of ligatures that allowed the pen to remain on the page. A few
letters, such as alpha, took a miniscule form. Greek cursive was used not only for
administrative documents, but also for literary texts to a greater extent than in
Latin.
Greek uncial, with rounded letters, was introduced during the Hellenistic pe-
riod (third century bce and later), the most characteristic forms being the lower-
case alpha, delta, epsilon, mu, xi, lunate sigma, and omega. Uncial then served
as the primary Greek book hand until the appearance of Greek miniscule in the
ninth century, which also used the characteristic Greek accents and breathing
marks.
The weight of tradition and authority of the Roman Empire created a unifor-
mity of scripts throughout the Greek and Latin worlds. But after the fall of the
Roman Empire, a great diversity of scripts appeared in the Latin West. Although
uncial and semi-uncial remained the standard book hands, various kinds of cursive
evolved in the different national areas, including Visigothic in Spain, Merovin-
gian in France, Insular in Anglo-Saxon England, and Beneventan in Lombard
Italy. In the Carolingian period (eighth–ninth centuries), a standardized miniscule
emerged, Caroline miniscule, which then replaced uncial as the standard book
hand, although uncial continued to be used as a display hand for headings and titles.
Subsequently, in the late eleventh century, a group of scripts generically referred
to as ‘Gothic’ (a term also used to refer to a new architectural style) emerged in
Fig. 7.9 Greek uncial from the Codex Sinaiticus, a copy of the Septuagint dating to
the fourth century CE and one of the two oldest surviving copies of the Greek Bible.
northern France. And even later, during the Renaissance, a rounded ‘humanistic’
script also was used as a book hand. It eventually developed into the modern ‘ro-
man’ typeface, whereas the angular cursive used for business documents developed
into modern ‘italic’ type.
Writing and reading aids

The writing and reading of manuscripts was facilitated by the use of stichometry,
colometry, punctuation, and abbreviations.
a. Stichometry and colometry Greek and Latin manuscripts were written in scripta
continua, without any spaces between the words. Various methods were introduced
that permitted texts to be broken down into smaller units, in order to create smaller
logical units, to facilitate a more euphonius delivery, and simply to count lines and
navigate through the text. In antiquity, the length of literary works was measured by
a unit called the ‘stichos’, the length of an average Homeric or Vergilian hexameter
line, about 16 syllables or 36 letters. The total number of stichoi was often noted
at the end of a work. The count of stichoi was used to determine a scribe’s wages
and the price of a book; to allow referencing of different sections of books (which
were numbered in the margin in units of 50 or 100); and to help ensure against later
additions or deletions (rather like a computer parity check). Josephus, for example,
claimed that his Antiquities of the Jews contained 60,000 stichoi. The use of the
Fig. 7.10 Greek miniscule, a tenth-century copy of Thucydides.

Source: Thompson 1912: pl. 57.
stichos (Latin versus) in the marketplace is attested in Diocletian’s Edict on Max-

imum Prices of 302 ce that also gave the respective values of book hand and cursive
(Edictum de pretiis 6. 41–3): ‘For a copyist, for a hundred lines (versus) of best writ-
ing, 25 denarii; for a hundred lines of next-quality writing, 20 denarii; for a tablet-
writer, for the writing of a letter or of account books, for a hundred lines, 10 denarii.’
Fig. 7.11 Caroline miniscule, the Rule of St Benedict, from the ninth century.
Source: Steffens 1903: pl. 36.
Fig. 7.12 A section of the seventh-century uncial Codex Amiatinus, the best
extant example of the Vulgate, showing divisions into cola and commata.
When copying verse texts, it was common to begin stanzas or lines with a capital
letter and often on a separate line, a practice that was also used in the biblical poetic
books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon). A related system
of parsing lengthy texts into smaller units, and an alternative to using punctuation
marks, is known as colometry, which consisted of breaking texts up into cola and
commata, sense-lines of clauses and phrases that assisted the reader not only in
understanding a text but also in inserting pauses and inflections in the appropriate
places. This system was utilized in the Vulgate by Jerome, who observed:
No one seeing the Prophets set out in meter would think that they were constrained by the
Hebrew language, and he would have a rather similar opinion about the Psalms, or the works
of Solomon, but one would see that which generally happens in Demosthenes and Cicero,
who surely wrote in prose and not in verses, that they are written in cola and commata. We,
likewise, planning for the utility of readers, have defined a new interpretation with a new
kind of writing.
(Praefatio in Isaiam, PL 28. 771)
On a manuscript page, cola began at the left margin and commata were indented
a space or two. The disadvantage of this system is that it was rather wasteful of
manuscript space.
b. Punctuation Another way of breaking up a continuous text involved the use

