Archives: Team Member

My project unites museum and academic experts in the fields of philology and experimental sciences. Each of the subprojects explores the paratextuality of a particular manuscript culture represented in the Chester Beatty collections (Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist). Within these traditions, philological researchers conduct empirical experiments to explore the links between paratexts and understanding. The project…

My project studies the role and impact of paratextual elements in reading, understanding, interpreting, and learning the Hebrew Bible. The project has two main objectives: to examine the relationship between the biblical text and the Masora annotations and to investigate the interaction between the Masora and other paratextual elements when they coexist in the margins…

My project sets out from the fact that the same text can be formatted in very different ways and it addresses the question of how these formatting differences affect the reader’s experience. This question is addressed to the text we know as “the Bible,” which originally circulated not as a complete volume but as separate…

My project analyzes the impact of paratexts on the perception of Pentateuch manuscripts and their reading within the Samaritan culture. The Samaritan manuscript culture is ancient but still alive and has been preserved within the Samaritan community until today. Literary and visual artwork is an extremely common feature in these manuscripts, but its function and…

His project investigates the phenomena of Tibetan Buddhist paratexts from historical, philological, and empirical perspectives, focusing on the Tibetan texts in the Chester Beatty collection. Some of the key research questions are what the nature and function of paratexts in the Tibetan Buddhist textual tradition are; how the phenomena of paratexts evolved and developed in the…

Her project examines the forms, functions, and cognitive values of the paratexts in the Islamic manuscript tradition, focusing on Arabic manuscripts the Chester Beatty library and Arabic texts on variant readings of the Qur’an, like The Book of Beauty. Dr Helali suggests that the paratext is a multi-layered, mobile fragments whose display and flow on the…

His project explores how Muslim scholars in the 12th and 13th centuries added paratextual elements to the texts that they read. These included notes attesting to students reading the text with a teacher, transforming a manuscript into a social document. Dr. Keegan is examining a 12th-century copy of a 10th-century work entitled The Exegesis of Rare…

Our project investigates the marginal notes and commentary (“scholia”) that surround the main text in Byzantine Greek manuscripts. Rather like modern footnotes, scholia are meant to clarify difficulties, expand meanings, and invite reflection on texts. But the aesthetics do not always seem to help. Sometimes the frame commentary script is so tiny, abbreviated, and unfamiliar…