Occasional Paper No. 4
Questionnaire for the Study of Manuscript Collections
(Towards a Typology of Manuscript Collections)
Max Jakob Fölsterm & Janina Karolewski
Collections of manuscripts can be of a very different nature. They can be in the possession of an indi-vidual, a group of people or an institution, who might use the objects in an exclusive manner or grant the right of access and use to others. Moreover, they can be situated in households or in edi-fices of particular communities, kept in shelves or stored in boxes, and so on. Surely, there are many more aspects that have to be considered when describing the nature of a collection, e.g. aspects related to its function or contents. In order to put an emphasis or generalize, one normally classifies a collection in regard to only a few of these aspects. Thus, among others, attributes such as private, public, imperial, monastic, scholarly and priestly are commonly used to describe a collection. But it is not evident at all on which aspect or combination of them a particular attribute bases. For instance, is a collection private in regard to its owner or to its user? And is a collection scholarly in regard to its contents or its use? Besides, at a closer look, some attributes proof less self-explaining as probably assumed. Do attributes like private, public, scientific and religious represent an academic (sometimes anachronistic) abstraction or do they reflect concepts actually existing in a given culture?
CSMC's Occasional Papers
The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures regularly hosts meetings to discuss the theory, terminology and other issues in manuscriptology. Several of its members – philologists, historians, art historians, linguists and others – collectively engage in contributing to the systematic and historical study of manuscript cultures. The documents are individual contributions and drafts reflecting some of the provisional results of the Centre’s activities.
The research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) within the Sonderforschungsbereich 950 (SFB 950). The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.