of punctuation marks. Said to have been invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium
(c .200 bce) as an aid for barbarians trying to learn Greek, they were intended to
assist readers in parsing a text during oral delivery. His marks consisted of a point
inserted at different levels of a text line to represent the length of a pause. But
this system was not extensively implemented. During the early Christian period,
Greek manuscripts indicated the end of a passage by the insertion of a space or of
a paragraphos or paragraph mark (such as a slash), by the enlarging of the initial
letter of a new passage, or by extending the first full line of a new passage into the
left margin.
Early Latin texts, especially epigraphical texts, sometimes used an interpunct, a
raised dot, to separate words, a practice that generally went out of use during the
imperial period. Early Latin manuscripts also sometimes left a space to indicate
the transition from one passage to the next, and the paragraphos mark (a slash in
the De bello Actiaco) to separate paragraphs was also used. Otherwise, punctuation
marks were slow to develop. In uncial manuscripts, a medial point was sometimes
used to indicate a period (long pause), and a colon the end of a chapter. In the
mid-seventh century, according to Isidore of Seville, punctuation marks akin to
those of Aristophanes were used by Latin writers to mark out the cola and com-
mata: ‘Punctuation is a form for distinguishing meaning through the use of cola,
commata, and periods. . . . The first mark is called the subdistinctio, the same as the
comma. The media distinctio follows it, the same as the cola. The ultima distinctio,
which closes the entire thought, is the same as the period’ (Etym. 1. 20). The comma
marked a place to take a breath, the cola a logical division of a thought, and the
period the end of a thought (sentence). The marks were indicated by a punctus
(point) placed at the bottom, middle, and top of the line respectively. By the same
time other marks also were in use, such as a semicolon for a longer pause, and a
virgule (‘’) for a period, or full stop. The question mark appeared in the ninth
century in both Greek and Latin texts (Thompson 1894: 70–1). These methods
for parsing texts ultimately gave rise to the modern division of scripture into
verses.
c. Abbreviations and shorthand Several methods were used to save space in a

manuscript. In Greek manuscripts, for example, letters were sometimes superposed
one above the other. Nearly all Greek and Latin scripts made use of some degree
of abbreviation. In Christian texts, the earliest and most commonly abbreviated
words were the nomina sacra, or sacred words, which were contracted so that
only the initial and final letter or letters were printed. In Greek, for example,
theos was abbreviated ths, whereas in Latin, dominus was abbreviated dns. A spe-
cial sign was the Tetragrammaton, an abbreviation of the name of God based
on the four Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. For marginal notations
in particular, Tironian notes, a form of tachygraphy (shorthand) used in the
Roman period, continued to be used in the Middle Ages. Tironian notes were a
form of linked, compressed cursive combined with abbreviations (such as p for
primus).
7.4 Post-production Issues

..........................................................................................................................................
Once a manuscript had been produced, its history was only beginning. It then had
to be preserved, used, and its contents transmitted to future generations.
7.4.1 Binding
Once a lengthy document had been copied, the gatherings were usually bound
together, often but not always with boards on the front and back for protective
purposes. The gatherings were sewn on to leather cords perpendicular to the spine
of the book. For a permanent binding, the loose ends of these cords were then
threaded through holes drilled into boards on front and back and secured by pegs.
The boards and spine were then covered by damp leather, folded and glued over the
edges of the boards (the ‘turn-ins’), that dried to a tight fit, with the cords showing
through on the spine. A pastedown leaf, often made from fragments of discarded
manuscripts, could be pasted on the inside of the boards for cosmetic purposes. It
was also common to insert a guard leaf, often cannibalized from a discarded man-
uscript, between the boards and the manuscript, and to use discarded manuscript
scraps in other parts of the binding as well. A simpler ‘limp binding’ of parchment
or fabric could also be used, but did not protect the volume nearly as well.
7.4.2 Storage and preservation

