Featuresmanuscripts

Featuresmanuscripts is a term used in textual studies to describe a class of manuscripts that foreground physical and linguistic features as objects of analysis, rather than treating the text solely by its content. In practice, featuresmanuscripts combine data on scribal hands, variants, punctuation, orthography, marginalia, glosses, watermarks, and layout to illuminate transmission history, authorship, and scribal practices. The approach appears in traditional philology as well as in digital humanities, where feature data are captured as structured metadata and linked to digital facsimiles.

A featuresmanuscript record typically includes a descriptive prologue, provenance, and physical description, followed by a catalog of textual variants, a map of scribal hands, notes on orthography and punctuation, categorization of marginalia, and documentation of illustrations or bindings. In digital settings, encoding standards such as TEI XML are commonly used to mark feature types, variant alignments, and scholarly notes, enabling queries and filtering by feature rather than by content alone. This facilitates comparative studies across manuscripts and supports machine-assisted analysis of transmission patterns.

The term emerged in scholarly conversations as manuscript studies expanded to emphasize material features and metadata. Featuresmanuscripts are used to support dating, scribal practice analysis, and authorship investigations, and they align with digital cataloging practices in libraries and research centers. Limitations include the need for clear methodological definitions to separate observable features from interpretive judgments.

See also: textual criticism, manuscript studies, digital humanities, TEI.