Encyclopaedic Notes as Micro-Texts: Contextual Variation and Communicative Function

Encyclopaedic notes occur in some 45 manuscripts from Helmut Gneuss
and Michael Lapidge’s Bibliographical Handlist (2014), either as individual microtexts or in groups. They are either single statements conveying factual information, or lists itemising simple knowledge. The manuscript context of encyclopaedic notes is, as yet, unexplored: they may occur in the periphery, in the margins or centrally in manuscripts, but are never part of the larger texts in these codices. In this article, I review a group of encyclopaedic notes which recurs, in various forms, in six manuscripts. By considering codicological as well as textual features and by assessing the interplay between the intentions of authors or compilers vis-à-vis reader- or user-response, it becomes clear that the insertion of encyclopaedic notes was motivated by various types of associations made by scribes and compilers. These associations are the key to establishing their communicative functions.