Definition of Paracontent

Occasional Paper No. 6

Definition of Paracontent

Giovanni Ciotti, Michael Kohs, Eva Wilden, Hanna Wimmer and the TNT Working Group

Core- and paracontent expressions such as “this manuscript contains …” or “the content of this manuscript is …” are ubiquitous and reveal much of how is perceived what is to be found in a specific manuscript. Usually, this would be a text, a group of texts (e.g. the Bible), a text with its commentary, but also pictures such as in sketch-books, or musical notation. This is called core-content.
However, a manuscript may contain further sets of visual signs related to the core-content, such as a preface, maybe written by someone else than the author of the core-text found in the manuscript, the notes of a reader or a cataloguer of the manuscript, a table of contents added maybe centuries after the production of the manuscript, a diagram, etc. This is called paracontent. This term is used in order to avoid ambiguities of the more familiar term paratext often used to refer to textual elements only.

CSMC's Occasional Papers

The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures regularly hosts meetings to discuss the theory, terminology and other issues in manuscriptology. Several of its members – philologists, historians, art historians, linguists and others – collectively engage in contributing to the systematic and historical study of manuscript cultures. The documents are individual contributions and drafts reflecting some of the provisional results of the Centre’s activities.