Ethiopian Manuscript Culture: Practices and Contexts

The Ethiopian tradition of manuscript production, despite being the longest-lived in the Christian world, is one of the most understudied. This dissertation, based in part upon a series of field reviews conducted with scribes and manuscript craftsmen in the Ethiopian highlands between 2007 and 2011, presents information from those interviews and contextualizes it in relation to other published sources in order to describe the Ethiopian tradition in its own terms before transitioning to selected conclusions about how scholars of foreign manuscript traditions might use the Ethiopian tradition to inform their approaches to historical practices. This work is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the research approach followed in the dissertation. Chapter 2 analyzes what is known about the contexts of manuscript production in Ethiopia, with a special emphasis on interrogating the lack of surviving books from the earliest periods of Ethiopian bookmaking. Chapter 3 describes the practices of parchmenters in the Ethiopian tradition and documents their tools. Chapter 4 describes the work habits of scribes including the cutting of pens, preparation of quires, and the situation of writing. Chapter 5 relates methods and recipes for the making of inks. Chapter 6 covers the processes and tools of the book binder and decorator and includes a more complete inventory of known decorator’s tools than other studies. Chapter 7 transitions away from describing the Ethiopian tradition and focuses on what scholars of foreign manuscript traditions can learn from ethnographic parallels with documented practices. The Ethiopian tradition is continuous since at least late Antiquity, and serves as an important source for analogies to those who wish to better understand vanished historical practices.Ph.D