The Limits of Paratexts/Paracontents in Manuscripts: Revisiting Old Questions and Posing New Ones

This article revisits the definition of paratextuality as a relationship between two pieces of content (understood in a broad sense) in a manuscript. It also discusses whether, from this perspective, signs and marks such as diacritics, punctuation marks, paragraph signs, quire signatures, owners’ names, library stamps etc. should be considered paratexts. Furthermore, it raises the same question about the physical features of the manuscript, such as the inks, the scripts, or the decoration, as well as variant readings added by scribes, and later readers’ corrections to the main text. Lastly, it implements concepts such as ‘procontent’, the ‘geography’ of the paracontents, and two types of paratextual ‘perimeters’.