Books represented wealth, not only because they were very labour-intensive but also
because of the material resources used in their construction. As treasures, books
were often stored with the other valuables of a church, monastery, or household.
In antiquity, the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum assembled myriads
of papyrus scrolls. Many of these works eventually made their way, in one form
or another, to Constantinople during the Byzantine period. Greek patristic and
classical manuscripts were also preserved in libraries such as those of Mt Sinai and
Mt Athos. In the fifteenth century many works of Greek antiquity and Christianity
then travelled to the West before and after the capture of Constantinople by the
Turks in 1453 ce. The primary repositories of books during the Western Middle Ages
were monastic libraries, the largest of which could contain more than a thousand
volumes. Some of the most significant early monastic and cathedral libraries, which
served both as copying centres and repositories, included Vivarium, Nonantola,
Monte Cassino, and Bobbio in Italy; St Gallen in Switzerland; Luxeuil, Fleury,
Cluny, Lyon, St-Riquier, Tours, and Corbie in France; Fulda, Reichenau, Corvey,
Lorsch, and Sponheim in Germany; and Iona, Lindesfarne, and Jarrow in the British
Isles. Were it not for these scriptoria and libraries, most of the literature of classical
antiquity and the early Christian period would not have survived.
7.5 The Purpose of Palaeography

and Codicology
..........................................................................................................................................
Not a single ancient or early Christian text survives in an original (or ‘autograph’)
copy. Even papyrus documents are copies. Except for the case of a codex unicus, a
copy of an ancient work that survives only in a single copy, ancient works survive in
multiple manuscript copies. Different manuscript copies of the same text invariably
have different readings for some of the same words or passages. How is the scholar
to know which reading is the ‘correct’ one? The primary purpose of palaeography
and codicology as disciplines is to assist in establishing the earliest and most au-
thoritative versions of ancient texts.
7.5.1 Technical Considerations

Much of a palaeographer’s work is very technical. A knowledge of scripts and
abbreviations can do much to help to transcribe (establish a full, unabbreviated
text) and date a manuscript, for even scripts with a long lifetime, such as uncial,
exhibit different characteristics at different times. The date of a manuscript can also
be established by patterns of abbreviation and punctuation, by folio and quaternion
markings, by binding type, and by a multitude of other considerations. Palaeogra-
phers also identify changes of hands in manuscript copying or the later appearance
of new hands, as by later correctors or commentators, for each scribe had his or her
own unique style of handwriting. Even from fragmentary pages, a codicologist can
often estimate the length of the line and number of lines per page in a manuscript,
especially if margins are preserved, and this in turn can help to reconstruct the
length of a lost text. A palaeographer can also help to identify forged documents.
7.5.2 Textual Analysis and Criticism

The actual work of creating modern editions of ancient works lies in the sphere
of textual analysis and criticism. Textual critics attempt to re-create, as much as
possible, the original texts that lie behind the surviving manuscripts, and can take
different approaches in doing so. One school of thought attempts to reconstruct
the original ‘edition’ of a work, however that is defined (ancient works were not
‘published’ in the modern sense, and from the moment of their composition most
ancient texts were in a constant state of revision); another school of thought at-
tempts to establish what the author intended to be the authoritative text.
The primary problem that confronts textual critics is that surviving manuscripts
almost certainly contain words or passages that were not in the original text (known
as the ‘archetype’). In the case where there are many manuscript versions of the
same document (the New Testament, for example, survives in more than 5,300
Greek manuscripts alone dating from the third to the sixteenth century), textual
critics attempt to classify manuscripts in order to determine which are the most
reliable. One method for assigning manuscripts to the same class is by noting
common errors that appear in all of them and must have originated in a single
exemplar (original copy). Textual critics then create a stemma, or family, of man-
uscript classes that allows them to postulate an archetype from which all of the
surviving manuscripts of a text have descended. Sometimes, or even often, the
oldest manuscript does not preserve the most authoritative text, for a much later
manuscript might in fact preserve a copy of a very early manuscript. The archetype
is not necessarily the ‘original’ edition, but is the closest that editors can get to it
based on the manuscript evidence. Textual critics also often suggest emendations
to a surviving text that are not preserved in any of the manuscript readings, but
which seem to an editor to fit the literary, grammatical, or historical context of the
text better than the manuscript readings.
(i) Transmission and errors

