Alumni

Currently:  Chevening British Library Fellow

Many early Islamic manuscripts in Arabic from Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau contain annotations in Soninke, one of the trans-border languages in West Africa. The Soninke glosses written in Arabic script (Ajami) feature many similarities in morphology, syntax and lexicon. However, there is considerable variation across the manuscripts, especially noticeable at the graphemic level which somehow reflects phonological structures. This research will group a dozen of digitalized manuscripts with the Soninke annotations according to their palaeographic patterns and linguistic variation. The phonological, grammatical and lexical features thus reconstructed for each of the established subgroups of the manuscripts will then be mapped to linguistic features of the spoken Soninke dialects. The study will contribute to our understanding of the historical development of the Soninke dialects and the sociolinguistic reasons behind the distribution of variation in the manuscripts.

Currently: Researcher at Centro de Estudos Africanos, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique

This study is focused on a local Swahili composed tenzi poem, Utenzi wa Kubula. Firstly, it aims to make a descriptive analysis of the text (with emphasis on the content, typology and style). Secondly, it will use Utenzi wa Kubula as a case study for the analyses of the historical process of the construction of identities in the region of Angoche and its hinterland, from the late nineteenth century onwards. The main objective of the study is to analyze the typology and style of the poem, including: a) motifs of poetic composition and the content; b) Spelling – how Arabic script was re-adapted for local spelling of Swahili, Portuguese and Makhuwa words; c) Metric composition and structure of the manuscript; d) Analyses of the handwriting, physical aspects of decoration and ownership inscriptions. These methodological steps may help to explain the social role of the manuscript as a cultural artifact containing aspects of a collective memory and how it can be used as a source for the study of history. The Comparative approach with the nineteenth century correspondence that I studied in my previous research and further tenzi manuscripts collected in the region may help regarding the understanding of the changing patterns within the writing system as well as the dating of the events in the poem. Oral history and tradition may be important for the reconstruction and mapping of the history of a manuscript transmission as well as the relationship with its sociocultural context. The study is based on a historical approach within an interdisciplinary perspective.

Currently: Research Associate in FNT02 Change and Retention in Annotated Manuscripts of West Africa

The proposed research will be concerned with West African Islamic manuscripts annotated in Soninke written in Arabic-based script (Ajami). The subject matters, specific layout and peculiarities of the language of annotations suggest that the manuscripts were used at advanced stages of Islamic learning, with Soninke being used as an explication language for educational instructions. The study will focus on paratextual elements as they give insight into the functional dimension of the manuscripts, allowing us to reconstruct learning practices. As the research will be dealing with the still living manuscript tradition, the data obtained from the primary written sources will be supplemented by the data collected during fieldwork. The outcome of the study will be a detailed description of the educational practices mediated by the Soninke Ajami manuscripts. The research will advance understanding of written and spoken transmission of Islamic knowledge in West Africa.

Currently: Researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Pwani University, Kilifi, Kenya

Qasidas are poems that are commonly sung and chanted during religious festivals or on special occasions such as marriage ceremonies. For centuries, the qasidas, have widely been used in the Muslim world. Some qasidas such as Banat Suada, Hamziyya and Burda are believed to have special spiritual attachment and healing powers. Hamziyya, one of the most frequently copied and elevated poem in Swahili land, will be the subject of my thesis. The Arabic version of Hamziyya was known as “Ummul Quraa” (Mother of Cities). It was composed by an Egyptian Sufi poet, Al-Busiri, in 12th century (CE). It was then translated from Arabic into Swahili by Sayyid Aidarus of Lamu in the 16th century. Little is known about the biographies of such scribes, their technical apparatus; paper, ink, calligraphy tools and the usage of their materials or texts. One may find Hamziyya manuscripts in Swahili-Arabic or Arabic versions with some interlinear Swahili translations. They were written by different copyists who were from different locations. Some copyists applied their own native Swahili dialects. Due to the absence of standardization, the texts varied considerably in their form, language, diction and style. The Arabic consonant ٻ (Ba), e.g., was used by scribes to represent b, bw, mb, mbw, pw and p in the Swahili texts and the Arabic consonant such as ﻮ (wau) was used to represent o, u or w. Hence, this makes the reading and deciphering of the texts extremely challenging. Based on an analysis which integrates textual, palaeographical, codicological and linguistic aspects, the social contexts of the usage of Hamziyya manuscripts will be investigated because the manuscripts were also used for oral performances. The fundamental objective of the thesis is to provide a critical edition of the Hamziyya corpus and to analyse the manuscripts with regards to the ways they have been used in order to address the overall question of how and for which purposes which type of knowledge was preserved, organized and transmitted in Swahili society.

Accessible as:

Parkar, Ahmed Hussein Ahmed: Manuscripts and Transmission of Knowledge in Swahili Society: A Comparative Analysis of Form and Usage of Qaṣīda al-Hamziyya. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2019

Many Islamic manuscripts from Nigeria, Niger and Chad have annotations in Old Kanembu – one of the earliest written languages in West Africa, related to the modern Kanembu and Kanuri languages. Beyond general similarities in syntactic and morphological structures featured in Old Kanembu glosses, there is a considerable amount of variation across the manuscripts. This study will group eleven digitised Qur’an manuscripts from historical Borno according to their linguistic and palaeographic features and map morphosyntactic variation in manuscripts to the regional Kanembu and Kanuri dialects. This will help us understand the relation between different scribal schools and different dialects.

Currently: Teaching coordinator responsible for the area „Gesellschaft, Kultur und Gesundheit“ at Volkshochschule Werra-Meißner 

Previously: Researcher, Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Arbeitsstelle Hamburg

The objects of investigation will be copies of three works that are the most famous writings in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad. First and foremost, copies of the Qaṣīdat al-Burda will be studied, a poem of praise for the Prophet Muḥammad written by al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Furthermore, I am going to examine copies of al-Ǧazūlī’s (d. 1465) Dalāʾil al-ḫayrāt, a prayer book or manual of blessings on the Prophet Muḥammad, and the Šifāʾ of Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 1149), a handbook devoted to the Prophet’s life, his qualities and miracles. The research starts with a detailed examination of the layout. The main emphasis will be placed on the organization of the single page. One of the basic questions will be to what extent layout elements were used to organize the text and are therefore linked to its content. Furthermore it can be asked whether modes of transmission and the visual organization of the text have mutually influenced each other. Another factor that may have had consequences for the layout and that will therefore be an object of study is the way in which the manuscripts were used. This assumption is all the more plausible since copies of all three texts are regarded as sacred and up to present times talismanic value is ascribed to copies of these texts.

Published as:

Daub, Frederike-Wiebke: Formen und Funktionen des Layouts in arabischen Manuskripten anhand von Abschriften religiöser Texte al-Būṣīrīs Burda, al-Ǧazūlīs Dalāʾil und die Šifāʾ von Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (Arabische Studien 12) Wiesbaden 2016.

In the cities of Roman Asia Minor, inscriptions were omnipresent. They are a comparatively complex medium whose perception was influenced by the particular text as much as by its formal design, its material or its location. The spectrum ranged from the hastily engraved graffiti on the wall of a room to the extensive imperial epistle carved in careful letters on the outside wall of a temple. Since persons from different social status commissioned the inscriptions in various situations, it can be assumed that these contributed to an agent-based structuring of public space. For example, inscriptions with large letters embedded in metal could have generated a surplus of meaning that made a square appear 'central' regardless of its position in the city map, thus requiring certain patterns of behaviour. So called topos-inscriptions, with which dealers marked their public stands, structured a street and permanently represented a group of people that was otherwise only temporarily present in the cityscape. Hence, the distribution of the inscriptions and their design can reveal spatial constructions resulting from competing agents. Apart from providing an elaborate case study of the Greco-Roman period, the project will serve as an example for transcultural and diachronic comparison of inscribed spaces, involving perspectives and methods from classical archaeology, ancient history and human-computer interaction.

This dissertation project is part of RFB02.

Currently: Junior Professor for Archeometry at UHH

Previously: Researcher in Research Field A "Artefact Profiling" at Understanding Written Artefacts.

This interdisciplinary research project combined Arabic studies, archaeometry, codicology and practical replication to the investigation of recipes of black inks and paper coatings in the Arabic language. Among the goals of the project were the identification of the purpose and use of the recipes, the treatises and the manuscripts in which they survive, especially in connection to the actual usage of inks and paper coatings on written artefacts. The identification of materials is also beneficial for the conservation of such manuscripts. The project consisted of several steps. First, ink recipes were collected from written Arabic sources, their feasibility assessed and some of them were reproduced. These samples were then artificially aged and analysed through an array of analytical techniques, mostly non-invasive and non-destructive. Some of the manuscripts containing these recipes were examined for their codicological characteristics and analysed with the same scientific methods. The results proved the effectiveness of such an interdisciplinary approach but also the limitations of the non-destructive techniques used in this research for the identification of recipes and ingredients.

Currently: UX/UI Designer at HDI Group, Hannover

The knowledge of the materials used to write and decorate Persian manuscripts is available thanks to ancient treatises about illumination, calligraphy and paper decoration. From the point of view of an analyst, colorants in Persian manuscripts can be detected by an instrumental analytical approach. In particular, it is generally possible to recognize the inorganic pigments by combining non-invasive analytical techniques such as reflectance spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy. Organic dyes can be identified in situ by UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry (FORS), spectrofluorimetry and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF).
This research will be a study of Persian manuscripts with special focus on Timurid manuscripts, and one of the main purposes of this study is to provide tables and previews of the colours used in the Persian manuscripts. In fact, the target is to render a palette of colours used in the Persian manuscripts based on the analysis carried out by using FORS, FOMF and p-XRF methods revealing the ingredients used to create each colour. The next factor which makes this study distinct from the others is that a more comprehensive analysis of the dyes has been conducted in the Persian manuscripts by employing the FORS and FOMF methods. According to the Golestan-e Honar (written in the 18th century AD) and the Art of bibliopegy in Islamic civilization, which include information about different stages of making manuscripts, it is quite obvious that a large number of dyes was used to make the manuscripts.

Currently: Cultural mediator for the exhibition „Révélation! Art contemporain du Bénin“ at the Fondation Clément, Le François, Martinique

Seeing script begins with reading – or so it seems. But even before reading, or rather, before decoding the letters to form words, which then turn into content and ideas, the reader is a contemplator of the page. From the early Middle Ages onwards, the diversity of script types shows that the written page is more than the mere trace of the word: it is image at the same time as it is content.
This matter was of the highest interest to the early humanists Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli when copying ancient texts in Florence around 1400. They were not content with reproducing these texts: Their work was philological, historical, grammatical and orthographical with the ambition to restore the unaltered form of the texts which, throughout their transmission, had been copied, recopied and adapted at every step to the individual or historical understanding of their structure and content. In addition, Poggio and Niccoli gave them a new form. They created a humanist aesthetic which uses the script and other micro- and macrotypographical elements as parts of the page display. While the script they developed, the humanist minuscule, is well known in palaeographic research, much less attention has been given to the overall decoration and mise en page of the manuscripts with their deliberate restrained appearance. The first part of this project will analyse the humanist aesthetics of the manuscripts of Poggio Bracciolini against the background of the visual traditions of manuscripts from the Carolingian to the scholastic era. The second part will explore how the strikingly ‘modern’ appearance of Poggio’s manuscripts, developed in response to these earlier traditions, embedding him clearly in the cultural and artistic environment of early Renaissance Florence: the translation of rhetoric ideas in visual presentation forms a paratext to the humanist copies making them both visual objects and artefacts to read.

