Browse results
Abstract
In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the fact that manuscripts are hardly static objects but prone to change over the course of time. Following this line of research, the present paper considers ancient Chinese scrolls as evolving entities and discusses some of the implications for their reconstruction and description.
Abstract
This study, emphasizing recently discovered bamboo manuscripts as both cultural documents and material objects, investigates the active and autonomous roles played by the scribes of the Tsinghua manuscript collection. Because pre-imperial textual culture has been presented as having tremendous orthographic flexibility and textual fluidly, the codicological and paratextual properties – titles, slip numbers, punctuation marks, verso lines, etc. – have often been considered as being applied without any overarching rules. Yet despite the difficulty of finding any consistent pattern of material design throughout the entirety of pre-imperial manuscripts, within the Tsinghua University collection, I have found not absolute, yet clear overlaps among the codicological and paratextual designs and the classifications of scribal hands. These overlaps indicate that titles, slip numbers, and punctuation marks were deeply associated with the scribes or producers rather than with the readers or users. Most of the punctuation marks should be viewed as a regulation or instruction for the text’s correctness rather than some readers’ understanding or interpretation. Altogether, these purposeful, pragmatic, and surprisingly advanced paratextual devices resonate with the producers’ deepening concerns about textual loss, and show local and even individual efforts and methods to organize and stabilize the ever-changing textual lore.
Abstract
Among the written sources discovered from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng
Abstract
This article proposes a typology of punctuation devices based on functional criteria. It argues that a broad concept of punctuation – including not only non-“alphanumeric” marks but also layout and spacing as well as script features – is needed to do justice to the diversity of material features of manuscripts and their changes over time.
Abstract
The phrase “make wet its upper part” (jiang qi shang