Abstract
Medieval manuscripts of literary character have already been the subject of research for several centuries. For a long time, the interest of researchers was limited to the texts contained in the manuscripts, while the actual manuscript was reduced to the role of a mere record carrier.
Although codices were gradually devoted more and more attention, codicology did not begin to develop as an independent discipline until the first half of the 20th century. It focuses on literary (unofficial) manuscripts, which it examines materially in all their contexts, in terms of their origin and function as well as further use; nevertheless, its broadest research area is the entire history of the manuscript book.
In the first place, codicology compares manuscripts and their features; based on the results of the comparison, it specifies the fates of individual codices and draws more general conclusions. However, the description of manuscripts as part of codicological work is not isolated from other disciplines and their findings.
A prominent position among them is occupied by library history, which some researchers actually consider to be a part of codicology. In order to provide an introduction into the wider context, the publication thus begins with a brief outline of the history of mainly medieval libraries in the Czech lands.
This text provides a chronological overview of institutional and personal libraries, but it also contains a short list of the sources used by library history and notes on the methods of book acquisition as well as the number of extant codices. For the presentation of the results of the recording and the basic level of the research into manuscripts and manuscript collections, the guidelines for manuscript description have been created in individual lands in order to ensure a comparable standard of the description of particular sources.
Nevertheless, these guidelines mainly specify what the description should contain but do not provide many practical instructions on how to obtain the required information. For this reason, most of the publication contains practical guidance for the description of codices, structured according to Czech Zásady popisu rukopisů [The Guidelines for Manuscript Description], published in 1983.
A manuscript description should be divided into several parts: the first should contain a physical description, the next ownership and library records as well as the literature, and the last the textual (content) description. Especially the physical description is subdivided into shorter chapters devoted to specific parts (the description of the material and of the preparation of the writing surface, the identification of watermarks, the hand, decoration, 183 notation, binding, etc.).
Since the guidelines and the most frequent cases are mainly based on the 'common' medieval material of Czech libraries with emphasis on the 13th-15th centuries, they primarily focus on manuscripts written in the Czech lands. Each of these chapters is complemented by the basic bibliography.
Likewise the accompanying visual materials have been selected with regard to the practical focus of the book. The pictures come especially from manuscripts in the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic and the National Museum Library.
The practical part is complemented by a model description of the codex.