Currently: Scholarship holder, Isa-Lohmann-Siems Foundation

The Magnum Legendarium Austriacum (MLA) is a late-twelfth-century Cistercian collection of saints´ lives and legends compiled in some Austrian monasteries. They are good examples to examine the visual organization of manuscripts. The two copies of Heiligenkreuz and Zwettl are products of a „mother“ and a „daughter“ house, which show discrepancies against the strict gridlines of manuscript spread of Cistercian customs and the close exchange of manuscripts, painters and writers between these both monasteries. They differ from each other in appearance, the organization of texts and the accentuation of certain saints by initials. The markup of initials divides them into representive-static and narrative-specific forms. The microcosm of two closely related manuscripts allows us - almost in a laboratory situation - to go further into the question of concurrent causes like conditions of production, methods of work, ways of transfer, organization of knowledge, devotional practice, political implications and possible change of monastic alignment.

Currently: Researcher, Universität Stuttgart

Previously: Research fellow, Isa-Lohmann-Siems-Stiftung

My PhD Thesis centres on a late medieval Book of Hours, the so called Copenhagen Hours (Kongelige Bibliotek Denmark, Ms Thot 541 4°). This French manuscript from about 1500 stands out due to its impressive illustrations. The Codex contains 8 text parts that are combined each with two diamond-shaped miniatures, altogether 16 illustrations. The miniatures are located in the centre of the page of each first and last part of the text. The pages that lie in-between the first and last pages of every text contain holes that are cut in the shape of diamonds. Through these "peep-holes" the reader is enabled to look at both illustrations at the same time. The aim of my dissertation is to investigate what effect the special layout of the Copenhagen Hours could have had on the devotional practices of it's readers. Whether it could have intensified or maybe even intentionally put into question the act of daily prayer and how it could have impacted the reader's religious knowledge. Furthermore an important part of the project is to ask whether the Copenhagen Hours evoke an idea of the codex as a virtual devotional 'space of the book' which can be entered through the process of reading traversed through the performative turning of the pages.

Published as:

Rostislav Tumanov: Das Kopenhagener Stundenbuch: Bildprogramm und Layout im Kontext Spätmittelalterlicher Lektüre- und Andachtspraktiken (Sensus 9). Köln usw. 2017

Currently: PI of the project RFB11 „Epigraphies of the Corpus – Textual Negotiations of Sacred Power on Medieval Liturgical Artefacts“

Manuscripts of the four Gospels are widely considered to be the most important books in medieval liturgy. On the one hand a certain section from the Gospels was recited or read aloud by the priest or the deacon during Mass, and on the other hand the Gospelbook, the material object, was also venerated, accompanied by candles and incensed in order to express the divine presence in the words that contained this manuscript. In addition to the Gospels, the codeces also include a nearly standardised corpus of paratexts and elements of visual organization, such as the canon tables, an instrument for structuring the manuscript and expressing the integrity of the Corpus Evangeliarum compiled by Eusebius of Caesarea, and his explanatory letter to Carpianos, which were – as far as we know – not read during the liturgy. This project will examine how the physical characteristics of Gospel manuscripts from the late 8th until the 11th century were related to the usage of these books in liturgical reading, considering in particular the functions served by their paratexts and indices. Furthermore, as an art historian it is my special interest to have a closer look at narrative illustrations or ornamental illuminations and especially their role in organizing the text of the four Gospels and their potential relevance as a visual argument.

From the Old Assyrian period it is known that professional scribes existed. It has also been suggested that some private persons, merchants and their families, managed their own correspondence and documents. The question of literacy amongst them, however, can only be answered if individual scribes, their handwriting and thus documents written by them, can be distinguished. The aim of this PhD project is to discern scribal hands in the delimited and coherent corpus of an archive, belonging to a limited number of individuals. It will focus on detecting all forms of individual variability which are used to increase the probability of identification. Therefore, the research will start with an overall analysis of manuscripts, which includes i.a. the shape of the tablets, layout, palaeography, sign choice and spelling variants. The first part of the analysis will focus on letters which show the highest grade of individuality. Later on, the newly developed methodology will be used on other documents to prove its validity. The identification of individual scribes and documents written by them can help estimating literacy among the Old Assyrian community.

The graduate work is about retrieval of writing patterns on historical manuscripts. These patterns could be characters, ligatures or any parts of characters or words. Retrieval means a computer-based automatic locating and collecting of occurrences within manuscripts, which are visually similar to a given pattern, interactively chosen by a user. By evaluating different methods used for general image retrieval, one aim is to adjust algorithms to optimally match the specific application conditions of comparing writing patterns. A proper representation should qualitatively describe the writing pattern to allow an adequate comparison, and should be adjustable to handle the specific characteristics of different writing systems. Finally, all methods will be integrated in an interactive workplace, which will support a broad scope of applications and writing systems investigated by the CSMC.

Currently: PI of the project RFA05 „Similarity Measurement of Visual Patterns in Written Artefacts“

Previously: Researcher at Field A: Artefact Profiling.

Starting from the assumption that each hand or (writer) has a unique writing style, handwriting measurements will be investigated and analysed for the purpose of using style distinctiveness to recognise the scribe of a given manuscript. Standard datasets will be used to evaluate the performance of the algorithms to be developed. Eventually, the implemented methods will be integrated into a web based toolbox to support manuscript analysis at the CSMC. Computer vision and image processing techniques will be applied in order to extract and classify relevant visual features. An online text-independent writer identification scheme will be realised according to the requirements of CSMC subprojects and potentially of CSMC research groups.

Accessible as:

Mohammed, Hussein. Computational analysis of writing style in digitised manuscripts. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2018.

After the end of the Second World War in Germany in 1945, paper documents were of central importance for the establishment of an administrative compensation practice with regard to Nazi crimes. Due to their semiotic and graphic specificity, these documents assumed the task of ordering and standardising the field of compensation for anti-Semitic and racist expropriation policies, which was not yet comprehensible.

Based on a case study, the PhD project examines the formatting, usage and agency of forms in a compensation procedure in the German post-war financial administration in the period 1948 to 1959. The main material consists of files containing the correspondence between financial authorities and the community of heirs as well as material evidence of the Nazi expropriation policy from the years 1939 and 1941.

The study highlights the fact that forms are not passive information carriers, but the result and folio of discursive formative processes that reflect the values and norms of their originators. A comparison of the forms reveals at what time which information was considered relevant to a decision with regard to compensation claims. Forms are documents with the specific format to transform and transmit content. Depending on their personal experience, applicants had various options for dealing with the asymmetric dialogue situation between the questioner and the respondent. With the subsequent transmission process, the forms also contain administrative processing traces such as stamps, numberings, comments, signatures, work instructions, underlines and colour codes, which can be used to reconstruct administrative layers of action and decision-making.

The aim of the PhD project is to decode and deconstruct the forms as multilayered artefacts in order to reveal the attempt to administer compensation and hence to outline the establishment of a compensation practice in German post-war bureaucracy in the 1940s and 1950s.

Currently: PI of the project RFB14 „The Long Journey to the Underworld: Interchangeability and Interaction between Languages, Scripts, and Materials as a Reflex of the Interplay Between Functional and Ritual Practices in the Production of Funerary Artefacts in Roman and Late Antique Egypt“

The aim of my research is the study of the transition from the traditional cults to the affirmation of Christian religion in the city of Oxyrhynchus (modern El-Bahnasa), around the second and the fourth century C.E. Although the site has been known since the Pharaonic era as the capital of the XIX nomos in Upper Egypt, it is the richness of the Greco-Roman period documentation that gives us adequate data for a clear historical reconstruction. The exceptional state of conservation of the Oxyrhynchus texts offers an ideal model rarely achieved in other contemporary settlements. The recent archaeological investigations have identified different cult structures, dated between the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine periods, until now known only from the papyrological documentations. In light of these, I propose to integrate the textual sources with the analysis of the archaeological contexts and the related material documents for a clear comprehension of the historical-religious dynamics that led to the transition from traditional cults to Christianization. I will begin with a critical examination of the source material available, the collected data will be compared to the “written artifacts” and the related archaeological contexts (such as: temples, churches, oratories, tombs and structures related to public and private feasts). The results produced by the systematic study of these testimonies may be applied to other Egyptian cities that do not have the same findings as this settlement, permitting an evaluation of Oxyrhynchus inside the Egyptian context and to compare it to other realities contemporary to the site.

Bindings capture the onlookers’ gaze, inspiring religious veneration, esthetical admiration and manifesting the purpose for which the manuscript has been created. Hence, the materials and the techniques adopted in bookbinding manufacture bear witness not only to the craftsmanship but also to the prestige of a manuscript, to its use and to the context in which it has been produced or transformed. Therefore, apart from protecting the leaves, bindings are used to define, organise and transmit a specific knowledge. Furthermore, this archival function dynamically changes as the binding is modified in order to adapt to the events which are stratified during the life of a complex object, such as the manuscript.

This project will examine the relationship between the binding of the manuscript and its content by looking at a corpus of Christian Egyptian codices dating between the fourth and the eleventh centuries. The research aims to understand the role of early Egyptian bookbindings as instruments to define and archive textual contents. The questions which this study seeks to answer are: which materials and techniques were available for bookbinding manufacture and which reasons oriented the choice of specific solutions? What is the relationship between the content and its binding? How did archival practices change in the course of time, reflecting in changes in bookbindings?

Through a systematic description of bookbinding features and measuring similarities of decorative motifs tooled onto the covers with the aid of digital imaging techniques, this research aims to reveal recurring patterns in order to propose a typological classification of Christian Egyptian bookbindings. By linking the material data to the textual content of the manuscripts, and interpreting the information in light of their cultural context, the study will reveal the criteria beyond the choice of materials and techniques for binding, thus highlighting their role in archiving Christian Egyptian manuscripts. Eventually, the set-up of a good documentation practice, based on standardised terminology and methods, will allow to combine bookbinding records from different projects’ databases, especially PAThs and Beta maṣāḥǝft, thus fostering the research in a comparative perspective.

This project is part of RFE09.

