Cultural Materiality Concepts at stake in Comparative Manuscript Studies Public Lecture Series, Spring Semester 2014 (original) (raw)

Hamburg | Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

manuscript cultures, 2023

In this article, we have delved into the phenomenon of multiple exemplars of the same estate inventory from the late fourteenth-century Jerusalem, each showcasing distinct variations in structure, wording, physical characteristics, and content. This pattern, evident in the Ḥaram corpus, is characterised by both versioning and copying practices. It sheds light on two distinctive successive writing processes carried out by court-appointed notaries in Jerusalem. Central to our investigation is the classification of these documents as either ‘versions’ or ‘copies’, a distinction that hinges on the identity of the scribe/originator and their distinct roles and responsibilities in creating and authenticating these documents. We have also discussed the implications of the status of the versioned and copied inventories as ‘originals’ within the socio-cultural context of late fourteenth-century Jerusalem. Out of eleven instances of duplicate inventories and one instance of a triplicate inventory, we identified six pairs of estate inventories where at least one of the exemplars carries a nuskha-note, indicating that copies of that respective exemplar were made.

A heuristic tool for the comparative study of manuscripts from different manuscript cultures

2016

This model depicts a particular manuscript within a manuscript culture in relation to the various key factors which have shaped its content and appearance, and which continue to shape its use. Inspired by Andreas Hepp’s schematic rendering of Raymond Williams’ model of a culture as a “Bedeutungssystem” (semantic system; Hepp 2010, Williams 1981), it represents a culture in which at least some types of knowledge and actions are preserved, transmitted, organised and performed by means of manuscripts. The model and this accompanying commentary do not, however, aim at being a theoretical foundation for a new, manuscript-specific branch of cultural studies. Instead, the model is designed as a heuristic device a) for the analysis of the characteristics and functions of an individual manuscript within a manuscript culture and, more importantly for the purposes of the CSMC, b) as a basis for a systematic comparison of the characteristics and functions of manuscripts from different manuscrip...

The Materiality of South Asian Manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania MS Coll. 390 and the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh

The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.

1 Textual traditions

Handbook of Stemmatology, 2020

Introductory remarks by the chapter editor, Elisabet Göransson Textual criticism and the study of the transmission of texts is by and large dependent on writing and written sources. The development of literacy, from the oral transmission of texts to the development of written records, was a long process indeed, and it took place in various parts of the world. The earliest stages of writing were pictograms, used by the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese, from which ideographic or logographic writing, which expressed abstractions, was developed. Phonetic writing, in which symbols, phonograms, represent sounds rather than concepts, was then developed into syllabic and later into alphabetic writing. Early Sumerian literature and Egyptian literature, both extant from the late fourth millennium BC onwards, constitute the oldest literatures we know of. A wide range of literary textsletters, hymns, and poems, but also autobiographical texts-were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. A narrative Egyptian literature became common from the twentyfirst century BC onwards (during the Middle Kingdom). The cursive shorthand known as the hieratic script gradually became more widely used, both for recordkeeping and for correspondence. Later on, the demotic script was developed from the late Egyptian hieratic script for the same day-today uses, and finally the Egyptians settled on a revised form of the Greek alphabet, the Coptic alphabet, which simplified writing most decidedly. Similarly, cuneiform literature from the ancient Near East, preserved on mostly fragmentary clay tablets, consists of a large corpus of narrative and laudatory poetry, hymns, laments and prayers, fables, didactic and debate poems, proverbs, and songs (T. L. Holm 2005). Even though writing and literature thus existed for a long time before classical Antiquity, for the study of textual criticism and stemmatology-i.e. the relations between the textual witnesses of a textual tradition-approaches to studying the transmission of Greek and Latin texts have been the main points of departure. The basic concepts, methodology, and terminology used by scholars within the field of stemmatology draw exclusively on the literary development and the copying of texts in ancient Greek and Latin. Hence, the perspective in this book and in this introductory chapter is based on the background of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. An overview of other types of literary cultures, specific textual traditions, and editorial approaches used for manuscript traditions in other parts of the world can be found in chapter 7 of the present book (on early Ethiopian, Hebrew, and Chinese literary cultures). For more case studies of oriental manuscript traditions, the reader is referred to the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies handbook (Bausi et al. 2015, 363-462). The textual traditions and transmission of the literary texts we study and analyse depend on many different circumstances. The nature of the preserved manuscripts, their material transmission, authorship, genre, the complexity of the textual tradition, and so on constitute specific challenges for the editor when deciding upon Open Access.

Textual and Material Craftsmanship: What does copying a manuscript mean? Program and Abstracts

2016

Transcribing and Inscribing. The World of Handwriting in Medieval China Medieval China and especially the Tang 唐 (618-907) dynasty are crucial for Chinese literacy, where all the manuscripts of the Chinese empire could only be written and reproduced with brush and ink on paper. This discussion outlines the differences between transcribing and inscribing texts in Medieval China on the basis of both manuscript and epigraphical sources. This analysis proposes that inscribed texts possess a higher aesthetic value or social prestige than transcribed texts. The modern Chinese word for "handwriting" is the compound shuxie 書寫. Both the characters shu 書 and xie 寫 refer to the physical act of writing with the brush. They can be intended as the action of "transcribing" a text from the original, as opposed to the word zhuan 撰, which means "to compose a text." Colophons and other sources show that the character xie implies the sense of transcribing, which means the replication of the original text in its linguistic significance. On the other hand, the character shu means the achievement of aesthetic dignity for the original text as seen beyond its linguistic significance. Clearly, in Medieval China this process of inscribing texts corresponded to the practice of calligraphy intended in its broadest sense, for which the same character shu was used, and is still used today in the modern word for the art of writing, shufa 書法.

Methodological Reflections on the Analysis of Textual Variants and the Modes of Manuscript Production in Early China

Even more than other recent archaeological fi nds from East Asia, ancient Chinese manuscripts have ignited strong academic excitement. While much attention is focused on the philosophical interpretation of these texts, we are only beginning to explore their social circumstances and modes of production, to relate them to other tomb artifacts alongside which they were buried, and to explain their very physical appearance. According to a not uncommon view, texts with a reception history-e.g., the classics, but also a broad range of recently discovered technical writings that were handed down across generations-represent lineages of writings, with each manuscript being a copy of an earlier one. Yet on closer examination, graphic idiosyncrasies suggest the mutual independence of various written versions of the same text and thus a local, individual mode of textual production where scribes enjoyed considerable freedom in choos ing particular characters to write the intended words. In their written form, texts with a transmission history-among them works of canonical status-do thus not seem fundamentally different from occasional writings without such a history. Compared to administrative writings, for which certain written blueprints existed, they were indeed less, not more, defi ned in their graphic form. This is not surprising if we consider that texts to be transmitted were also texts to be committed to memory; their modes of storage and com mu ni ca tion of knowledge did not entirely depend on the writing system. One necessary step towards the discussion of such manuscripts, and ultimately to their function and nature, is the systematic linguistic analysis of their textual variants. The present paper outlines the methodological preliminaries towards such an analysis and suggests which scenarios of early Chinese manuscript production are plausible according to our present evidence, and which others are not.