Materiale Textkulturen

The final volume in the series synthesizes the research conducted by the Heidelberg Collaborative Research Center 933. Systematized into six topic areas (reflecting on writing, layout and text/image, memory and the archive, material transformation, sanctification, and rule and administration), the CRC scholars summarize the knowledge gained from twelve years of interdisciplinary work into 35 theses on a theory of material text cultures.

Parchment or paper? The choice between these two writing materials was available to people in Italy from 1100, to those north of the Alps from the thirteenth century. If we take them by their word, they preferred the traditional animal skin. But in the hands of writers, paper took over on a broad front. This study analyzes the quiet revolution quantitatively and qualitatively, and investigates why it was so silent.

Like ancient Rome, the medieval metropolis on the Tiber is also a landscape of transmission due to the diversity of its epigraphic legacy. This legacy had a lasting impact on the municipal area of the urbs and provides contemporary researchers with information about the practices of communication that developed in the city. This volume examines this multifaceted medieval epigraphic culture with help from new methodological impulses.

The production and retention of written records was a common and important facet of pre-modern rulership and administration. Much of our understanding of governmental practices and expressions of authority come from the contents of such documents, which have been well studied. Less studied, however, are the records themselves as artefacts.

This volume is an attempt to redress this balance by taking a more holistic, material approach to a range of written records. Through a series of case studies, this volume explores questions regarding the material characteristics of various records and their use. It demonstrates that the material features of the records, including the size and shape, the hands that wrote them and the material substrate, can shed new light on the functioning of government and the declarations of power these records asserted.

The ten contributions of this volume focus on records from a variety of rulers, political systems and administrations. With four case studies from early China and six from medieval Europe, this volume offers transcultural perspectives to demonstrate how different cultures expressed rulership and administration materially through the use of text-bearing artefacts.

The pictoriality of writing has been a major research topic for some years now. This reflects the fact that writing is not just read but always seen as well, that letters are not just written but can also be carved, scratched, and painted. This volume asks how the appearance of writing suggested sacredness in the medieval church space.

The Eucharist and cannibalism: the cultural situatedness of these two concepts seems contrary, which made the analogies between these two concepts all the more disturbing in the sixteenth century. This volume asks whether the "wild cannibal" of America was not just a metaphor-become-meat for the "cultural cannibalism" of colonialism itself but also a manifestation of other discourses of ingestion and devouring circulating in early modern Europe.

A cross-cultural, comparative view on the transition from a predominant ‘culture of handwriting’ to a predominant ‘culture of print’ in the late medieval and early modern periods is provided here, combining research on Christian and Jewish European book culture with findings on East Asian manuscript and print culture. This approach highlights interactions and interdependencies instead of retracing a linear process from the manuscript book to its printed successor.
While each chapter is written as a disciplinary study focused on one specific case from the respective field, the volume as a whole allows for transcultural perspectives. It thereby not only focusses on change, but also on simultaneities of manuscript and printing practices as well as on shifts in the perception of media, writing surfaces, and materials: Which values did writers, printers, and readers attribute to the handwritten and printed materials? For which types of texts was handwriting preferred or perceived as suitable? How and under which circumstances could handwritten and printed texts coexist, even within the same document, and which epistemic dynamics emerged from such textual assemblages?

This edited volume examines the forms and functions of the interaction between hand writing and print culture in the period ca. 1500 to 1800. Handwritten interventions into printed books interrupt the text fixed in print by commenting on it, correcting it, or expanding it. They point to changing contexts of use, the flexibilization of supposedly static concepts of authorship, and the dynamics of correction processes.

This peer-reviewed conference volume examines paper and material aspects of the written word in early modern Europe. The collection is designed around three thematic strands, based on the lifecycle of handwritten documents and manuscripts and printed books: first, production of paper, second production of books and manuscripts and third, trade and exchange, and ownership of manuscripts and books. By tracing the history of paper, books and collections through case studies of historically important objects, the authors identify agents and hotspots of production, trade and ownership from both centres and peripheries of Europe from the late Middle Ages until the beginning of industrialisation. They thereby address material aspects of documents, manuscripts and books, as well as object biography, from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. By doing so this volume provides insight into actual practices of the past and the material history of written texts.

This study examines Speyer, a significant medieval printing location, where four printers operated between 1471 and 1500. Alongside the most important workshop belonging to the Drach family, the brothers Johann and Conrad Hist printed there, as did two anonymous printing firms. This volume builds on their biographies to examine and compare their respective incunabulum production in terms of its content, design, use of paper, and dissemination.