This project aims to investigate the textual and manuscript history of the Dəggʷā, the main antiphonary of the Ethiopian Christian tradition. Traditionally attributed to the 6th-century saint Yāred, the Dəggʷā is a collection of antiphons used in the Divine Office in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It contains antiphons for the major liturgical celebrations of the year, including the feasts of the Lord, a number of Marian feasts, and feasts for major saints. Unlike significant parts of Classical Ethiopian literature, the Dəggʷā is not considered a translation from Greek or Arabic, but an original Gəʿəz composition. Although of great importance for the life of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and widely attested in the manuscript material, the Dəggʷā has received little scholarly attention until now. Basic questions, such as the age of the composition, its sources, its historical developments (including abridgments and reorganizations of the material) and the question of authorship, still remain to be answered. As part of this study, the tradition of the Dəggʷā manuscripts as physical artefacts will also be investigated. Dəggʷā manuscripts typically share a number of layout features, such as the large size, the usage of small script, and the occurrence of mələkkət, an indigenous musical notation, written in very small script above the lines of text. The development and history of these manuscript features will be studied in conjunction with the development and history of the text. The project also includes a sample edition of a part of the Dəggʷā, which will allow an in-depth study of a selected portion of the textual and manuscript transmission.

Currently: Researcher, Technische Universität Berlin

This study will focus on the patterns of multi-language use, organizational structure and orality of Ethiopian medical and magical manuscripts with the aim of exploring their textual transmission, the contribution of oral-traditional knowledge in the application and preservation of medical and magical procedures, and attempting an overall textual synthesis of the treatises. Multi-language use will be explored with the aim of synthesizing the alleged use of Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Pseudo-Arabic and Pseudo-Hebrew and other forms with Ge‘ez (Old Ethiopic) as the main language of composition. Methods of historical linguistics will be employed to arrive at safe conclusions about the actual languages involved in the manuscripts. Moreover, the alleged language use within the manuscripts will be utilized as a key instrument to figure out the transmission history, ideological implication and cultural contact of the manuscript cultures of the actual languages involved. Secondly, organizational structure analyses will involve elements of internal textual organization, lay-out and image combination, order and pattern of repetitive elements. Eventually, the role of orality in the application of the knowledge contained in the treatises and the indicators of such oral involvment will also be discussed thoroughly. Data will be collected from private collections, churches and monasteries in Ethiopia, and from libraries and museums both in Ethiopia and abroad. The data will be analyzed using philological methods (textual-comparative method highlighting an innovative “conceptual base manuscript” approach) and where appropriate appealing to historical linguistics (sound changes, etymological connections and semantic shifts).

Accessible as:

Kebede, Gidena Mesfin: Ethiopian Abǝnnät Manuscripts: Organizational Structure, Language Use, and Orality . Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2016.

Currently: Postdoctoral Researcher at Collège de France, Paris

The aim of this project is to investigate the tradition and the significance of the hagiographic celebration of King Lalibäla, as well as preparing a critical edition of the Gädlä Lalibäla (GL) ‘(Spiritual) Combat (or Vita) of Lalibäla’ and his miracles. The GL is the main source about the life and deeds of King Lalibäla. King Lalibäla is considered a saint along with other kings of the so-called Zagwe dynasty, who ruled in the twelfth-thirteenth century ce, who is given credit for the construction of the renowned rock-hewn churches in the city of Lalibäla, named after the king. The term Gädl, lit. ‘Combat’, defines a text written according to the hagiographic genre, which, with its own rules and conventions, reveals at the same time the author’s own ideas. Therefore, hagiographical texts are excellent witnesses to the history of thoughts, mentality, and practices. The only scholarly yet partial edition of this text was carried out by the French philologist Jules Perruchon in 1892. This incomplete basis has been misleading researchers. The working hypothesis is that the GL results from merging two originally independent texts – as it appears in some manuscripts – with distinctly marked ideological approaches, which were eventually transmitted as one text. Such merged redaction is already attested in the oldest known manuscript dating back to the fifteenth century. The first text, containing only the Gädl, presents us Lalibäla as a legitimate king of Ethiopia, whereas the second text, the ‘Miracles of King Gäbrä Mäsqal’ (throne name of Lalibäla) introduces him as an illegitimate ruler, not to say as an usurper. To date the writing of all these texts, to find out the aim of the writing, to reconstruct the way of their transmitting, to find their place in the liturgical practice are further challenging tasks of the research.

Currently: Research Grant Holder at Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Italy

This dissertation studies the history of transmission of the Platonic dialogue Laches, or On Courage, and proposes a sample of critical edition with commentary.

The most significant works on the Platonic manuscript tradition that have been published over the last decades are ‘monographic’ volumes or articles that investigate a given dialogue or groups of dialogues. Previous articles on the Laches have focused on specific manuscripts and papyri (or groups of them), but the Laches has so far not been the subject of a comprehensive study of its entire textual evidence.

The main purpose of my project is thus to study all the testimonies of this dialogue and to present a sample of critical text with commentary, based on the study of the textual evidence. The complete collation of the manuscripts will allow to reconstruct the relationships between them. Papyri, scholia, indirect testimonies, Latin translations, and sixteenth-century editions will also be taken into consideration and examined. As a result, manuscripts, first printed editions, and, if linkable to manuscript families, papyri will be placed in the stemma codicum et editionum, which graphically represents the textual evidence of the dialogue.

In addition to widening our knowledge on the textual tradition of the Laches, the findings of the study will provide the basis for a new critical edition. Accompanied by commentary notes, a sample of a critical text will be proposed in my thesis.

The purpose of this PhD project is to examine all Greek manuscripts which transmit the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, the most extensive and popular treatise of Aristotle on ethics. Whereas the manuscripts of the two other ethical treatises by or ascribed to Aristotle (the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia) have been thoroughly studied, the examination of the Nicomachean Ethics’ transmission still remains a gap in the philological research. There are about 120 manuscripts of that particular moral treatise, most of which have not been taken into consideration in the recensio yet. All previous editors from the Renaissance to modern times have considered only a small number of the extant manuscripts in their reconstruction of the text. The oldest manuscript of the NE dates back to the end of the 9th cent. (Laur. Plut. 81.11) and is the oldest representative of the first most important family of manuscripts, whereas the main codex of the second family is dated to the 12th cent. (Paris. gr. 1854) However, the currently accepted arrangement of the manuscripts into groups as proposed by former researchers is likely to change, since the total amount of manuscripts will be examined in its entirety for the first time. Furthermore, the dating of some manuscripts has recently been shown to be earlier than assumed (i.e.Vind. phil. gr. 315 into the 11th-12th cent., formerly 13th cent., Laur. 81.18 and Riccard. 46 into the 12th cent., formerly 14th cent.), giving these manuscripts particular importance in the reconstruction of the text, as they are now considered to be in more relevant positions in the stemma codicum. A new evaluation of these manuscripts and, subsequently, a new examination of them together with all others in order to elucidate their precise interconnections will shed new light on the text’s transmission insofar as the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics is concerned. In addition to that, many witnesses of the indirect tradition of the text will be taken into account, because they can attest variant readings that are not to be found in the surviving manuscripts. These are the commentaries written by various scholars from the late antiquity (Aspasios, 1st cent. CE) till the Middle Ages (Eustratios, Metropolit from Nicaia), excerpts, paraphrases and the Latin translation of the late 13th cent. made by Robert Grosseteste. The study of the textual witnesses of the Nicomachean Ethics will allow to attempt a new arrangement of them into groups and the construction of a stemma codicum for the first book.

Currently: Researcher in the Academy Project „Etymologika“

Orion’s Etymologicum is the earliest Greek etymological lexicon (5th century CE) and represents a fundamental link between Hellenistic/Late Antique and Byzantine scholarship. It is indeed an inestimable witness for previous erudite works and, at the same time, it served as a model and major source for the later Byzantine Etymologica. Despite the importance of this lexicon, a comprehensive study of its manuscripts, and therefore a modern critical edition, are still lacking. The transmission of the Etymologicum is extremely intricate: The lexicon has come to us in a ‘long’ version (though still shorter than the original one) through an apparently very late codex and in at least two ‘shorter’ versions through seven (or eight) miscellaneous codices; These versions vary widely from one another and each one has its own textual transmission. The indirect transmission is also very rich and complex, as the compilers of many erudite works of the Byzantine era had still access to more complete versions of the Etymologicum, which they exploited in different fashions.
The Aim of this project is to thoroughly study all the manuscripts of Orion’s Etymologicum and to investigate its main indirect witnesses, in order to finally sketch a complete picture of its transmission; Moreover, since all the manuscripts are, to a different extent, products of Byzantine learning, their content, sources, dating, place of origin and reception must also be investigated, in order to help improving our knowledge of scholarship in the Byzantine period.
Therefore, as a result of the prospected study, it will be possible not only to finally outline the textual transmission of Orion’s Etymologicum, thus providing the basis for a future edition, but also to shed some light on the transmission of its sources and witnesses and to deepen our knowledge of this particular field of Greek and Byzantine scholarship.

Currently: Researcher Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Before: Researcher Universität Hamburg

Andronicus Callistus was a leading figure among the Byzantine emigrants who worked in the humanistic Italian circles during the second half of the fifteenth century. The studies on him begun with the pioneering work of É. Legrand (1841-1903), but more information on this scholar became available when a series of literary manuscripts (transmitting for example the poetical texts of Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus and Pindar) had been identified as his work. Modern studies on Greek scribes of the Renaissance have brought to light the philological depth of his erudite personality, and pointed out that data taken for granted still needs to be further examined. To name one example it is often very difficult to find the antigraphs of the texts copied by Andronicus. That inevitably raises questions about the origin of the lectiones presented in the scholar’s codices; in other words, should they be considered as traditional or should they be taken as original interventions and ope ingenii corrections? His teaching methods and philological activity are the two sides of the same coin, they cannot be separated. In this context, using a synergistic approach to philological and palaeographical data, the research project I propose has two main objectives: 1. outlining and defining Andronicus’ cultural activities in the philological as well as didactic field, by examining all the manuscripts transcribed or annotated by this scholar; 2. making an inventory (with all the necessary palaeographical, historical and bibliographical notes) of all the manuscripts ascribable to Andronicus and attempting to reconstruct the history of his own library. The very remarkable manuscript collection belonging to Andronicus, as is well known, was lost in the last few years of his life. Somehow during the sixteenth century a considerable part of his collection ended up in the Estense Library of Modena, and many other European libraries are still hosting some of the disiecta membra of his manuscript collection. The new palaeographical data will enable us to give an updated outline of Andronicus’ biography. To organize all the data emerging from the three-year research project in a monographic study and to clearly prove and explain the key role Andronicus played at the critical time of the translatio of Greek literature and knowledge into the western culture, is the final objective.

