Alessandro Bausi

Bruno Reudenbach

Hanna Wimmer

The so-called ‘Canon Tables’ of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of the early, late antique, and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West, the invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring, organizing, and navigating the Four Gospels united in a single codex – and, in doing so, building upon and bringing to completion previous endeavours – the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly complex combination of text, numbers and images, that became an integral and fixed part of all the manuscripts containing the Four Gospels as Sacred Scripture of the Christians and can be seen as exemplary for the formation, development and spreading of a specific Christian manuscript culture across East and West AD 300 and 800. In the footsteps of Carl Nordenfalk’s masterly publication of 1938 and few following contributions, this book offers an updated overview on the topic of ‘Canon Tables’ in a comparative perspective and with a precise look at their context of origin, their visual appearance, their meaning, function and their usage in different times, domains, and cultures.

The Canon Tables of the Four Gospels

Canones: The Art of Harmony

Mauro Tosco

contributi presentati all'8o Incontro di linguistica afroasiatica (camito-semitica) : Napoli, 25-26 gennaio 1996

Afroasiatica neapolitana

Siegbert Uhlig

Baye Yimam

The encyclopedia treats all important terms of the history of ideas of this central region between Orient and Africa. After its completion the set will comprise five volumes - four text and one index volume with altogether approximately 4000 articles. The topics range from basic data over archaeology, ethnology and anthropology, history, the languages and literatures up to the art, religion and culture. This first volume combines about 1000 articles in the English language, written by approximately 250 authors with extents varying from a few lines to several pages. Approximately 150 maps and about the same number of illustrations round off this unique reference book.

Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: A-C

This volume brings together a set of contributions, many appearing in English for the first time, together with a new introduction, covering the history of the Ethiopian Christian civilization in its formative period (300-1500 AD). Rooted in the late antique kingdom of Aksum (present day Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea), and lying between Byzantium, Africa and the Near East, this civilization is presented in a series of case studies. At a time when philological and linguistic investigations are being challenged by new approaches in Ethiopian studies, this volume emphasizes the necessity of basic research, while avoiding the reduction of cultural questions to matters of fact and detail.

Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian

Michael Friedrich

Sabine Kienitz

Christian Brockmann

The archive is traditionally considered the counterpart of the library, the one storing records, the other housing "books." There is evidence, however, that this institutional division of labor reflects certain historical and social constellations.

Comparative Views on Record-keeping

Manuscripts and Archives

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).

Comparative Views on Record-Keeping

The encyclopedia for the Horn of Africa treats all important terms of the history of ideas of this central region between Orient and Africa. After its completion the set will comprise five volumes four text and one index volume with altogether approx. 4000 articles. The topics range from basic data over archaeology, ethnology and anthropology, history, the languages and lit-eratures up to the art, religion and culture.

Encyclopaedia Aethiopica

Marilena Maniaci

The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge previous knowledge and trigger further developments. With a vast selection of highly representative case studies – from India, Islamic Asia and Spain to Ethiopian cultures, from Ancient Christian to Coptic, and Medieval European domains – this volume deals with manuscripts planned or growing and resulting in time to comprise ‘more than one’. Whatever their contents – the natural world and related recipes, astronomical tables or personal notes, documentary, religious and even highly revered holy texts – codicological and textual features of these manuscripts reveal how similar needs received different answers in varying contexts and times.

Alessandro Bausi

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