Manuscript Cultures
The invention of writing is one of the most momentous innovations in human history. For a long time writing meant handwriting; even the relatively recent dissemination of type printing has not, as some still claim, brought about a radical break with the handwritten text. Western European manuscripts not only played an important role well into the eighteenth century. They are quite literally inscribed into the new medium of print: today’s printed books owe far more to the medieval manuscript than the widely held “media change” thesis suggests. In other cultures it took longer still for type printing to take hold in urban centers. In China, for example, this development took place in the early twentieth century and although type printing had been known since the eleventh century, two techniques belonging to the medium of manuscript—the seventh-century technique of woodblock printing and the nineteenth-century technique of lithography—proved enduringly robust competitors. Viewed from this perspective, it is more than valid to ask to whether the claim about the quasi teleological succession of both individual and key media posited in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy—a claim which continues to prevail in current debates about the most recent media change to electronic text processing and the Internet—is not in fact a thoroughly contingent, regional perspective.
The manuscript cultures of Asia and Africa are not well known here and, as a result, there has been little attempt to study them from a comparative or typological perspective. Even in their native regions, modernization has often resulted in these manuscript cultures being forgotten and their material basis being endangered. Rediscovering one’s own traditions has in some places led to newfound appreciation and even reinvigoration of manuscript cultures.
This is why it is essential for those who wish to approach the medium of the manuscript from an anthropological or universal perspective to take into account the rich, empirical diversity of manuscript cultures. Of course, the sheer volume of materials—conservative estimates suggest there are more than ten million surviving manuscripts from all manuscript cultures worldwide—necessitate manuscript-specific methodological approaches.
The term “manuscript culture” refers to the social and cultural context in which manuscripts are produced, used, and passed on, as well as the social and cultural context shaped by the emerging medium. In this respect, manuscript cultures are not necessarily identical to regional (e.g., Indian) or religious (e.g., Islamic) cultures. It is possible for several manuscript cultures to exist at one time and in one place, for example, that of a scholarly elite and that of religious experts.