Research on the manuscript transmission of Plato’s works is still in many respects a research desideratum. Especially the manuscripts of the Nomoi (Laws) have not yet been investigated in depth. More than 260 manuscripts of the Corpus Platonicum are preserved, 23 of which entirely or partially transmit the Nomoi. However, no collation (systematic comparison of textual transmission) has ever been carried out for some of them, and there is reason to suspect that previous published collations of a number of manuscripts are not always reliable or complete with regard to this particular work.

The aim of the present project is to deliver a detailed evaluation of the existing manuscript evidence at our disposal pertaining to the text of the Laws, as well as to elucidate this work’s textual transmission. The mutual relationships of the known manuscripts shall be investigated fully, assessing their value to the reconstitution of the text. At the same time, there will be a focus on the scribes and scholars who produced, studied, and worked on these manuscripts and generally, on the cultural environment in which the manuscripts originated and were put to use.
This project intends to make a significant contribution to solving important questions of textual criticism, the manuscript transmission and the history of Plato’s work, particularly the Laws. The approaches to be applied might further be useful in working on the manuscripts and textual criticism of other Platonic texts as well as texts of other Ancient Greek authors.

Published as:

Sadovskyy, Anton. The manuscript transmission of Plato’s Laws (books I and V). Wiesbaden, Dr Ludwig Reichert Verlag 2022.

Georgios Gennadios II Scholarios was the first patriarch after the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and is considered as the last philosopher of the Byzantine Empire. His works were published in eight volumes between 1928 and 1936; however, Scholarios’s commentary on the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics is nowhere to be found in these volumes and, until now, has never been studied. This commentary is of interest, on the one hand, because of its late date, and, on the other, because of Scholarios’s excerpts from earlier commentators. What we encounter here is an attempt at an exegesis of Aristotle’s text, based on Scholarios’s adaptation of previous commentaries. This enables us to see how ancient Greek philosophical texts were used and interpreted in late Byzantium. The commentary was transmitted in three Byzantine manuscripts, all written in the 15th century. It is generally assumed that the Parisinus is an autograph manuscript. For all these reasons, my dissertation focuses on providing the first critical edition, together with a translation (German), of the first book (1094a1-1103a10) of this work.

Accessible as :

Schäfer, Jan Philipp. Editio princeps of the Commentary of George Scholarios on the Nicomachean Ethics The Reception of Aristotle in Late Byzantium. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2016.

Currently: Lecturer at the Institute of Byzantine Studies, Byzantine Art History and Neo-Greek Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The Greek medical recipe books are practical usage texts, which are usually collected in miscellaneous manuscripts and were widely spread during the late Byzantine era. Although these works, generally named Iatrosophia, had a practical function and offered remedies for common illnesses, their knowledge often originates from the classical medicine tradition: by analysing these texts, it is possible to readjust the relevant role of the common use of medicine in Byzantium and to offer hints to the medical habits in the context, where they come from. An interesting medical recipe book is given by the ff. 121r-278v of the Ms. Panorm. XIII.C.3. This is a XVI century manuscript, which is located in the Biblioteca regionale siciliana of Palermo and probably comes originally from Crete; the main source of the text is the Epitome de curatione morborum by Theophanes Nonnos. The goal of my research project is to edit and translate the medical recipe book of the Ms. Panorm. XIII.C.3 and to focus on its features, contents and language, with the intention of comparing this work with other samples of this medicine daily usage genre and to find occurring characteristics in them.

During the 19th century, a new form of written artefacts rapidly grew in popularity in Europe: manuscripts written in shorthand.  Although the concept to protocol speech verbatim is known since Roman Antiquity, its sudden divulgation was closely linked to a novel form of political communication: Stenography swiftly turned into an indispensable tool for recording parliamentary debates. At the same time, the technical details and conceptual implications of shorthand protocolling political affairs remained contested throughout the 19th century. My project will investigate the material culture and political impact of shorthand manuscript cultures as they developed in German Parliaments in the decades between 1819 (first stenographed debate in Bavaria) and the early 1930s (introduction of the Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift and political turning point). The overall aim is to explore shorthand as a writing and material practice. For my period of investigation, it was embedded in a “shorthand milieu” within the German states. Professional associations, institutions and journals, as well as personal networks and a distinctive set of social practices surrounding the different shorthand systems, emerged. The nucleus of the project, however, will be the examination of the remaining parliamentary shorthand notes as well as the analysis of the procedure right up to the finished print. A comparison of the different stages of parliamentary manuscripts from shorthand to longhand to the printed version will highlight the various settings, actors, materialities and practices involved. To broaden the view, these protocols will also have to be taken into account as a part of the wider debate about Parliamentarism. Private letters of shorthand writers, newspaper articles and last but not least the parliamentary debates themselves are full of remarks about the political overtones of shorthand protocolling: Should everything be divulged? Could shorthand protocolling be trusted? Were parliaments accountable to the wider public, and, if so, was publishing their oral debates the best way to do this? These questions have to be considered in order to gain a deeper understanding of the connection between politics, publicity, and handwriting in the 19th and early 20th century.

Currently: Postdoctoral researcher in Medieval History at UHH

Poems were passed down in the form of collections almost by default – their short nature making them “collectibles” like no other genre of medieval literature. Because of their small format they also form part of larger collections together with texts of different genres. These short pieces were also easily shared and transcribed. As such they are suitable for a study of manuscripts as collections and collections in manuscripts. The specific set of texts such as classic poems from antiquity and contemporary verse from the 9th century is exceptionally well researched in terms of editions and manuscript catalogues. By tapping into this reservoir of classical scholarship, I hope to integrate traditional methods with the new emphasis of contemporary manuscript studies.
This is especially apparent in multiple text manuscripts (MTM) with their wide variety of texts also known as “one volume library”. The combination of texts in these manuscripts is crucial to understanding them in their socio-cultural setting. For example, a text, which is part of an educational collection, must be read differently than one from an authorial collection. However, recent studies on MTMs have often been limited to the analysis of a single volume and its codicological properties, but codicological units may also obscure the relationship between the texts, especially in the case of repeated copying. Only a comparative analysis of manuscripts containing the same texts can reveal the associations of the larger textual tradition. Connections between manuscripts and their texts are also connections between people and institutions. The circulation and proliferation of a text show the inner workings of the cultural networks of the Carolingian age.
The usage of a text may be obscured as well in the context of a larger manuscript; on the other hand, a family of manuscripts of similar use can reflect the use of single texts. By establishing a typology of collections we get closer to the intended use of the texts and the role of the manuscript in the transmission of learning and literary culture.

Accessible as:

Hennings, Till. Ostfränkische Sammlungen von Dichtung im 9. Jahrhundert. Nova Mediaevalia 19. Göttingen 2021.

Currently: Recruiting and Sourcing Expert at PowerCo

This study examines the juridical knowledge of Early Medieval monastic communities and how juridical manuscripts were used, chosen, copied, exchanged and preserved. The St. Gall Monastery (founded in 719 by its first abbot Othmar) was far away from the Carolingian court and until the reign of Louis the Pious (c. 820) not well-disposed towards the Franks, but bound to the Alemanni, to whom it owes many of its possessions. It later became an influential Imperial abbey with a magnificent Monastery school. Thanks to lucky circumstances most of its former library survived in the “St. Galler Stiftsbibliothek” and predestines itself for this study. The former library contains 471 codices (among them lots of juridical texts, which have already been identified as utilitarian manuscripts) from the 5th to 12th century more than 280 of them originating in the 9th century and written at the St. Gall Monastery. The “St. Galler Stiftsarchiv” holds more than 800 documents from the time between 731 and 1050. This rich lore is in comparison to the other great monasteries of its time, with which St. Gall was in contact, inimitable. I regard the manuscripts not only as simple writing material, containing laws and norms, but will examine them on several levels (i.e. the variety of normative texts, their visual organization, the division of chapters, etc.) to see how juridical knowledge was absorbed, understood and used. The main emphasis will be placed on the question how the manuscripts were designed with regard to the potential user and which actual knowledge – representative for other communities – can be assumed.

Published as:

Ulrich, Arne. Die normativen Manuskripte des Klosters St. Gallen. Hamburg 2017.

Currently: Postdoctoral Researcher at Taisho University

Previously: Postdoc Fellowship at the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation.

Nepal is the most noteworthy area in the world where Hinduism and Buddhism coexist, and have done so throughout the region's recorded history. The tradition of Sanskrit manuscripts in Nepal is the most attractive and valuable source in order to approach the interrelationship between Hindu Śaivism and Buddhist Tantrism. My main field of research is tantric manuscripts with an emphasis on the early Śaiva Trika system as it survives in Sanskrit texts from the 8th–11th centuries. My proposed Ph.D. project is to research manuscripts of Hindu Tantra text, especially the Tantrasadbhāva, “The Essence of Tantra”. This text comes to us in four manuscripts, all of which were microfilmed by the NGMPP (Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project). By studying the manuscripts of the Tantrasadbhāva in contrast to relevant Buddhist tantric texts and recensions of earlier and later Śaiva tantras, my research intends to highlight and identify those aspects of manuscript culture, which were unique to the Nepalese environment around 11th century.

Accessible as:

Bang, Junglan. Selected Chapters from the Tantrasadbhāva, Based on the Tradition of 11th Century Śaiva Sanskrit Manuscripts in Nepal. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, 2018.

Currently:  Researcher in the Academy Project „Tamilex“

The 19th century in Tamil Nadu deserves to be called a transitional period for several reasons. On the one hand, it marks the transfer from manuscript to print to be observed in so many cultures of the larger region, although here too, as in other places, manuscripts continued to be in use for a long time (and up to this date have a, if minimal, place in the cultural economy as one of the “traditional handicrafts”). On the other hand, it heralds a large-scale takeover of the institutions of learning on the part of the colonial government which entailed massive changes in the workings of many learned traditions. This process was coupled with losses in traditional knowledge, because learned men such as pandits no longer found a traditional livelihood in the employment of courts or monasteries. Others were integrated into the colonial institutions such as Fort St. George. In order to better understand this process, this PhD project will focus on a new type of manuscript. The beginnings of “official” manuscript collection in Tamil Nadu (then the Madras presidency) were made by the emissaries of the British surveyor Colonel Colin Mackenzie and were brought together as the “Mackenzie collection”, the central piece of today’s Government Oriental Manuscript Library in Chennai. Apart from many old manuscripts, they also contain a sizeable portion of a novel kind of document, namely manuscripts (occasionally on palm-leaf, but mostly on paper) written by Mackenzie’s Indian collaborators (mostly Telugu brahmins) who noted down oral accounts of local events, customs and institutions in the areas they visited, mixing what might be factual with traditional myths and legends, often based on the earlier literary production, and creating a new form of historiography. After a short phase of lively interest in these documents, resulting in a number of descriptive catalogues, they were soon discarded as “useless” in the European project of reconstructing South Indian event history. This project will map the manuscripts in question and make several case studies connected with the early historiography of Maturai and the royal dynasty of the Pāṇṭiyas. It will also explore the possibility that a particular type of late classical manuscript, preserving simple prose retellings of earlier high literature, might have been one model that guided Mackenzie collaborators.

