Bibliographical theory and miscellanies. A meeting of opposites

In the sciences bibliography (which often goes under other names and guises) is primarily concerned with information; in the humanities, also due to the historical perspective of most scholarship, both the definition and the practice are more complex. A starting point is marked by a famous article by Fredson Bowers in 1952, which divides bibliography into five distinct disciplines: enumerative, historical, analytical, descriptive, and textual, viewed also as a pyramidal or ascending structure. Expounding an example from my own experience, the 1472 edition of Boccaccio’s Filocolo, I argue that Bowers’ definition is not so much about bibliography as about what bibliographers do. With reference to my own Analytical bibliography. An alternative prospectus (2004), I suggest that bibliography is defined, alternatively, on a diachronic axis by the categories of “work”, “text”, and “material object”. To these I now add “space”, which is the physical object as it exists now in present time, a definition of particular interest for the ongoing discussion about the historical and bibliographical importance of the miscellany.