First introduced by the literary theorist Gérard Genette in his fundamental works “Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré” (1981) and “Seuils” (1987), the concept of paratext (everything beside a main text) saw an increasing interest in recent years. No longer relegated to secondary aspects of the printed or manuscript texts, paratexts are more and more considered as thresholds between the texts and its readers, and not least between texts and the mediums of textual transmission.Since its introduction, the concept has been welcomed also by scholars working on literature in the second degree, who adopted the definition of “paratextual literature” to refer to mainly exegetical texts somehow connected to a base text. It is not by chance that both the international meeting “Palimpsests: An International Symposium on Paratextual Literature” (Vienna 2007) and the volume containing its proceedings “In the Second Degree. Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture” (2010) bear titles clearly related to the theories of the French structuralist.The purpose of this panel is to reflect on paratextuality from the perspective of two strictly related manuscript cultures: the Coptic and the Arabic one. By focusing on a specific case study each speaker will contribute bringing a different perspective, in order to stimulate a debate on terminology and to establish a dialogue between disciplines and different ways of approaching this concept.Chair: Simone Petrillo (Sapienza Università di Roma) Speakers:Marta Addessi (Sapienza Università di Roma), The Canons of Eusebius in Coptic Manuscript TraditionCostanza Bianchi (FSCIRE), Paratexts in Coptic Manuscripts transmitting Canonical Literature: an InsightValentina Bella Lanza (Sapienza Università di Roma), Paratexts and Parabiblical Literature: The Case of the Song of Songs and its Judeo-Arabic VersionsMatteo Pimpinelli (Sapienza Università di Roma), The Margins at the Center: Marginalia and Paratexts as Practices of Reuse in the Arabic Medical Manuscripts