The guiding research questions will be:

• How was traditional knowledge modified and adapted in order to answer a novel type of question?
• Which layers of traditional knowledge (high literary tradition, lighter prose versions, oral retellings) were exploited to meet the demand?
• Is it possible to trace back some of the famous “modifications” or new versions of earlier legends to particular documents, thus affording a glimpse at concrete agency?
• How do the various languages (Tamil, Sanskrit, Manipravalam, Telugu, English) involved in the process show in the documents via, firstly, a mixture of languages and registers, secondly, scripts (Tamil, Grantha and European, but also the evolvement of diacritic marks), and, thirdly, layout, beginning with visual organization, structuring the information and dealing with annotation?
• How do paratexts such as colophons and notes reflect the integration of diverse sources?

Currently: Research Associate, South Asia Institute, Universität Heidelberg

Previously: Researcher, NETamil

As part of the project ‘Going from Hand to Hand: Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil Learned Traditions’ (NETamil), my PhD project deals with the Tiṇaimālai Nūṟṟaimpatu (TN), a poetical work of late-classical Tamil literature probably composed around the middle of the 1st millennium. While trying to investigate the ways in which the TN has been transmitted, my project involves manuscriptological methods. In the case of the Tamil tradition, we are faced with the unique situation that, while the texts date back up to almost two millennia, due to the climatic conditions in South India, the manuscripts at our disposal have an age of approximately 300 years at most. One goal of the project is to preserve the surviving primary witnesses and make them available through means of digitisation, cataloguing, and text-critical analysis. We have seven TN manuscripts (four on palm-leaf and three on paper) to date and hope that field-trips will yield further material. The other important goal is to find out what the manuscripts tell us about the way the texts were handed on. This involves a study of the paratextual material found in the manuscripts—commentaries, glosses, colophons, etc. An investigation of this material will help us to understand the dynamics of the intellectual tradition through which the TN was transmitted.

Published as:

Buchholz, Jonas. Tiṇaimālai Nūṟṟaimpatu: Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. Hamburg 2017.

Currently: Univ. assistant of Pre-Modern South Asian Studies at Universität Wien

Previously: Lecturer, Kyoto University

Previously: Scholarship holder, Leiden University and Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

My research focuses on the manuscript transmission of the commentaries on classical Indian belletristic literature (so called kāvya). As the basis for my investigation I use a hypothesis, which was put forward by several scientific publications dealing with literary and textual studies of concerned texts. This theory proposes (1) a continuous alteration of the commentaries on kāvya in the course of time as well as (2) a typology of the most common alterations. My research project is aimed at examining this hypothesis from the point of manuscript studies and raises a set of basic questions, such as by whom, how, why, under which circumstances, under the influence of which local or intellectual traditions etc. such changes in the manuscripts were undertaken. I shall limit my survey to the study of the manuscripts of three unpublished commentaries on a poetical work in Sanskrit, the Kirātārjunīya. One of these commentaries is transmitted primarily in South Indian, the other in North Indian and the third one in Nepalese manuscripts.

Accessible as:

Klebanov, Andrey. Texts composed while copying : A Critical Study of the Manuscripts of Selected Commentaries on the Kirātārjunīya, an Epic Poem in Sanskrit. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2017.

Currently: Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Indology and Tibetology at Universität Hamburg; involved in the 84.000 project and teaching at the Rangjung Yeshe institute.

Previously: Lecturer at the University of Sydney

The study consists of the critical edition and annotated translation of Kṛṣṇacaryā’s (ca. 775-850 CE) Dohākośa and its two commentaries, the Dohākośaṭīkā by Amṛtavajra (ca. 12th cen.) and the later Mekhalāṭīkā, the author of which remains unknown. It investigates the textual history and reception of this important commentarial tradition of late Indian Buddhism that has been rather neglected in Western academic research. In the Dohākośaṭīkā, Amṛtavajra explains the content of Kṛṣṇacaryā’s song-poem through the lens of advanced yogic practices that are commonly categorised as belonging to the “completion stage practices” within the Buddhist tantric traditions. This involves tantric visualizations of the subtle body with strong sexual connotations, various breathing exercises, and the like, such as these can be found for instance in Six-Limbed Yoga doctrine as prominent in the Kālacakra tradition. In his explanation, Amṛtavajra cites and refers to a great number of important Buddhist tantric scriptures from Guhyasamāja, Hevajra, Cakrasamvara and Kālacakra related traditions. The Mekhalāṭīkā, even though essentially nothing but an abridged version of Amṛtavajra’s commentary, is of great importance as in this work the Dohākośa itself, i.e., Kṛṣṇacaryā’s verses have been preserved.

Accessible as:

Schott, Julian. Kṛṣṇacaryāpādasya Dohākoṣaṭīke: A Study of Its Commentaries: Edited, Translated, and Annotated, Together with a Survey of His Life and Works and a Study on the Dohā as a Literary Genre. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, 2019.

Currently: Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Indology at Universität Würzburg

This research project pursues the question in which particular manners the scribes of medieval India expressed their individual devotional involvement while producing manuscripts. My initial investigation of the Vaiṣṇava Sanskrit poem Govindavilāsamahākāvya has already shown that the significant differences in both examined manuscripts can be interpreted on the basis of the distinct devotional techniques of their scribes. To investigate such expressions of devotionalism, all known manuscripts of this particular text will be examined, with selected sections being critically edited and annotated. The project will focus on a comparative analysis of these manuscripts and another group of manuscripts of the Vaiṣṇava poems Harivilāsa and Gītagovinda, originating from the same time period and geographic location. The study will take into consideration 1) the level of the text itself (omission or addition of text parts, number of mistakes, (deliberate) duplication of particular words/names etc.), 2) the paratextual level (entrance vers(es), colophons, information in margina such as comments, revisions, style of numbering verses/pages etc.) and 3) the visual organization (e.g. particular aesthetic designing such as ornamentation, rubrication etc.) of the manuscripts. On the basis of these exemplary manuscripts of 16th century Rājasthān, this research project will for the first time establish a typology which specifies and categorizes the various ways in which scribes expressed their individual devotionalism while copying texts.

Accessible as:

Unterdörfler, Judith Antonia Swenja. Govindavilāsamahākāvya: Manuskripte, Text Und Übersetzung. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, 2018.

This PhD project focuses on the so-called utai’ehon, illuminated manuscripts dated c. 1600 containing the texts of works of the Japanese Nô-theatre. The manuscripts come in two different shapes: bound books or handscrolls. They combine not only different media like text and image, but also reflect the influence of theatre performances and different contemporary types of books. They reflect many developments in the artistic field as witnesses of the manuscript culture of Japan around 1600, a time of grave social and political changes. They bear testimony to new means of expressions, the beginnings of commercial book-production and the incipient application of block-print-techniques to secular literature among other things. Since manuscripts at that time were only produced for individuals, clearly defined groups or a narrow market, the strategies of handling different media in the transition from the medieval period to the early modern era in utai’ehon can shed new light on the preoccupations of their likely recipients: urban citizens. The project aims at reconstructing the contexts of the creation and reception for the “under-researched” manuscripts. In doing this, they can be placed in the larger picture of a historical context. Since it is evident from the script and illustrations that they were not used by actors and not only for rehearsing in a private sphere either, the leading questions are: for whom and for which purpose were these books? A crucial key to these questions lies in the materiality of the manuscripts. The interplay and style of writing and painting and the medial realisation as handscroll or bound book for example hint on the contexts in many ways. The understanding of utai’ehon is relevant for Japanese studies because it makes new material accessible and contextualises it. On the one hand it contributes to exploring the cultural distractions and conceptions of the urban citizens in a tumultuous time, and on the other hand to the history of the book in Japan and the reception of Nô-theatre in media different from performances. In a more interdisciplinary perspective it might add to methodological frameworks for other text-image-relationships.

Published as:

Möller, Berenice. Erzähltes Theater: Illustrierte Nō-Manuskripte Zwischen Mittelalter Und Früher Neuzeit. Hamburg 2019.

This thesis traces back a history of the transmission of Sefer Shimmush Torah from the point of view of its material and textual features. First, it provides a comparative analysis of the corpus’ codicological features. Second, it proposes scholarly editions of the three texts which constitute a single concept in the scholarly literature. Sefer Shimmush Torah (‘SST’) is referred to as a magical-theurgical treatise structured around the parashot in the Torah (lectionary reading portions of the Pentateuch). Generally speaking, ‘SST’ contains names derived from the recombination of letters extracted from words, which were in their turn selected from the pericopes of the Torah. The idea of ‘SST’ arose from the understanding that the Torah can be rearranged to reveal secret configurations of great power to the initiated. This idea spread mainly among medieval Jewish mystical groups in Germany, France, Provence and Spain, and is thought to have crystallised in the circles of Hassidei Ashkenaz from the 13th century onwards. This thesis provides material and textual evidence to support the dating and location of the concept of ‘SST’, as well as its popularisation in post-medieval Italian circles. However, a closer examination of this concept reveals that there are two variants of Shimmush Torah, one of which is also introduced by a midrashic historiola. Material and textual evidence suggests that the compilers of the ‘SST’ were equally engaged with religious, legal and magical works. Although the general scholarly view is that they were somewhat marginal to the rabbinic elites, they were an integral part of a cultural system that blended together astrology, liturgical traditions, rabbinic exegesis and scholastic kabbalah.

Currently: PI of the project RFK03 „Magical Written Artefacts in Late-Medieval German Instructional Literature (2023-2025)“

Previously: Researcher, RWTH Aachen

Previously: Researcher, Universität Düsseldorf 

The German Altgermanistik has always been working with a very broad concept of literature, including not only literary, i.e. fictional and / or poetic texts, but also theological, philosophical and scientific texts. Although most of the medieval texts we have are non-literary texts, they have never been in the main focus of scientific research and editing. Indeed most of these texts are still unknown today. This is caused mainly in the form of the texts and the medium in which they have been written in: Most non-literary medieval texts are written in multiple-text-manuscripts. Usually these texts have no known author, their text is not stable and it is very difficult to determine clear text borders within one single manuscript. So these texts cannot be understood or classified through classical idealistic concepts like work or author. The aim of my exemplary research on a small group of geomantic manuscripts of the late 15th century is to understand the German medieval multiple-text-manuscript as a medium of its own. I focus on the following questions: What was the function of these manuscripts? How are they structured (materially, logically)? What types of layout and paratexts are used? And how can we define clear text borders? My corpus includes until now six manuscripts: Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cpg 584; Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cpg 844; München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 596; München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 987; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne 84.3 and Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 5327.

