Manuscript
A
manuscript is any
written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. Information may be hand-recorded in other ways than in manuscripts, as
inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of
graffiti) as with a knife point in plaster or with a
stylus on a waxed tablet, (the way Romans made notes), or are in
cuneiform writing, impressed with a pointed stylus in a flat tablet of unbaked clay. The word
manuscript is derived from the
Latin manu scriptus, literally "written by hand."
In
Southeast Asia, in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as
copperplate, softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with a metal stylus. In the
Philippines, for example, as early as
900 CE, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's
dot-matrix printers. This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In
Myanmar, the kammavaca, buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In
Italy some important
Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in
Bulgaria. Technically, these are all
inscriptions rather than manuscripts.
Thus it will be seen that manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in the form of
scrolls or in
book form, or
codex format.
Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with vignettes, border decoration, elaborately engrossed initial letters and full-page illustrations.
The traditional abbreviations are
ms for manuscript and
mss for manuscripts. (The second
s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, it doubles the last letter of the abbreviation to express the plural, just as
pp means "pages".)
Before the invention of printing by inked carved blocks (in China) or by
moveable type in a
printing press (in Europe), all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of
scrolls (
volumen in Latin) or
books (
codex, codices). Manuscripts were produced on
vellum and other
parchments, on
papyrus, and on
paper. In Russia
birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived.
When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a
scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.
The oldest manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their resting places, whether placed within
sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as
mummy-wrappings, discarded in the
middens of
Oxyrhyncus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried (
Nag Hammadi library) or stored in dry caves (
Dead Sea scrolls). Manuscripts in
Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the
Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Manuscripts preserved in volcanic ash preserve some of the Greek library of the
Villa of the Papyri in
Herculaneum.
Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of
Antiquity are all lost.
The study of the writing, or "hand" in surviving manuscripts is termed
palaeography. In the
Western world, from the
classical period through the early centuries of the
Christian era, manuscripts were written without spaces between the words (
scriptio continua), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in
Greek or
Latin and usually dating from the
4th century to the
8th century, are classified according to their use of either all
upper case or all
lower case letters. Early
Hebrew manuscripts, such as the
Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called
majuscule, those using all lower case are called
minuscule. Usually, the majuscule scripts such as
uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakeable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be
cursive, that is, use little pen-lift.
According to
Library and Information Science, a manuscript is defined as any hand-written item in the collections of a
library or an
archive; for example, a library's collection of the
letters or a
diary that some historical personage wrote.
In other contexts, however, the use of the term "manuscript" no longer necessarily means something that is hand-written. By analogy a "
typescript" has been produced on a typewriter.
In book, magazine, and music publishing, a manuscript is an original copy of a work written by an
author or
composer, which generally follows standardized typographic and formatting rules. (The staff paper commonly used for handwritten music is, for this reason, often called "manuscript paper.") In film and theatre, a manuscript, or
script for short, is an author's or
dramatist's text, used by a
theater company or
film crew during the production of the work's
performance or
filming. More specifically, a motion picture manuscript is called a
screenplay; a television manuscript, a
teleplay; a manuscript for the theater, a
stage play; and a manuscript for audio-only performance is often called a
radio play, even when the recorded performance is disseminated via non-radio means.
In
insurance, a manuscript policy is one that is negotiated between the insurer and the policyholder, as opposed to an off-the-shelf form supplied by the insurer.
*
Scriptorium*
Codex*
List of manuscripts*
List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts*
Manuscript format*
Historical document*
Media preservation
