Marges, gloses et décor dans une série de manuscrits arabo-islamiques

• Main Author: Annie Vernay-Nouri
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2002-11-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/1178

The margins in manuscripts are the privileged place for glosses. These are often used to specify a certain point in the text and they rarely play a deliberate decorative role in the layout of the page. Nonetheless, a small group of Arabic books, preserved in the National Library of France (BNF), contain glosses of micrographic writing which are composed of figurative motifs which, in the most finished work among them, have an aesthetic quality over a double page when the book is laid out open. These manuscripts, in addition to several others preserved in foreign libraries, seem to have all been copied in Ottoman Anatolia, most often during the 16th century; almost all of them contain grammatical texts. Are these isolated examples or are they part of a decorative practice which has spread out and which is related to Arabic, Hebrew and Persian models? This article begins to explore these questions.