Published as:

Heiles, Marco: Das Losbuch: Manuskriptologie einer Textsorte des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Archiv für Kulturgeschichte. Beihefte 83) Köln, Weimar und Wien 2018

Currently: PI of the project RFA19 „Painting the Ancient World: Crystallochemical Characterisation of Pigments and Minerals in Ancient Written Artefacts“

The primary goal of the project is to develop a novel method based on Raman spectroscopy for unravelling vanished or hardly readable inscriptions on inorganic rock-base writing supports via mapping the lateral distribution of crack-enhanced weathering products. For this purpose the weathering processes in marble, limestone, and diorite in different atmospheric environments are going to be comprehensively analysed. In addition, the relationship between the crystal chemistry and Raman scattering of selected layered silicates will be thoroughly studied as a first step towards a followed-up long-term project on non-destructive material profiling of clay tablets to elucidate their provenance and history.

This dissertation project is part of RFA02.

Accessible as:

Aspiotis, Stylianos. Understanding Written Artefacts on Rock-base Supports at the Atomic-scale Level: Weathering and Crystal Chemistry of the Rock-forming Minerals. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, 2022.

In the late 14th and early 15th century, composers of polyphonic music in France and Italy introduced proportion signs into musical notation in order to depict complex rhythms. Proportion signs, which can be symbols, Arabic numerals or fractions thereof, appear in great variety and shape, not only in Ars subtilior music manuscripts but also in treatises on music from the same period. Even though these treatises were intended to help standardise musical notation (in addition to functioning as reference books for students in educational institutions), the use of proportion signs in Ars subtilior music remained highly individual, which manifests itself in the fact that the same proportion is sometimes represented by a number of different proportion signs in the same manuscript and occasionally even in the same piece. This project aims to make a comparison of all proportion signs used in Ars subtilior manuscripts with the intention of shedding light on practices of composers, theorists, students and scribes in different Ars subtilior circles.

Currently: Academic librarian in training at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin –Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Previously: Researcher, Universität Hamburg, SFB 950

The project focuses on the still unknown early fifteenth-century repertory of three composers closely associated with the florentine cathedral, namely Giovanni and Piero Mazzuoli and Ugolino of Orvieto. Their secular compositions are found in the palimpsest Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, San Lorenzo Archivo Capitolare 2211, which seems to be the last copy of a specific music-manuscript culture in late medieval Italy. The compositions will be analysed and contextualised for the first time. Furthermore, the palimpsest will be considered not only as the source for the music, but also as a document within the trecento manuscript culture, and will be compared with the so-called “international” music manuscripts. Working on the palimpsest includes recovering lost writing and focusing equally on palaeographical and philological features. All three composers are key elements in understanding the musical manuscript cultures in use at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Published as:

Janke, Andreas. Die Kompositionen Von Giovanni Mazzuoli, Piero Mazzuoli Und Ugolino Da Orvieto Im San-Lorenzo-Palimpsest (ASL 2211). Georg Olms Verlag 2016.

Currently: Researcher, Universität Heidelberg, SFB 933

Previously: Research Fellow, Universität Hamburg

The dissertation aims at providing a new approach to the organum and conductus repertoire associated with Notre-Dame of Paris, one of the most famous repertoires of music history. The thesis follows two main aims: firstly, a new view of the sources that looks into the realm of manuscript cultures rather than into outdated conceptions of the composer and the artwork and secondly, case studies on individual pieces or groups of pieces in order to explore a variety of methodological approaches towards this well-known repertoire. An updated survey of the sources since Ludwig’s Repertorium (1910) seems necessary, as until recently, new fragmentary sources have been found. The large amount of fragmentary sources as well as entries in historical library catalogues that mention sources now lost point to a much larger amount of manuscript dissemination than the three main sources may suggest. The fragmentary sources will be the main sample of the thesis. Questions of provenance and context will be discussed and the attempt will be made to draw unknown connections between sources and institutions. However, open questions of the reputedly well-known main sources F, W1 and W2 will also be taken as a point of comparison. Case studies on individual pieces or groups of pieces will then consider aspects of style and transmission, including questions of mentalities, manuscript culture and material culture.

Accesible as:

Maschke, Eva M.: Notre Dame Manuscripts and Their History: Case Studies on Reception and Reuse. Diss. Univ. Hamburg / Univ. of Southampton 2015.

This project performs a material-related investigation and systematization of the handwritten tradition of operatic practices. The approach is methodologically significant because of the fact that historical performance practice can be reconstructed almost only by means of (handwritten) annotations. Essentially, the handwritten supplements, eliminations and alterations represent fragmentary evidence of former practices. The project focuses on a pivotal period of time, namely between the establishment of music drama by Richard Wagner and the outbreak of the Second World War.

The opera archive of the renowned Neue Deutsche Theater in Prague (1888–1938) will serve as a model source collection, as it offers completely unexplored material in its original constitution. The project will analyse the various handwritten notes within the printed performance material (conductor’s scores, piano reductions, parts, stage and light directions), and consider the sources’ quality as well as their relation to each other. On this basis, the interdependencies between handwritten marks within the performance material and the aesthetic ideals of the operatic practice will be exemplarily described, and related to the public reception of Wagner in Prague. The point is less to publish a critical edition of the works concerned, but to identify, collect and digitize the annotations related to performance practices. The handwritten markings will be displayed in their relation to the notated (resp. printed) ‘original’ layers of the works. Another aim of this project is to compile a digital presentation of the handwritten notations which illustrates them as substrates of an historic operatic practice. The project plans to closely cooperate with the Archive of the Czech National Theatre, the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth, as well as with Research Field A Artefact Profiling and the Research Unit Data Linking within the Cluster.

The project is part of RFD12.

This dissertation will conduct a comprehensive study of literary Multiple-Text Manuscripts (MTMs) from Dunhuang (in Gansu province in present-day China). Based on the manuscript evidence, this study explores changing collections of various kinds of literary texts such as transformation texts (bianwen 變文), rhapsodies (fu 賦), poems, children's primers and educational texts. In doing so, this study examines for what purposes MTMs were produced and used. Furthermore, it aims to assess overall principles of collecting and structuring texts in different types of MTMs.

The interplay of multiple factors will be considered, including codicological features, scribal hands, layout of texts, titles, dates, and involved persons and institutions. Both MTMs that share similar text combinations and have similar features as well as MTMs that cannot be easily assigned to formulated types of MTMs will be scrutinized.

Given that certain MTMs containing similar combinations of texts of a specific layout were produced under the same circumstances and used for similar purposes, which features are most decisive in distinguishing them from other types of MTMs containing literary works? Which MTMs show codicological peculiarities (such as irregular sheet lengths and caesura in the texts), and what do they say about the MTMs as textual collections? Do MTMs exist that cannot be assigned types, and what can be said about them? Furthermore, previously established genres of literary works will be reconsidered: What does it mean, if the same text or group of texts appears in different types of MTMs and under different titles or with different layouts? Which texts could have been used for what kinds of purposes?

Currently: Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Inter-Asia Engagement Cluster at the National University of Singapore

Previously: Researcher, Max Weber Stiftung

The imperial library of the Former Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) is the first collection about there is substantial information in form of a catalog. This is the Yiwenzhi chapter of the Hanshu, the dynastic history compiled by Ban Gu (32–92). As is well known this catalog goes back to two earlier sources, the Bielu and the Qilüe, which originate from the collation project started in 26 BCE. This grand project was not only about making an inventory, but also encompassed producing editions of the different texts. In the beginning the project was headed by Liu Xiang (79–8 BCE), who wrote editorial reports on each of the edited texts, all of these reports are believed to have been brought together in the Bielu. After Liu Xiang’s death the work was continued by his son Liu Xin (ca. 50 BCE–23 CE), who summarized the reports in the Qilüe, which Ban Gu indicates as his direct source. The Bielu and the Qilüe have only come down to us in fragments. The present work brings together all extant fragments as well as the Yiwenzhi in translation for the first time.
The first part investigates in which relation the three sources stand to each other precisely. On the one hand, it can be shown that the Bielu only came into being after the Qilüe. On the other hand, it becomes clear that the marked changes found in the Yiwenzhi, which traditionally are attributed to Ban Gu, go back to Liu Xin. The latter had continued the collation project under the reign of Wang Mang and produced a revision of or sequel to the previously finished Qilüe.
Ban Gu does not mention this deliberately because he denies Wang Mang any legitimacy and makes him responsible for the fall of the Former Han-dynasty. The second part is devoted to the history of the imperial collection. There are good reasons to assume that the assembling of manuscripts only began under emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) and that there existed various collections at different places within the palace. The collation project led to the production of new manuscripts and thus created a new collection, which is what the Yiwenzhi describes. It is evident that administrative documents and judicial texts were not part of the collection, these were rather stored in special archives. The initial motivation behind the collation project cannot be reconstructed entirely, but, Liu Xiang, in any case, used his editorial reports as a means to try exerting influence on the emperor.
The third part is on the philological methods developed by Liu Xiang to make editions of the text. Despite the innovative nature of the methods it is clear that Liu Xiang resorted to procedures in the production of documents and copying of texts that had been employed in the bureaucracy before. At the same time, different types of editions have to be distinguished. In some cases these are compilations of texts by Liu Xiang; others are editions on the basis of a body of texts attributed to a certain author, which before had been circulating individually; finally there were already stable editions, which probably did not need much editing. Without a doubt, Liu Xiang’s editorial work had a significant influence on all received texts as we know them today.

Published as:

Fölster, Max Jakob. The Imperial Collection of the Former Han and the Origins of Philology in China. A Study of Bielu, Qilüe and Hanshu Yiwenzhi. Hamburg 2016.

Currently: PI of the project RFE15 „Local Archives and Administrative Practices of Eastern Han China: Discarded Documents in Ancient Wells and Storage Pits“

The record-keeping and storing of legal and administrative documents have a long tradition in China. However, only little is known about concrete archiving processes on the lower administrative levels in pre- and early imperial times. At the same time, this knowledge is of utmost importance in order to understand the operating principles of a government that was confronted with the mounting pressure of handling a growing number of enacted laws during and after the unification period. This dissertation delves into the study of archiving written laws by critically examining manuscript evidence containing two main legislative forms, namely statutes and ordinances. The corpora were mostly found in ancient tombs of officials in a southern region, far away from the political centre and considered of marginal importance and thus often neglected in historical sources.

The research focusses on certain aspects of filing techniques, (re-)organising schemes, and copying procedures as well as the purposes behind them. It adopts a multi-method approach combining codicology, palaeography, and philology in order to gain insights into the following research questions: how did the local government organise voluminous and accumulative bodies of legal knowledge? What strategies were developed and by whom were they utilised in archiving contexts? The project reveals that the archival traces such as ordering systems, checking marks, and filing notes embedded in legal manuscripts mirror a vivid picture of administrative work surrounded by different scribes during the lifetime of the tomb owners. Apart from that, the discussion extends to a chronical development of categories through over Western Han times by further investigating law collections and their table of contents from several closely located tombs. Overall, although there is an expectation to implement an empire-wide framework for a universal legal system, the reality of archiving law collections in local regions might turn out to be more individual and complicated.

