Reichert Media Library

This study focuses on the role of paratext in the context of Zoroastrian manuscripts. The emphasis is on how paratexts contribute to structuring, organizing, and commenting on the knowledge contained in the Avesta manuscripts. It also highlights how they reflect the activities of scribes, commentators, readers, sellers, and owners in the process of production, transmission, dissemination, and reception of the manuscripts and their contents.
The study examines how paratexts enable access to the main text by highlighting their role as a transitional zone that documents the spatial and temporal dimensions of the manuscript production process and reveals the history of each individual Avesta manuscript. In addition to colophons, which are a primary component of the paratext, marginal notes are also examined. These notes can be comments, annotations, statements, contracts, or corrections typically written by later readers or scribes into the margins. The selection criteria for the chosen colophons and marginal notes include diversity in
structure and content, as well as the relationship between specific manuscripts and their respective colophons and marginal notes.

Saloumeh Gholami, born in 1979 in Tehran, is a Professor of Minority Languages in the Middle East at the Institute for Empirical Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her expertise lies in the areas of minority languages and cultures, language documentation, and codicology.