Palaeographers can assist textual critics not only by deciphering manuscript scripts,
but also by identifying ways in which errors can creep into manuscript copies. The
very copying process introduced many opportunities for error, and the proliferation
of copies over the centuries created opportunities for the propagation of erroneous
readings.
Unintentional or accidental errors could occur in many ways. There were several
kinds of sight errors. Letters with a similar appearance (e.g. in Greek uncial, epsilon,
theta, omicron, and lunate sigma; or gamma, tau, and pi) could be confused. In
‘permutation’, a scribe transposed letters, syllables, or words because of bad light,
bad eyesight, or a hard-to-read copy. Parablepsis (‘glancing to the side’) occurred
when the scribe’s eye did not return to the correct place on the page. This could lead
to the error of haplography (omission) resulting from homoteleuton (two adjacent
lines ending with the same word or letters). On the other hand, ‘dittography’
(duplication) occurred when a scribe re-copied the same section of a manuscript.
Memory lapses during the split second between reading and copying could result
in the substitution of synonyms or variations in the sequence of words. Other
unintentional errors resulted from hearing errors, when a text was being dictated
by a lector or when a scribe was reading it aloud. Both Greek and Latin had many
homophones, different letters or combinations of letters that, when read, sounded
alike, such as (in Greek) omega and omicron or omicron-upsilon and upsilon. The
error of ‘itacism’ resulted in Greek because, as of the fourth century, the vowels eta,
iota, and upsilon, and the diphtongs ei, oi, and ui, were all pronounced like long e
in English.
Changes to an original text could also be intentional or purposeful, introduced
by a scribe who wanted to improve a text. Scribes sometimes attempted to correct
spelling or grammar. Doing so could result in hypercorrection, the ‘correcting’ of
non-existent mistakes, such as adding an ‘h’ to the beginning of a word on the
assumption that an unpronounced ‘h’ had dropped out. This kind of error was
mentioned by Jerome in a letter to a friend who had sent several scribes to copy
Jerome’s works: ‘If you encounter any errors, you ought to blame the copyists, who
write not what they see but what they understand, and when they attempt to emend
the errors of others they display their own’ (Ep. 71. 5). In Christian manuscripts,
another kind of intentional alteration could involve making doctrinal or theological
‘corrections’ to an objectionable passage.
(ii) Additional aids to textual critics

Documents in other languages
Documents were also copied in a multitude of other scripts in many other lan-
guages, too numerous to be considered in detail here, but which include Syriac,
Samaritan, Coptic, Old Nubian, Meroitic, Ethiopic, Aramaic, Georgian, Armenian,
Arabic, Persian, and Gothic, whose testimony can often augment the evidence of the
Greek, Hebrew, and Latin manuscripts. Syriac, Coptic, and Samaritan manuscripts,
for example, can preserve alternative scriptural traditions. And Arabic manuscripts,
in particular, preserve translations of Greek documents that no longer survive.
New discoveries
One of the most exciting aspects of the palaeographer’s work is the possibility of
the discovery of new texts to study. Previously unknown texts can be found in the
bindings of medieval manuscripts (such as part of the second book of De reditu
suo of Rutilius Namatianus); in palimpsests (such as the new letters of Augustine);
preserved in Renaissance or early modern copies of now-lost documents (such as
the new Augustinian sermons); or as ancient texts, usually papyri (such as the Dead
Sea Scrolls), preserved in the desiccated climates of Egypt and Palestine.
(iii) Future directions

