The ABCs of Codicology: Describing Manuscripts for Beginners, Episode 3

In this six-part video series, Dr. Ilya Dines will introduce codicology and manuscript description to librarians and new scholars. These videos were recorded at the Catholic University of America, Special Collections rare books reading room, located in Washington, DC.

Dr. Dines received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a dissertation on the Critical Edition of Bestiaries of the Third Family. He completed his postdoc at the University of Cologne, where he worked on the artist Theophilus.

He came to the United States in 2015, as a recipient of a Kluge fellowship at the Library of Congress, where he worked until 2022. He is the author of 2 books, 20 articles, and several electronic catalogues. In recent years, he has become increasingly interested in codicology and paleography. From these pursuits, the idea emerged to create a small, accessible course that would help librarians describe manuscripts without being professional codicologists.

This video series is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Dines's colleague and mentor, Svato Schutzner (1923-2019).

The Catholic University of America Special Collections consists of four distinct parts which include the Rare Books, Museum, University Archives, and Manuscript Collections. The Rare Books Collections contain approximately 70,000 volumes, which range from medieval documents to first editions of twentieth century authors. The Manuscript Collection, also known as the American Catholic History Collection, collects personal papers and institutional records which document the heritage and history of the American Catholic people. The collections are open by appointment: https://libraries.catholic.edu/specia...

Manuscript:

Didactic miscellany, containing a bestiary and other texts (MS Kk.4.25): https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-KK...

Reference books:

Beal, Peter. A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Brown, Michelle (Michelle P.). Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts : A Guide to Technical Terms. Los Angeles, California: The J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, 1995.

Hunt, Richard W. and Falconer Madan. A summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895-1953.
Useful link: https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/m...

Ricci, Seymour De, with the assistance of W. J. Wilson. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. Three volumes. New York: H. W. Wilson Company. 1935-1940.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL63299...

Szirmai, J.A. (1999). The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315241333