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Incipit
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The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is its first few words or opening line. In music it can also refer to the opening notes of a composition. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits. Incipit comes from the Latin for "it begins". In the medieval period, incipits were often written in a different script or color from the rest of the work of which they were a part.
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The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is its first few words or opening line. In music it can also refer to the opening notes of a composition. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits. Incipit comes from the Latin for "it begins". In the medieval period, incipits were often written in a different script or color from the rest of the work of which they were a part. Though incipit is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia, and can be found in various parts of the world. Although not always called by the name of "incipit" today, they remain popular and commonplace.
Historical examples
Sumerian
In the clay tablet archives of Sumer, catalogs of documents were kept by making special catalog tablets containing the incipits of a given collection of tablets.
The catalog was meant to be used by the very limited number of official scribes who had access to the archives, and the width of a clay tablet and its resolution did not permit long entries. This is a Sumerian example from Lerner:
- Honored and noble warrior
- Where are the sheep
- Where are the wild oxen
- And with you I did not
- In our city
- In former days
Hebrew
Many books in the Hebrew Bible are named in Hebrew using incipits. For instance, the first book is called Bereshit ("In the beginning ...") and Lamentations, which begins "How lonely sits the city ..." is called Eykhah ("How").
All the names of parshiot are incipits, the title coming from a word in its first two verses.
Some of the Psalms are known by their incipits, most noticeably Psalm 51 (Septuagint numbering: Psalm 50), which is known in Western Christianity by its Latin incipit miserere.
In the Talmud, the chapters of the Gemara are titled in print and known by their first words, e.g. the first chapter of Mesekhet (Tractate) Berachot ("Benedictions") is called Me-ematai ("From when"). This word is printed at the head of every subsequent page within that chapter of the Mesekhet
Papal
In the Catholic Church, proclamations such as Papal bulls and encyclical letters issued by the Holy See (either by the Pope himself or by Congregations of the Roman Curia), or by an Ecumenical Council, are generally referred to by their opening words — by their incipit, in short.
Some recent examples have been printed with a description placed above the text, laying out the document's subject matter, which functions more or less as a title. Yet even in those cases it remains common to ignore this heading and refer to the document by its incipit. Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, for example, is headed by the description De Christiano Amore (Latin: "On Christian Love"); but it is nonetheless generally known by the first words of its text proper: Deus Caritas est ("God is love").
Some Masses, along with their Gregorian chant settings, are also known by the incipit of the introit, as these were the first words to be sung. One well-known example is the funeral Mass, or Requiem, whose introit begins "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei." ("Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.")
Modern uses of incipits
The idea of choosing a few words or a phrase or two, which would be placed on the spine of a book and its cover, developed slowly with the birth of printing, and the idea of a title page with a short title and subtitle came centuries later, replacing earlier, more verbose titles.
The modern use of standardized titles, combined with the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), have made the incipit obsolete as a tool for organizing information in libraries.
However, incipits are still used to refer to untitled poems, songs, and prayers, such as Gregorian chants, operatic arias, many prayers and hymns, and numerous poems, including those of Emily Dickinson. That such a use is an incipit and not a title is most obvious when the line breaks off in the middle of a grammatical unit (e.g. Shakespeare's sonnet 55 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments").
Incipits are also used in catalogs of music, particularly catalogs of symphonies. In cataloging symphonies, the incipit is the first four bars of the first violin part of the score.
A 2008 novel with a title nearly seven thousand words long uses the incipit of the title (Marienbad My Love) as a name.
Many word processors propose the first few words of a document as a default file name, assuming that the incipit may correspond to the intended title of the document.
In computer science, long strings of characters may be referred to by their incipt, particularly encryption keys or product keys. Notable examples include FCKGW (used by Windows XP) and 09 F9 (used by Advanced Access Content System).
See also
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