This edited volume explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. Through its choice of authors, disciplinary backgrounds are deliberately merged in order to bridge the traditional gap between archaeologists, epigraphists and philologists, who for a long time studied statues, material inscriptions and literary epigrams within the closely confined borders of their individual disciplines. Through its choice of objects, privileging works of which there are significant material remains, through its inclusion of all kinds of figural-cum-inscriptional designs, ranging from grand sculpture to reliefs and ‘decorative’ marble-objects, and through its methodological emphasis on ‘close viewing’ (and reading!) of individual objects, this volume focuses on the materiality of both sculpture and inscription. This perspective is enriched by two comparative chapters on inscribing Greek vases and Roman walls (graffiti). The intermediality of image and inscription is envisaged from various thematic angles, including the intricacies of combining image and epigram (both materially and in literary projection), the original production and reception of inscribed sculpture in its ‘long life’, the viewing and ‘reading’ of sculpture in a space of movement, the issue of (re-)naming statues, and the image and inscription in its social and gender-historical context.

The combination of image and text is a central element of Roman mosaics from the third to fifth centuries. This volume is the first to present a comprehensive media studies analysis of the complex medial configuration of these artworks that views both media as equal. It reveals mosaics’ communicative strategies within their spatial contexts but also in light of their social and cultural background.

Practices of reading form an important center of synagogal worship as well as Jewish scholarship. The monograph reconstructs the development of ritual reading practices in ancient Judaism based on the triad of acts of reception, materiality, and scriptural use. In this context, Greek-speaking Judaism and its reception of the Greek Bible are given greater attention than before.

Today’s visitors to Pompeii and Herculaneum encounter a vast profusion of written evidence. Painted announcements stand alongside inscribed notices and monumental stone inscriptions. The content is as varied as the conditions of creation and situations that once confronted the ancient reader. This demonstrates in singular fashion the interconnections between the context, action, content, and materiality of the texts.

Throughout Egypt’s long history, pottery sherds and flakes of limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a number of languages. These objects are conventionally called ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts, material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.

We are surrounded by complex things that affect us but which remain concealed behind interfaces. Examples of such black boxes are diverse: smart watches, artificial intelligence, complex software, and gene-editing technology. This interdisciplinary volume explores case examples of black boxes using theoretical analytic tools, looks at the ways they are sealed, and presents attempts to disclose their contents.

What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.

Considering Greek statue inscriptions from the archaic and early classical periods, this book emphasizes inscription practices without losing sight of issues of semantics. The analysis focuses on the layout and graphical or ornamental features of the inscriptions. With this approach, for the first time questions of aesthetics and materiality, which were previously examined only for the statues themselves, are also brought to their inscriptions.

In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.

The everyday use of texts in the ancient world relates in many ways to contemporary practice. Besides inscribed artifacts, the self-reflection of Greek and Roman authors demonstrate an awareness of the importance of materiality. This book presents sixteen interdisciplinary studies of specific cases that illuminate this complex interaction between material presence, media semantics, and literary reflection.

This publication seeks to endeavour the relationship between material artefacts and reading practices in ancient and medieval cultures.
While the acts of reception of written artefacts in former times are irretrievably lost, some of the involved artefacts are preserved and might comprise hints to the ancient reading practices. In form of case studies, the contributions to this volume examine various forms of written artefacts as to their implications on modes of reading. Analyzing different Qumran scrolls, codices, Tefillin, Mezuzot, magical texts, tablets, bricks, and statues as well as meta-textual and iconographic aspects, the articles inquire the possibilities of how to correlate material aspects to assumed modes of reception and practices of reading. The contributions stem from Egyptology, Papyrology, Qumran Studies, Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, Ancient Christianity, and Islamic Studies.
In total, this volume contributes to the research on practices of reception in times past and demonstrates the potential hidden in text-bearing artefacts.

That inscriptions are not only texts but also material objects of specific materiality and presence is one of the recent central insights of ancient epigraphy. This understanding is applied here for the first time systematically, across different regions and over an entire epoch, by examining the change in the inscriptions culture in late antiquity with a view of the Italian peninsula.

Der Kommentar des Raschi (R. Schlomo ben Yitzchaq, Troyes 1040–1105) gehört zum jüdischen Core Curriculum und wird zusammen mit dem Hebräischen Bibeltext abgedruckt. Diese Arbeit untersucht anhand ausgewählter Stellen die Zitationen der Hebräischen Bibel und der Masora, und die frühen handschriftlichen Versionen des Raschi-Kommentars. Zugleich führt die Arbeit in die mittelalterliche jüdische Bibelauslegung und die Lesarten der aschkenasischen Tradition der Hebräischen Bibel ein. So kann gezeigt werden, dass Raschi im 11. Jh. ein Hebräischer Text vorlag, der sich in bestimmten Lesarten, Details der Plene- und Defektiv-Schreibung und Teilen der Masora von dem heute rezipierten Bibeltext auf Grundlage des Codex Leningradensis (BHS) unterschied, und dass die aschkenasische Texttradition sukzessive durch die nach Westeuropa eindringende orientalische Texttradition und die tiberiensische Masora verdrängt worden ist. Damit ist das Buch eine Fundgrube für masoretisch und exegetisch interessierte Theologen, Judaisten und Mediävisten.

