Archaeography

Archaeography is a special historical-philological discipline that develops the theory and methodology of discovering, describing, collecting, and scholarly publishing written historical sources — above all manuscript and old-print monuments. Archaeography embraces field archaeography (the search for and collection of manuscripts in expeditions, archives, and monasteries), cameral archaeography (description and systematization), and editorial archaeography (the preparation of sources for print). It is closely linked to textology, paleography, codicology, and source studies. The development of Ukrainian archaeography is connected with the activity of the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission (from 1843), in which Taras Shevchenko worked as an artist, and later with the foundational source editions of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Multi-volume corpora of chronicles, acts, and charters are the fruit of archaeographic labor. Contemporary Ukrainian archaeography is coordinated by the Archaeographic Commission and the Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography of the National Academy of Sciences.