The pearl and the ruby: scribal dicta and other metatextual notes in Yemeni mediaeval manuscripts

The Yemeni manuscripts constitute an important source for the investigation of regional manuscript production. This article discusses various typologies of manuscript notes, namely, copyists’dicta as well as other margin notes pertaining to textual transmission. Typologies of this kind may allow for a better understanding of the history of medieval Yemeni manuscript culture in general and, more specifically, of the history of any single codex under consideration. While general interest in these metatextual notes—typically to be found at the end of a text, and in the margins and other blank spaces of a codex—has been voiced for more than a century, it has only recently been recognized as “one of the more fascinating areas of the study of manuscripts … outside of the text proper.”