Towards a Historiography of the Colophon

Histories of the colophon report that its existence is nearly contiguous with the existence of writing itself. Scribes, the narrative goes, included information about the date or place of a text's copying thousands of years ago on cuneiform tablets, and they continued to do so throughout antiquity, into the Middle Ages, and beyond. Whether bland and factual in diction, flowery, or formulaic, whether earnest or deceptive, the colophon can tell us something about a book's production, even if the colophon was simply copied unchanged from one mauscript to another. Yet the term, "colophon" itself was never used by a single medieval scribe, nor by their contemporaries, nor even by early printers. This paper will present the colophon as a scholarly invention and, through a case study tracking the vagaries of a single colophon across four centuries, will illustrate the work that the invention of this category performs.