The so-called 'Canon Tables' of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of
the early late antique and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West the
invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth
century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring organizing and navigating the
Four Gospels united in a single codex - and in doing so building upon and bringing to
completion previous endeavours - the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly
complex combination of text numbers and images that became an integral and fixed part of all
the manuscripts containing the Four Gospels as Sacred Scripture of the Christians and can be
seen as exemplary for the formation development and spreading of a specific Christian
manuscript culture across East and West AD 300 and 800. In the footsteps of Carl Nordenfalk's
masterly publication of 1938 and few following contributions this book offers an updated
overview on the topic of 'Canon Tables' in a comparative perspective and with a precise look at
their context of origin their visual appearance their meaning function and their usage in
different times domains and cultures.
