Hi Henry,

I don't know of an official name.  I've seen such devices as "footnotes" in Bedan mss where the hand will point to the text from the margin and Bede's source will be abbreviated in the margin (AVG, GRG...).  I've also seen them and other such symbols used in later mss in the same way, a gloss of some kind in the side margin with a hand pointing to the text to which the gloss refers.

But I've not seen merely ornamental hands pointing at texts.

Larry Swain

----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry Gough-Cooper"
To: Apparatus_Criticus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Apparatus_Criticus] Pointing hands in MS
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:20:29 -0000

In a manuscript chronicle from the 13th c. Anglo-Norman or Welsh, the marginalia include roughly-drawn hands pointing at items in the text. They are perhaps not be contemporaneous with the scribal hand of the text, but later ornamentation. Is there a technical name for these? How common are they?