Minitexts as Informal Written Interventions: The Case of Cambridge University Library Kk.5.16, Vat. reg. lat. 1127 and Namur MS 11

Abstract

This paper offers three case studies on ‘minitexts’ added to eighth- and ninth-century manuscripts and suggests that such informal interventions need to be recognized as part of a communication process between readers, scribes and their books in early medieval culture. The additions, comprising a vernacular poem, canon law, epistolary and homiletic material and kinglists suggest an association of ideas between main text and added minitexts.  Yet they also expose a variety of sources for the minitexts, from a written record of oral memory, a summary of one aspect of a well-established texts as in the case of  Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and the reproduction of papal rulings which were part of another widely-circulated collection of canon law, to some interesting chronological summaries which appear to reflect a reader’s engagement with the entire codex in which the minitext was inserted. They indicate too how much we can learn in general about early medieval intellectual culture from pursuing both the engagements with knowledge represented in readers’ additions to their manuscripts, and the questions they raise.