Chapter 2 - Manuscript

Summary

This chapter charts the historical development of a series of technologies for transmitting handwritten literary texts. It focuses on writing surfaces such as clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper; book formats such as scrolls and codices; scribal practices such as the introduction of spaces between words; and the social organizations through which manuscript texts were produced and circulated, such as the medieval scriptorium. Mak argues that the human hand in particular “supports the production and circulation of ideas in manuscript, printed, digital, and other forms.” It is, she argues, central to all textual transmission, “whether it be slave scribes who took dictation in antiquity, stonecutters who fashioned the inkstones to the world of scholarship and art in China, or the legions of students and overseas workers who manually transcribe and encode literary, medical, and other texts in service of their digital use.”