The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge…
The archive is traditionally considered the counterpart of the library, the one storing records, the other housing books. There is evidence, however, that this institutional division of labor reflects certain historical and social constellations. The present volume addresses the question of this complex interrelationship with case-studies from an impressive variety of ancient, traditional, and …