Ralph Mathisen
The world of early Christianity was a world of texts, ranging from scriptural and
patristic to calendars, charters, private letters, and even graffiti. Documents were
written on many different kinds of materials in several different languages, primar-
ily Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but others as well. The study of ancient and medieval
texts comprises several different scholarly disciplines. For example, texts written on
durable materials such as stone, bone, metal (such as bronze and lead), pottery, or
clay arc subsumed under the field of epigraphy, whereas numismatics deals with
the specialized category of the inscriptions and iconography of coins and medals.
Characteristically, epigraphic and numismatic documents are rather short, often
just several lines, as in the case of epitaphs, legal documents, or graffiti. Longer
documents, such as books, were written on more perishable materials, such as
papyrus, parchment, vellum, and even wax tablets. The study of these documents,
including identifying their dales, classifying their different types of scripts, and
reading their texts, is known generically as palaeography, from the Greek words
for‘ancient writing’. All of the palaeographic documents written in antiquity and
the Middle Ages were written by hand, the Latin for which, ‘manu scripta’, gives its
name to manuscripts. The discipline of Latin palaeography was established by Jean
Mabillon and the Benedictine monks of St Maur in the late seventeenth century
for the purpose of establishing the age of Latin manuscripts based on their hand-
writing and other internal considerations (Mabillon 1681; Metzger 1981: 3). Shortly
thereafter, the first to study Greek palaeography was the Benedictine monk Bernard
de Montfaucon (1708). The study ofbolh Greek and Latin palaeography was greatly
furthered by the publication of many manuscript facsimiles beginning in the mid-
nineteenth century, and of indexes of manuscript catalogues and microfilm cata-
logues in the twentieth century. The study of papyrus documents has its own sub-
discipline, papyrology. Codicology (from codex, the name for a manuscript book),
on the other hand, studies the materials from which books were constructed, the
way in which books were assembled, and the manner in which texts were laid out
on the page (Metzger 1981:3; Thompson 1894: passim). And diplomatics studies the
provenance (origin) ofcharleis and archival documents. Taken together, codicology
and palaeography have much to tell us about how early Christian writings were
preserved from antiquity until the modern day.
