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.