Minuscule Texts and the Transmission of Practical Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages
Paperback (Forthcoming)
(November 2026)
ISBN: 9782503624921
Price: $150.00
This volume presents over two hundred early medieval Latin “minuscule texts”—marginal, practical, and often anonymous additions to pre-tenth-century manuscripts—revealing the socio-economic, religious, and cultural practices embedded in their production and transmission.
This volume offers a representative corpus of Latin minuscule texts inserted before ca. 1000 into manuscripts originally produced up to the ninth century. “Minuscule texts” designates typically brief, often anonymous writings added in margins, on flyleaves, or in other available spaces within a codex, and which bear no direct thematic or formal relationship to the principal text. In this volume, more than two hundred such items are edited, translated into English, and examined through detailed philological and contextual commentaries. The collection illuminates the diverse circumstances in which minuscule texts were generated and transmitted, demonstrating how these interventions responded to immediate administrative, liturgical, pedagogical, or other practical needs. In doing so, it provides new insights into the socio-economic, religious, and cultural practices of early medieval communities and the manuscript environments in which they operated. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of medieval Latin, textual transmission, manuscript culture, and the social, economic, religious, cultural, and intellectual history of early medieval Europe.
Other Titles in this Series
Crafting Knowledge in the Early Medieval Book
Practices of Collecting and Concealing in the Latin West
Volume 16
Insignis Sophiae Arcator
Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Michael Herren on his 65th Birthday
Volume 6
Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies Cambridge, 9-12 September 1998
Volume 5
Latin Love Elegy and the Dawn of the Ovidian Age
A Study of the Versus Eporedienses and the Latin Classics
Volume 14
The Relatio metrica de duobus ducibus
A Twelfth-Century Cluniac Poem on Prayer for the Dead
Volume 10
