Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC)

Oral and Written in Sumerian Literature

Sam Mirelman — 2026-10-13

This article seeks to demonstrate that Sumerian literary texts, including ‘curricular’, liturgical and incantation texts, were usually recited and written from memory in pedagogic contexts. This feature of Mesopotamian scribal culture is suggested by various forms of evidence, including especially the abbreviation of texts in manuscripts from all periods.

How Many Lines in a Sapphic Stanza?

P. J. Finglass — 2026-10-13

This article considers, first, why in papyri of Sappho the sapphic stanza is written over four lines, rather than the three required by the nature of its verses; and second, how printing a three-line stanza allows a better appreciation of the relationship in Sappho’s poetry between metre and meaning.

Pindar as a School Author in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: The Evidence of Papyri and Medieval Manuscripts

Almut Fries — 2026-10-13

This paper studies the role of Pindar’s poetry in Late Antique and Byzantine education up to ca. AD 1280. Based on references to Pindar in ancient and Byzantine authors, and the number and content of papyri and medieval manuscripts, it traces the gradual narrowing of the school syllabus from Pindar’s entire oeuvre to the Epinicians (Victory Odes) in the fourth century AD and eventually a Byzantine ‘selection’ of only the Olympians and Pythians. It also examines select papyri and manuscripts for signs that they served educational purposes. It is argued that, as in the case of many ‘classical’ Greek authors and texts, the transmission of Pindar’s works, and their reception in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, cannot be separated from their use in schools.

Literary History in Fragments: The Transmission and Reception of Roman Republican Literature

Gesine Manuwald — 2026-10-13

This paper looks at the issue of how the fragments of Roman Republican literature have been transmitted (by isolated quotations in later ancient authors) and how this way of transmission has shaped the perception of this phase of Roman literature.

Aural Fixity and Semantic Flexibility in the Early Chinese Songs Tradition

Dirk Meyer — 2026-10-13

Based on the newly discovered bamboo slip Songs in the Ānhuī University manuscript collection, this article analyses how during the Warring States period (c. 475–221 BC) in China different text communities would fill the sound moulds of aurally fixed songs creatively for their purposes. By way of a hypothetical, emic reading of the manuscript text, we cast light on the conceptual community behind the bamboo slip Songs and how it assigned meaning within suspended but delimited possibles to the text in a systematic fashion. As an exemplary case, we discuss ‘White Boat’ 白舟 in the bamboo slip Songs with reference to ‘Cypress-wood Boat’ 柏舟 from the songs of the state of Yōng 鄘 in the Classic of Songs (song 45) in the Máo recension.

Arabic Picture-Poems and the Simple ‘Tree’

Julia Bray — 2026-10-13

Arabic picture-poems have a thousand-year history but have been largely ignored by western literary historians and art historians. Only one poet working in the medium has attracted a small body of scholarly studies, al-Jilyānī (AD 1136–1206). This paper will give an overview of existing scholarship on the topic, describe the codified auditory features of classical Arabic poetry that can give rise to different levels of pictorial patterning, and analyse a chronological series of four picture-poems that employ the same motif, a tree, to different effect. Situating picture-poetry more generally in relation to current issues in Arabic literary history, it will suggest how knowledge of, or lack of access to, the manuscript-supports and -formats of pre-modern Arabic literature may inflect our approaches to it.

‘En este lugar se acaba esta rrazon’: Closing Down the Discourse in Performance and Script

Anthony John Lappin — 2026-10-13

How, in oral performance, do we know that the end of the recitation or display has been reached? And how, too, in a manuscript context, can the end of a work be signalled to the reader? Such bringings-to-an-end were often loci of creativity, and I discuss the authorial ending (here termed ‘explicit’) and the scribal signing-off (here invoked as ‘colophon’), as well as scribal colonization of the authorial adieu; in all, an element which has often been dismissed as sterotyped, as fixed or as fossilized is shown to be in constant, often subversive, evolution. At the same time, I consider the typological information preserved in these end-ers (title, author, date, genre), their phylogeny (transmission of particular phrasing or style), and the implications for their use in a particular place and time—here, northern Spain, thirteenth–fifteenth centuries—and, as just one last thing, the manner in which they may transmit how scribes themselves considered the nature of the works they were copying.

John P. Clay and the Clay Sanskrit Library

2026-10-13

The Clay Sanskrit Library (www.claysanskritlibrary.org) is a book series initiated by John P. Clay covering a wide spectrum of Classical Sanskrit literature spanning two millennia. Today, the list of published volumes encompasses fifty-six works. Bound in the convenient pocket size (4.5″×6.5″) in an elegant design, each work features the original Sanskrit text in transliterated Roman letters on the left-hand page with its English translation on the facing page.