Three Kinds of Evidence, Read Off One Object

Manuscript studies brings together the physical examination codicology performs, the handwriting analysis palaeography performs, and the textual editing philology performs, treating a single manuscript as an object that carries three linked kinds of evidence at once, its construction, its script and its wording, none of which is fully understood in isolation from the other two. The field consolidated as its own specialty in the mid twentieth century, alongside the codicological method Alphonse Dain named in 1949, as manuscript libraries and university programs increasingly trained scholars to read all three lines of evidence together rather than treating codicology, palaeography and textual criticism as separate disciplines applied to the same object by different specialists.

A scripture surviving only in manuscript form, without a printed critical edition to fall back on, is exactly the kind of object manuscript studies is built to examine, and its findings often decide basic questions a tradition's own account leaves open, how old a given copy actually is, whether it was produced by a trained scriptorium or a less careful private hand, and how closely its wording matches other surviving copies of the same text. The atlas cites manuscript studies findings wherever a scripture's early textual history depends on evidence read directly off surviving physical copies.