Thirteen papers on different subjects, focussing on writings and inscriptions in medieval art, explore the faculty of writing to create and determine spaces and to generate the sacred by the display of holy scripture. The subjects range from book illumination over wall painting, mosaics, sculpture, and church interiors to inscriptions on portals and façades.

Schrifttragende Artefakte sind einer Vielzahl von Praktiken ausgesetzt, durch die sie in der einen oder anderen Form beschädigt werden. Dabei können die Absichten, Hintergründe und Kontexte dieser Praktiken stark variieren, sodass durch die Zeiten hindurch in verschiedenen kulturellen Kontexten, Situationen und Diskursen vielfältige Ausprägungen zu beobachten sind. Solche Fälle sind keineswegs darauf beschränkt, Missbilligung gegenüber Inhalten oder Autoren auszudrücken oder das Andenken an Personen auszulöschen. Anhand von detailliert aufgearbeiteten Fallbeispielen, die vom antiken Ägypten, Mesopotamien und dem Mittelmeerraum über das alte China, das europäische Mittelalter und die Neuzeit sowie islamische Traditionen bis zum heutigen Bali reichen, werden verschiedene Facetten der unterschiedlichen Praktiken und ihrer Motivationen erarbeitet und eine übergreifende Systematik entwickelt. Ziel ist es, eine an praxeologischen Kriterien orientierte Phänomenologie von Schriftzerstörung aufzustellen. Das Hauptaugenmerk liegt auf Praktiken in non-typographischen Gesellschaften, also in Kulturen, in denen Schriftdokumente nicht mittels Buchdruck und vergleichbaren Verfahren fast beliebig vervielfältigt, sondern von Hand einzeln angefertigt wurden.

The volume examines the epigraphic cultures of Italian communes during the High Middle Ages and their relationship to earlier epigraphic cultures in antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It focuses especially on the question of continuity and breaks and the influence of the ancient epigraphic heritage on Medieval epigraphic practice in the cities.

Sign-bearing artifacts are immanent elements of sacred spaces in many cultures. Often, one encounters a phenomenon there that might be described as deliberate “invisibility,” the conscious “concealment” of artefacts and writing. The volume examines this interplay of presence and invisibility using the example of sign-bearing artefacts in sacral spaces in various religions in the Near East and Europe.

Discussion about artifacts with “magical” effects generally focuses on the explicit messages written on them, but what is the relationship between text and image? Does the “magic” come from an interaction between these two elements or should they be interpreted separately? This volume examines the intricate relationship between text and image on amulets and cameos, among others, across different cultures and centuries.

This study examines the rise of paper production while looking specifically at southwestern Germany. The first part illuminates technical and historical aspects through a material investigation of paper and the clues it provides concerning the production process. The second part focuses on the founding of paper mills in Basel and other southwestern German cities while giving particular consideration to social and economic history.

Between 616 and 1180, Buddhist monks at the Cloud Dwelling Monastery engraved around 1,600 sutras on 15,000 stone slabs to save the texts from the impending end of the world. Over one-third of text was inscribed during the Liao Dynasty. Through the analysis of the colophons, this volume offers insight into politics, society, and Buddhism during this period.

The excavations at Pompeii have uncovered over 5600 graffiti carved into the walls of temples, shops, workshops, and homes. They range in type from literary verses, names, greetings, and messages to numbers and tally marks. For the first time, this book takes a comprehensive look at Pompeii’s never-before systematically researched graffiti to explore the nature of graffiti writing in ancient times.

Texts of the Old Testament and the literature of the European Middle Ages feature a number of narratives about objects on which something is written. In this volume, scholars from the fields of Old Testament studies, Jewish studies, and medieval literary studies examine approaches for analyzing such stories and their narrating and narrated objects.

This edited volume includes a compilation of new approaches to the investigation of inscriptions from different cultural contexts. Innovative research questions about "material text cultures" are examined with reference to Classical Athens, late ancient and Byzantine churches and urban spaces, Hellenistic and Roman cities, and medieval buildings.

This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Ancient Middle Eastern studies and the humanities.

Letter writing was widespread in the Graeco-Roman world, as indicated by the large number of surviving letters and their extensive coverage of all social categories. Despite a large amount of work that has been done on the topic of ancient epistolography, material and formatting conventions have remained underexplored, mainly due to the difficulty of accessing images of letters in the past. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital images and the appearance of more detailed and sophisticated editions, we are now in a position to study such aspects.

