Synopses & Reviews
Hebrew manuscripts are our most important source of knowledge about Jewish medieval life, and anyone wishing to engage with Jewish history needs to know about the manuscripts, how to study them, and their literary genres. Colette Sirat offers a comprehensive overview of these subjects in this illustrated introduction. The book is a re-structured, extended and updated version of an earlier presentation in French. It has been translated from the author's revision of her earlier French book, and edited for an English readership, by Hebrew scholar Nicholas de Lange.
Synopsis
An illustrated introduction to Hebrew manuscript culture from the tenth to fifteenth centuries.
Synopsis
This illustrated introduction to Hebrew manuscript culture encompasses all aspects of Hebrew manuscripts - textual, codicological and palaeographical - combining different disciplines to give an all-embracing view of the subject. A description of the history of texts in Hebrew reveals the range and variety of texts - many of which have never been printed.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Part I. Texts: Before the Middle Ages; The Middle Ages; Part II. Books: Codicology; Writing: calligraphic and personal subjects; The scribe; Appendix: Abbreviations, acrostics and the meaning of the Hebrew letters; Part III. The History of Books and Texts: The life and death of manuscripts; Libraries; Questions of method: codicology and palaeography; Texts, copies and text-editions; Judgement on readings and the edition of texts; Part IV. Some Manuscripts: Ten manuscripts: pictures and detailed descriptions.