Manuscript Catalogues and Book History

This essay addresses the production of ‘descriptive catalogues’ of medieval manuscripts. What function are these, in a scholarly context that has seen the rise of ‘codicology/book history’, supposed to be serving? And what (if anything) have their makers been thinking? The essay addresses, inter alia, the fixation of cataloguers on textual identification and their persistence in following what is basically a print-book model formula of presentation, as well as a strikingly ‘presentist’ view of the volumes they handle. The essay suggests a range of improvements: greater explicitness of explanation, suppression of some detail to indexes, and especially greater attentiveness to the fluidity of medieval book-making procedures.