Incipit (and explicit)

Before the title page, which did not appear until the end of the 15th century, a book was identified by its opening words. Medieval manuscripts often open with the formula Incipit liber…, 'here begins the book…', rubricated in red, and close with Explicit…, 'here ends…', sometimes followed by the scribe's colophon. Early printers continued this practice: incunabula have an incipit and an explicit, and it is by these that bibliographers, from Hain to the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, have classified them. The term was later extended to any text: in literary criticism, the incipit is the opening sentence of a novel, whose opening function is studied.

For identification purposes, the incipit is a key: manuscript databases (In principio for Latin texts, the catalogues of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and incunabula indexes are searched by incipit, making it possible to attribute an anonymous text, to identify an abridged or interpolated version, or to recognise a fragment. In a description of an autograph manuscript, quoting the incipit and explicit in quotation marks fixes the identity of the document: two manuscripts of the same poem can thus be distinguished by variations in their opening and closing words. For an incunable, transcribing the incipit with its abbreviations and line breaks is the classic method of description.

The incipit should not be confused with the title, nor the explicit with the colophon: the explicit belongs to the text, while the colophon is a production note. A common error is to mistake an incipit formula for a title, or to describe an early book by a modern conventional title without transcribing its opening words. In a manuscript, an incipit that does not match the reference indexes may reveal a previously unknown text — or a truncated copy missing its first leaf.