Palaeography and Codicology

The study of both Greek and Latin palaeography was furthered by the publication of many manuscript facsimiles beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and of indexes of manuscript catalogues and microfilm catalogues in the twentieth. The study of papyrus documents has its own sub-discipline: papyrology. Codicology, on the other hand, studies the materials from which books were constructed. Diplomatics studies the provenance (origin) of charters and archival documents. Taken together, codicology and palaeography have much to tell about how early Christian writings were preserved from antiquity until the modern day. Materials that were used for bookmaking included papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, and vellum. They were fabricated into books in two formats: the scroll and the codex.