This book examines the development of letter writing conventions from the archaic to Roman times, and is based on a wide corpus of letters that survive on their original material substrates. The bulk of the material is from Egypt, but the study takes account of comparative evidence from other regions of the Graeco-Roman world. Through analysis of developments in the use of letters, variations in formatting conventions, layout and authentication patterns according to the sociocultural background and communicational needs of writers, this book sheds light on changing trends in epistolary practice in Graeco-Roman society over a period of roughly eight hundred years.

This book will appeal to scholars of Epistolography, Papyrology, Palaeography, Classics, Cultural History of the Graeco-Roman World.

Following Levita’s statement, the Masorah transmitted by medieval illuminated manuscripts was generally considered as less significant for the study of the biblical and masoretical knowledge in the Jewish world. The biblical codices produced in Ashkenaz were considerably disregarded compared to Spanish codices. Challenging this assertion, this work engages in a reflection on the link between the standard Eastern tradition and the Ashkenazic biblical text-culture of the 13^th century.

Élodie Attia provides an edition of thirteen cases taken from MS Vat. Ebr. 14, offering the oldest series of Masoretic notes written inside figurative and ornamental designs. Its critical apparatus offers an unprecedented comparison with the oldest Eastern and Ashkenazic sources to evaluate if the scribe paid more attention to aesthetic details than to the textual contents.

In an unexpected way, the Masoretic notes of Elijah ha-Naqdan, even written in figurative forms, show a close philological link with the Masorah of the eastern Tiberian sources and prove that the presence of figurative elements neither represents a loss nor a distortion of Masoretic knowledge, but rather illustrates a development in the Masoretic tradition.

What does order mean - what orders meaning? These are at once elementary and complex questions for the theoretical and praxeological self-definition of the textual and visual sciences. The collected essays in this volume seek answers from a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in relation to both ancient and modern objects. They engage in a dialogue between the notions of “classical” philology and “modern” literary theory.

The present volume comprises 6 highly original studies on material text cultures in different nontypographic societies stretching from the 3^rd millennium cuneiform textual record of Ancient Mesopotamia to 20^th century Qur'anic boards of northern and central African provenience. It provides a multidisciplinary approach to material text cultures complementary to the interdisciplinary, strongly theory-grounded research scheme of the CRC 933. Six research fellowships were awarded to outstanding young researchers for innovative, high-risk research proposals pertinent to the CRC 933's overall research scheme. Their studies contained in this volume add multidisciplinary dimension to material text culture research, satisfy the curiosity as to the applicability of the theoretical premises and methodology developed and tested by the CRC 933 to research on inscribed artefacts carried out on an international level and in different research environments and contribute to anchoring material text culture research as proposed by the CRC 933 within the tradition and broader context of other research strategies devoted to the material dimension of writing, such as the filologia materiale.

This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselves through writing and material culture.

Researchers view the switch from parchment to paper as an essential condition for the rapid rise in literacy in Europe during the Late Middle Ages. The first part of this volume focuses on medieval paper production in the mill districts in Northern Italy, Southwestern Germany, and Belgium. The second part examines the displacement of parchment by paper in administration and in book culture.

This volume seeks to explore new interpretive approaches to textual sources from past cultures that emphasize their materiality and praxeology. The focus of inquiry is on the relationship between the text and its material carriers and on the influence of material forms on the creation, presence, and reception of what is written.

This study focuses on Holy Scriptures as material objects. What are the contexts for the appearances and the usages of these objects? Is there a difference between Holy Scriptures and other objects, and is it inevitably their sacred content that renders them holy? Interdisciplinary perspectives offer new incentives for understanding the material phenomenon of the ‘Holy Scriptures’.

Carolingian monasteries were the most important agents for the transfer of knowledge and scientific methods during the early middle ages. This publication examines contemporary vehicles and recipients that were involved in the Carolingian knowledge system and guided the transmission and selection of knowledge. The study focuses on the Abbey of Lorsch with its extraordinary manuscript collection and unique library.

‘Praxeology’ as theoretical concept has obtained growing attention in recent years, at the same time there is a lack of empirical findings upon its scope in applied research. The contributions of this volume prove the operational feasibility and heuristic capacity of the ‘praxeological’ approach in an interdisciplinary perspective and based on specific research questions.

From the perspective of early modernity, the presence of writing is linked to its visibility and legibility. This may be a questionable assumption, and it was especially problematic for writers in the premodern era, for whom concealment and veiling played such an important role. The aim of this book is to critically examine the category of the “restricted presence of writing,” from an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective.

How does one define and explore the “material presence of the written in non-typographical cultures?” The interdisciplinary and collaborative essays in this handbook present theoretical principles, describe text-bearing materials and objects, and investigate the diverse practices related to text-bearing artifacts. The analysis is illustrated with examples drawn from a period of over 4,500 years.