Thread by @Sonja_Drimmer

1. Manuscript lesson of the Day! The technology of the page. Every page can be thought of as the product of a methodology for communication. Some highly engineered pages are those of glossed books (books with commentary) of the 12th century. Here I'll walk through one.

2. In my first tweet, I outlined in green the main text on the page, which is text from Psalm 51. The remaining infrastructure of the page serves the function of keying the glosses (commentary) to that main text. Here I've marked out in purple the space occupied by the glosses.

Next up is the technique for letting the reader know which gloss corresponds to which part of the main text. I've outlined here in yellow a word in the main text, which is repeated in the section with the commentary, and underlined. The relevant gloss then follows.

4. This commentary contains words on the main Psalm text by celebrated "auctores" (like "author" in our sense, but...More Importanter? The topic for another thread). So here those names are heavily abbreviated, but they're Augustine and Cassiodorus. Citing your sources, yay!

5. Little symbols (tie-marks) help the reader then key the commentary to the auctor. So, when you see a graphic symbol in the commentary column, find its nearest twin. That will tell you the person responsible for that particular gloss.

6. We're still not done! Colored initials in the main text indicate the beginning of a new verse from the Psalm. Smaller colored initials of the same words appear in the adjacent commentary column, so the reader knows where commentary on that new verse starts.

7. Finally, we have a large, red and sparingly pen-flourished initial that indicates the start of the next main text, in this case, Psalm 52. If you'd like to explore this manuscript further, you can do so thanks to the Digital Bodleian, here digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/51e096…

8. What I neglected to mention earlier in the thread is the use of different sizes of script to distinguish the main text from the gloss. So we have, just on this one page, a variety of mechanisms that ease a highly active and complex engagement w the text. They include:

9. Different sizes of script, color coding, placement, symbols to ease cross-reference, a system of abbreviation, and different systems for spacing.

10. And the graphic intelligence of this whole arrangement is made especially clear when one attempts, as I have done, to produce one's own system of reference for breaking down and explicating the components of this page.

11. p.s. just to shout her out bc she is the best: in the fall @Yael_Rice gave a lecture for a class I was teaching, in which she addressed the development of the early design of Qur'an manuscripts, and it's one of the best class lectures I've ever seen. Manuscripts are amazing.