Currently: Assistant Professor, Hunan University in Changsha (China)

It remains a question whether the Qin had ever a concept and a definition of penal law, or classifications of different laws. So a proper definition of penal law is very central for my research. The corpora are all excavated manuscripts; I cannot avoid discussing the archeological evidence, materiality, because only in this way I will have a better understanding of their nature and function. Through research of the material evidence and context, I try to reconstruct some characteristics of penal law in Qin and Han. The excavation locations of Ernianlüling and Falü dawen are both in Hubei Province, near to the capital of the pre-imperial state of Chu 楚. The provenance of the Qin bamboo manuscript in the possession of Yuelu Academy is not clear. So I would discuss whether characteristic of penal law which can be found in these three corpora are national or only regional.

Accessible as:

Li, Jingrong: The Ernian lü ling Manuscript. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2014.

Currently: Head of Desk for Asia at the Senate Chancellary of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

Until the 1970s, historians had to laboriously gather knowledge about the officials on the lower administrative levels and their education in early imperial China from historical works and commentaries. The nature of this work took a decisive turn with the discovery of two tomb manuscripts containing educational texts that can be dated to the end of the Warring States Period (475 - 221 BCE) respectively the Qin dynasty (221 - 206 BCE): The first manuscript is known as *Wei li zhi dao (“The Way of an Official”), belonging to the manuscript collection of Shuihudi (discovered in 1975), and the second one is called Wei li zhi guan ji qianshou (“How to be an Official, and how to govern the office and the common people”), being part of the Yuelu Academy Qin manuscripts (purchased in 2007). Both manuscripts share similarities in content and layout. The objective of this PhD thesis is to determine nature and function of the two manuscripts as well as to contribute to the improvement of knowledge about the source material. In doing so, the thesis will analyze the manuscripts’ textual, codicological and paleographical features, and compare them systematically. Who were the authors/compilers of the manuscripts’ texts? Which textual units refer to passages from the transmitted literature? What were the criterial for the selection of the textual unit? Is there a pattern in their sequence? In addition, it is also necessary to analyze the two statutes of the Wei kingdom that can be found at the end of the *Wei li zhi dao, especially with regard to their structure, function and position in the manuscript.

Published as:

Luckmann, Leif Thomas. Lehrtexte für den Beamten. Eine Studie zu zwei Grabmanuskripten aus der Qin-Zeit. Hamburg 2017.

Currently: PI of the project FNT07 „Collecting and Exchanging Medical Recipes in the Age of Print: Recipe Manuscripts in 19th and Early 20th Century China“

Previously: Researcher in Research Field D “Formatting Contents” at Understanding Written Artefacts

Previously: Researcher, Universität Heidelberg, SFB 933

For scholars studying bamboo and wood manuscripts from pre-imperial and early imperial China reconstruction is very basic work. This is due to the fact that these manuscripts usually do not come to us in a complete state, but as disordered collections of individual slips. In almost every case the binding strings that once held together several slips to form complete codicological units do either not exist anymore or only remain as traces on individual slips. With regard to the state of the art in the field of manuscript reconstruction, there are mainly three aspects that deserve further attention. First, even in China there are only few works that try to deal with manuscript reconstruction in a comprehensive or even systematic way. Typically discussion is confined to the special circumstances of a concrete case, either a certain manuscript or a certain corpus of manuscripts. Second, there are particular problems with regard to manuscript reconstruction, which can usually not be satisfactorily solved. They often boil down to the core problem of distinguishing manuscripts that comprise several self-contained textual units—these may be multiple-text manuscripts (MTM) or composite manuscripts —from separate manuscripts with one self-contained textual unit in each (single-text manuscript, STM). Even if the possibility of a multiple-text or composite manuscript is considered, the question of the arrangement of self-contained textual units inside such a manuscript is equally difficult to solve. Third, new manuscript publications since late 2010 have enabled an analysis of the verso of the slips for a considerable amount of bamboo manuscripts. As it turned out, the slips’ verso often contain information that is extremely valuable for the purpose of reconstruction. Especially the so-called verso lines have become a focus of interest during the last few years, because there appears to be a relation between the verso lines and the original sequence of the slips in a manuscript. However, this relation has turned out to be rather complex and calls for further clarification. A second phenomenon that sometimes occurs on the verso of the slips, namely mirror-inverted imprints of writing, has not yet received the attention it actually deserves. Although it has been shown years ago that an analysis of such imprints can provide evidence for manuscript reconstruction, they have thenceforth rarely been used for that purpose.
The dissertation hopes to fill the mentioned gaps in research and is mainly devoted to two aims. The first is to clarify and illustrate that an analysis of the verso of the slips can be the key to solving remaining problems (e.g. with regard to multiple-text and composite manuscripts) and how exactly the two phenomena verso lines and verso imprints of writing can be utilized for the purpose of manuscript reconstruction; the second is to systematically approach the reconstruction of early Chinese bamboo manuscripts and develop both a comprehensive catalogue of criteria as well as guidelines for reconstruction, which take into account possible evidence from the verso of the slips. Although this dissertation is largely confined to the investigation of bamboo manuscripts, some of the findings are equally relevant to the reconstruction of wood manuscripts.

Published as:

Staack, Thies. Reconstructing Early Chinese Bamboo Manuscripts. Towards a Systematic Approach Including Verso Analysis. Diss. Univ. Hamburg 2015.

Numerous archaeological discoveries of ancient tombs containing manuscripts in mainland China since the 1970s made it possible for the first time to investigate systematically tomb manuscript collections from the last centuries before the Common Era. In the past decades, scientific research on excavated manuscripts showed great progress, especially in the palaeographical and linguistic fields. However, dealing with tomb manuscript collections raises fundamental questions as to the organization, function and status of the collections which still remain unresolved. How were the collections organized physically and thematically for tombs, and is it possible to classify excavated manuscripts following a comparison with transmitted sources? What is the real function of manuscript collections contained in tombs, and how is the function influenced by cultural background such as views of the afterlife, funerary rites and practices as well as social and political circumstances? Which status did the tomb manuscript collections have and what is the relationship between manuscript collection and tomb owner? Based on these questions the study will focus on investigating several significant collections as case studies and aims at drawing general conclusions regarding the organization of tomb manuscript collections in ancient China.

Published as:

Wang, Bin. The Spatial Arrangement of Ancient Chinese Tomb Manuscripts (5th-2nd C. BCE): An Archaeological Survey. Hamburg 2023.

This project is a religious-social study of the Manichaean community of Turfan region (in Xinjiang, China) during the 9th–11th centuries and its relations with Turfan Manichaean manuscripts. Manichaeism, as an official religion of the Qocho Uyghur Kingdom (based in Turfan region), was replanted to Turfan from the Mongolian Steppe by Uyghurs in the 9th century. The 20th-century archaeological discoveries of the first-hand Manichaean materials in Turfan region had started a new era of Manichaean studies. But the actual operation of the Turfan Manichaean community and the Turfan Manichaean use of manuscripts have not yet been sufficiently researched. Therefore, this project investigates the functions of manuscripts for the Turfan Manichaean community, and analyzes the triangle relationship between manuscripts, elects (monks) and auditors (laymen), in order to explore how the Turfan Manichaean community and its identity were built up, and what its social, political and economic bases were. This project aims at researching the Turfan Manichaean manuscripts written in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Uyghur and Chinese languages, as well as the Turfan Manichaean book art. Through the efforts of Manichaean missions, the original Manichaean texts in Syriac-Aramaic and Middle Persian were translated into various languages and adapted to local cultures. The Turfan Manichaean manuscripts visually reflect the frequent intercultural communications as well as the complicated social, political and economic situations of eastern Silk Road towns during medieval time. I provide cross-cultural and comparative insights into the roles manuscripts played in the eastward transmission of Manichaean knowledge and in fostering devotion among both elects and auditors, and into the use of texts and pictures as ritual objects in eastern Manichaean traditions. In brief, this project attempts to reconstruct a relatively more complete image of the Turfan Manichaean community by seeing it from the inside, based on the surviving Manichaean textual and pictorial materials from the Turfan region.

Accessible as: Wang, Shutao. The Functions of Manuscripts for the Turfan Manichaean Community (9th-11th Centuries). Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, 2024.

Nearly every state power in the long history of China did their best to take control of the households. The grain and cloth from agricultural taxes, cash revenue from property taxes, regular free workers for the public construction and soldiers for the military service all depended on knowing the precise information of every household. All these businesses were not directly linked to individual persons but households. To organize the complicated data of the location, name, age, gender of every person from millions of households in the whole empire, an elaborate household registration system was created. In these household registration documents, which information would be written down and what is the relationship between the persons recorded in the same household? Which officials were responsible for these documents and how were these documents preserved and processed?

The oldest household registration files found until now were excavated from a pit at the Qianling site, at present-day Liye, Hunan. With these materials and literary sources, it becomes possible to reconstruct the household registration system in early imperial China. In addition to administration documents, “Wei Statute on Households” from the Shuihudi manuscripts and “Statutes on Households” from the Zhangjiashan manuscripts provide some evidence about stipulations on the establishment of households, the allocation of agricultural fields and homesteads, and the storage of the registration documents. Furthermore, one statute on households of the early Han dynasty from the Shuihudi site was already published, although most of the legal corpus is still not publicly available.

This dissertation aims to show what the household registration documents contain in early imperial China and how the household registration system was run efficiently.

Accessible as:

Wang, Xiao. The Basic Unit of an Empire: Studies of the Household System in Early Imperial China (ca. 3rd-1st Century BCE). Hamburg 2021.

Currently: Postdoctoral researcher at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan

The Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945) was the first to govern the territory roughly corresponding to present-day Vietnam. At the heart of its administration was a correspondence system that connected central and territorial authorities. Over the course of the dynasty, a vast number of these documents accumulated in its central government archives. The extant holdings of the Nguyễn central government archives are now preserved at the National Archives No.1 in Hanoi, commonly referred to as “Châu bản triều Nguyễn” (the Vermilion Records of the Nguyễn dynasty or the Nguyễn central government archives). This dissertation explores various aspects of the institutional history and practical operations of the Nguyễn bureaucratic communication and decision-making system, the standardized writing patterns of its state documents, and the structure of its central government archival system.