Many opportunities for new work in palaeography and codicology as related to
the history of early Christianity are offered by the application of computer and
scientific technology. Potentially exciting use of scientific analyses has shed light
on the development of early biblical and patristic texts. Modern scientific methods
permit the evaluation and processing of existing and newly discovered texts that
are in a bad state of preservation—the recently processed Judas Gospel, which had
disintegrated into more than 1,000 fragments and for which radiocarbon dating was
used to prove that the papyrus on which it was written dated to between 220 and
340 ce, being a good case in point. Another example of the results that can follow
from meticulous detective work and restoration is provided by the recent edition
of Philodemus’s ‘On Piety’, re-created from a carbonized papyrus scroll found in
Pompeii. New techniques of restoring and preserving ancient documents promise
to make other biblical and patristic texts available to the scholarly community as
well.
Manuscript pages and fragments can now be preserved using ultra-high resolu-
tion digital images that can also be made available on the internet, so as to make
documents much more accessible than in the past. Once texts have been digitized,
they can be categorized and analysed in any number of ways. Computer software
can be used to identify similar scripts used in different manuscripts. Manuscript
tables of contents can be collated and compared to identify similar transmission
processes. Thousands of texts can be compared electronically for use in stud-
ies of authorship. Electronic publication venues, such as the ‘Digital Medievalist’
(<http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>), permit the dissemination of information
about new advances in digital techniques to a world-wide audience.
Techniques of biological research are also beginning to be used to provide new in-
sights into ancient and medieval texts. Computer programs used to chart the evolu-
tion of changes in DNA structure can also be applied to creating evolutionary trees
of manuscript text transmission. And, most recently, it has even been suggested that
DNA analysis can be applied to identify the source of and interrelationships among
ancient manuscript materials derived from animal hides.
Bibliography
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and R. Kay as The Elements of Abbreviations in Medieval Latin Palaeography (Milan:
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Sijthoff).
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Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press).
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Lewis, N. (1974), Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Manuscripts prior to the Ninth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
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McGurk, P. (1994), ‘The Oldest Manuscripts of the Latin Bible’, in R. Gameson (ed.),
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(1981), Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography (New
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7.1 Introduction: Terminology

palaeography and codicology 141

7.2 Palaeographic Materials

7.2.1 Writing Surfaces and their Formats

142 ralph w. mathisen

(ii) The scroll

(iii) Wax tablets

(iv) Parchment and vellum

palaeography and codicology 143

(v) The codex

144 ralph w. mathisen

7.2.2 Predominance of Parchment and the Codex Format

palaeography and codicology 145

(ii) Choice of book format

146 ralph w. mathisen

7.3 Producing a Codex

palaeography and codicology 147

7.3.2 Pre-production Issues

(i) Size considerations

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(ii) Availability of writing material

(iii) Surface preparation: ruling

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Fig. 7.1 Palimpsest of Cicero, De Republica. The large fourth-century uncial

7.3.3 Writing the Text

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Fig. 7.2 Capitalis quadrata used in a fourth- or fifth-century copy of Vergil’s

(ii) Sections of a codex

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(iii) Writing the text

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palaeography and codicology 153

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palaeography and codicology 155

Writing and reading aids

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Fig. 7.10 Greek miniscule, a tenth-century copy of Thucydides.

stichos (Latin versus) in the marketplace is attested in Diocletian’s Edict on Max-

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b. Punctuation Another way of breaking up a continuous text involved the use

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c. Abbreviations and shorthand Several methods were used to save space in a

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7.4 Post-production Issues

7.4.2 Storage and preservation

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7.5 The Purpose of Palaeography

7.5.1 Technical Considerations

7.5.2 Textual Analysis and Criticism

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(i) Transmission and errors

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(ii) Additional aids to textual critics

(iii) Future directions

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(1910), Paléographie latine: 125 facsimilés en phototypie accompagnés de transcriptions et

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