Historical Research Through Manuscript Colophons and Marginalia (Research Brief)

Colophons, the addendum to the beginning or end of a manuscript, describe the conditions of each manuscript's production and occasionally include personal notes of the scribes. Marginalia, the notes written in margins, reflect the thoughts of users. Until now, no one had digitized colophons and marginalia to create a comprehensive collection of manuscript description, text, and image. My research produced such a corpus of textual and digital data, plus three CD-ROMs containing 300 digital images of 180 colophons and marginalia from 67 manuscripts, with translations into Bulgarian, English, and normalized (written in standard computer script) Old Church Slavonic (OCS).

Download the pdf at the top of this page for the full brief.

Tatiana Nikolova-Houston, of the University of Texas at Austin, was a 2002-03 Short-Term Travel Grants fellow.