Currently: PI of the project RFH07 „Colophons in Lao Manuscripts from Luang Prabang: Exploring Production, Uses, and Interaction Between Sangha and Laity“

The research aims at studying Anisong manuscripts in Northern Thailand and Laos and is associated with the research project (A08 sub-project) which aims at analyzing a corpus of Buddhist anisong homiletic texts. Most anisong manuscripts contain rather short texts with less than 10 folios; some bundles are multiple-text manuscripts which contain more than one text. The main corpus of 287 manuscripts to be studied is from Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos and centre of Lao Buddhism where the practice of anisong is still alive. This corpus, which for a greater part is accurately dated, will be compared with a microfilmed collection of almost 300 anisong manuscripts from northern Thailand and with another collection of about 40 Tai Lü manuscripts from northern Laos and the Chinese province of Yunnan.
Anisong (Pali: ānisaṃsa) is a specific genre of homiletic texts related to the perfection of gift-giving (dāna). It explains specific benefits or advantages (anisong) gained from various kinds of merit-making; a believer may expect from a particular religious deed. Because they deal with and acts as an incentive for offerings made to monasteries and the community of monks (sangha), they serve an important function in the social and economic relationship between laity and Sangha. On the basis of numerous dated copies available, anisong manuscripts may also be seen as a testimony of customs and practices of local Buddhism over at least three centuries until now.
As the textual structure, the text in general begins with some meritorious acts done by somebody. An arahat disciple of the Buddha or a famous figure in the Buddha period always asks the Buddha about consequential benefits derived from the meritorious act; the Buddha then explains them in details. Such anisong texts were inscribed or written on different writing supports such as palm-leaf and mulberry paper. Anisong manuscripts can be categorized as follows based on the preaching on different rituals: specific occasions, rites of passage, gift-giving ceremony, and non-specific rituals. The main purpose of anisong manuscripts is to be a medium of sermons. Anisong manuscripts are not only containers of texts but objects of important functions in ritual practices. Rituals are therefore regarded as being inseparably connected with anisong manuscripts.
All described above are preliminary observation and survey on anisong manuscripts found in Lan Na and Laos with considerations toward rituals. This corpus of manuscripts provides significant clues about rituals on one hand and gives considerable meanings to rituals on the other hand; they reveal both vernacular cultural aspects and cross-cultural aspects. Traditions of anisong preaching have predominantly occurred in Lan Na and Laos; however, similarities and differences between the anisong manuscripts of two regions are explicitly found in the initial stage of the research. Anisong manuscripts of Lan Na and Laos definitely suggest significant aspects which worth being comparatively studied to reach more conclusions on cultural details.

Accessible as:

Jaengsawang, Silpsupa. Relationship Between Anisong Manuscripts and Rituals: A Comparative Study of the Lan Na and Lao Traditions. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, 2020.

Currently: PI of the project RFE16 „Writing Culture of the Thai Royal Court through the Archives of Royal Scribes“

The literature of the Ayutthaya Period (1351–1767), though long perceived as the classical, and even national, literature of Thailand, has rarely survived as original manuscripts. Due to the destruction of the former Siamese capital in 1767, most manuscripts from that classical period got lost. Nevertheless, in the subsequent Bangkok period (since 1782) royal scribes, scholars, and intellectual monks searched for surviving manuscripts to compile and restore the corpus of Ayutthaya literature. However, the role of these scribes and scholars in this complex process has never been thoroughly studied, and our knowledge of manuscripts in the history of transmission of Ayutthaya literature remains unclear. Therefore, this study focuses mainly on the scribal paratexts, such as prefaces, colophons and annotations, from the extant manuscripts of Ayutthaya literature in order to explore in detail the roles which the scribes and scholars of the Bangkok period played in the transmission history of Ayutthaya literature.

Published as:

Panarut, Peera. Ayutthaya Literature in the Hands of Bangkok Scribes and Scholars: Paratexts and Transmission History of Ayutthaya Literature in the Bangkok Period. Hamburg 2019.

Currently: Researcher at the Archive of Lān Nā Inscriptions, Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, Thailand

This research focuses mainly on the study of the colophons and prefaces in Tai Lü mulberry paper manuscripts from Sipsòng Panna in the People’s Republic of China and Müang Sing in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. These two kinds of paratexts can show information on history of the manuscripts. Thus I interested in specific study colophons and prefaces in the two corpora of mulberry paper manuscripts from the countries where the original homeland of Tai Lü is situated. For the purposes of this research are to study the form of colophons and prefaces in Tai Lü manuscripts, the purpose of the scribe (author or copiest) to written colophons and prefaces in Tai Lü manuscripts, the difference of colophons and prefaces which appear in religious texts on the one side and in secular texts on the other side. I am most interested to analyse how the Tai Lü way of life, state of society, belief system and cultural background is reflected colophons and prefaces of Tai Lü manuscripts. Moreover, in a preliminary study, I found some colophons in religious Tai Lü manuscripts that are similar to inscriptions on the pedestal of Buddha images in Müang Sing. It will be interesting to make a comparative study of colophons in Tai Lü manuscripts and those inscriptions on the pedestal of Buddha images. The results of this research might hopefully contribute to understanding the importance of the manuscripts with the Tai Lü society which make for the revival of Tai Lü manuscript culture in the present time after the most of Tai Lü manuscripts were destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Published as:

Techasiriwan, Apiradee. Tai Lü Manuscripts from Southern Yunnan and Northern Laos: The Function and Development of Paratexts in a Recently Revived Manuscript Culture. Hamburg 2019.

Currently: Coordinator of the project „The Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal“ and PI in the project RFD17 „A Study of Palaeography and Colophons in a Selection of Dated Palm-leaf Manuscripts from Nepal“

Previously: Researcher and Coordinator of the project “Safeguarding the Manuscripts of Nepal”

This project studies the ways in which scribes of Sanskrit manuscripts visually demarcate a text from paratexts (such as introductory matter, or concluding colophons) or from other texts (such as texts preceding and/or following in a multiple-text manuscript, or from a commentary or commentaries transmitted together with a text). Such demarcation may involve the use of space(s), variation in the size and/or the style of writing, symbols, colours (rubrication), or a combination of these. In the course of this study 40 different Sanskrit manuscripts from North India and Nepal, written on birch-bark or palm leaves until ca. CE 1350 will be analysed. Particular attention will be paid to what the study of such scribal practices reveals about how textual knowledge is organized and structured (on several levels, including those of the division of individual texts and of chapters within texts), made use of, and how it is conceived. In addition, the study aims to contribute to a broader understanding of such scribal practices in manuscript cultures, as well as to the working out of a more precise, non culture-specific, terminology for their description.

Accessible as:

Bhattarai, Bidur. Dividing Texts. Conventions of Visual Text-Organization in North Indian and Nepalese Manuscripts up to ca. CE 1300. (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 10) Berlin 2019.

Foremost amongst the chief aims of this project is to provide a detailed study of the last few manuscripts produced for and by a mid – late 19th century manuscript lending library facility. The six manuscripts, written and/or copied by Ahmad Beramka, are part of the manuscript collection owned by Beramka’s family, more popularly referred to in scholarly articles as the ‘Fadli collection’, originally consisting of at least 75 manuscripts. Whilst much credit has been given to modern print technologies in the spread of information and knowledge in Southeast Asia, it is critical to also examine indigenous networks and systems of knowledge dissemination. In its entirety, the Fadli collection allows us a unique opportunity to examine the intimate relationship between the scribe and his community, the interests of indigenous readers (in influencing the scribe’s works), and the business transactions that occur on a micro scale. By examining these last vestiges of the Fadli lending library through Beramka’s manuscripts, we are able to identify the final desperate attempts of the Malay manuscript tradition to remain relevant in the 20th century.
This project will place Beramka’s six manuscripts in a broader socio-economic framework to examine the pressure the Malay manuscript tradition faced in the time of print. This will additionally allow us to understand Beramka’s reliance on certain patronages that heavily influenced his work. The primary aim here is to identify possible factors influencing the Malay manuscript tradition such as social backgrounds, economic consideration, aesthetic and/or literary preferences.

Currently: Assistant Professor, Department of Turkish Literature, Samsun University.

Lamii Çelebi (1472-1532) is an outstanding figure of 16th century Ottoman textual culture being the author of more than 20 books. One of his most well-known books is his work Nafahat al-Uns (Breaths of Fellowship). Nafahat al-Uns was originally written by Jami (1414–1492), one of the leading Sufis of this period, and contains biographies of Sufis who lived up to the 15th century in Western Asia. My hypothesis is that this book with its more than 90 surviving manuscript copies, which are preserved in the collection of several libraries throughout the world, was one of the central factors in shaping the development of Sunna-minded Sufism from the 16th century onwards in the Ottoman Empire. In order to better contextualize the manuscript copies, I will be investigating all manuscript copies with a seal indicating that the copy belongs or belonged to the historical manuscript collections of the Empire related to the court or to Sufi institutions. In this framework, all manuscript copies matching my criteria will be examined comprehensively and all paratextual elements and other elements reflecting their usage will be analysed to better understand what kind of Sufi field or milieu they constructed and shaped through their own agencies. Consequently, considering the current state of Ottoman studies, this study will be a completely new approach by examining manuscripts and their agency as such.

Published as:

Yayla, Mustafa Altuğ: Informing the Ottoman Literati about Sunni Tasavvuf. The venture of Lāmiī Çelebi's Fütūhu'l-Mücāhidīn li-Tervīhi Kulūbü'l-Müşāhidīn in the reading public of early modern Ottoman Rūm (ca. 1500-1800). Hamburg 2021.

Currently: Lecturer and Researcher at Hanoi National University of Education

For decades under the management of the National Archives in Hanoi, bureaucratic texts of the Nguyen, the last dynasty in Vietnam (1802-1945), were considered politically sensitive. Therefore, academic accessibility was strictly prohibited. This situation recently experiences gradual change and scholars now have permission to access a large part of this invaluable manuscript collection. This is a study of early nineteenth-century Vietnamese administrative manuscripts and the practice of bureaucratic textual production as part of the Vietnamese political culture. The use of multiple bureaucratic textual forms will be explored with the aim of revealing patterns, character, and functions of these texts, figuring out the correlation between political performance and textual production in imperial Vietnam, and theorizing the dialectic relationship between bureaucratic texts and the state’s operation. The development of the political system in early nineteenth century Vietnam brought back a discontinued tradition of promulgating Confucianism as official ideology. Since the political system operated within a bureaucratic framework, elite authority dominated intellectual landscape, and Confucian scholars were the embodiment of the state’s authority, textual practice therefore became a medium of governance and an expression of power relationships. The existence of these administrative texts well consolidated with the canonical textuality of the court and imperial examination to form a distinctive feature of the Vietnamese imperial state: the use of writing as a crucial technology of administration and statecraft. In other words, those manuscripts present as self-referential form of the power structure of the state under which political authority was conveyed through the textual medium. Going beyond a means of information, those documents were visual forms of power hierarchy, defining the way in which the empire operated through the connection between central and local levels. The well-organized and sophisticated regulations of administrative texts produced between 1820 and 1841 highlights political centralization and clarifies the interrelation between textual use and bureaucracy, a defining feature to understand Vietnam’s political culture in the 19th century.

Accessible as:

Vu, Duc Liem. „Sweating Buffaloes“ and Chaotic Archives: Nguyen Paperwork and Bureaucratic Operation, 1802-1841. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, 2020.