Intertwined Worlds

Phyllis Granoff, Yale University

In this paper I look at manuscripts from Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. All the manuscripts I discuss have errors; some of the errors are in the written text, while others are in the images that accompany the texts. I speculate on the nature of the errors that frequently occur in pre-modern Indian manuscripts and ponder what they can tell us about the process of manuscript production and reading practice.

Ayesha A. Irani, University of Massachusetts Boston

Tyler Williams, University of Chicago

Gila Prebor & Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Bar-Ilan Unversity

Paul Dilley, University of Iowa

According to the standard narrative of book history, Christians championed the codex over the roll, and the ???triumph??? of Christianity in the later Roman empire led to its adoption as the paradigmatic book form in the Mediterranean world (and eventually in the Islamic world). Yet this approach focuses on raw numbers of surviving manuscripts, rather than a close analysis of sources--both textual, visual and archaeological--for particular communities. My talk will explore the variegated evidence for textual culture in the fifth-century writings of Shenoute, the most famous author of the Coptic language, and abbot of the White Monastery, a community of several thousand monks on the edge of the desert in southern Egypt. Shenoute lived apart from his disciples for most of the year, communicating to them through letters, often quite lengthy, on waxed tablets and papyrus rolls. These letters, which conveyed orders and strenuously urged the confession of sins, were composed and recited to the assembled congregation during the White Monastery's four yearly rituals of collective repentance. They were then stored in an archive, and sometimes copied as dipinti painted inscriptions on the walls of the monastery. Towards the end of his life, Shenoute supervised the copying his letters from roll and tablet to codex, gathering them in nine volumes of Canons, and directing that they be read aloud at the collective repentance ceremonies, especially as a textual legacy after his death. This transfer to codex format was a literal canonization of his own writings: the adoption of a new material form corresponded to their authoritative position in the monastery's ritual calendar. Indeed, Shenoute's Canons have survived because they were copied in the medieval period at the White Monastery; yet the longevity of the codex should not obscure the importance of other written media formats, each with a specific role in the complex textual culture of this early Christian monastery.

Shazia Jagot, University of Surrey

Hidden away in one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, we find the canonical English poet implicitly engaging with the essential metaphysics of Islamic mysticism, folded into a tale that delves into the murky world of alchemical transmutation. The relationship between Sufi thought and the development of alchemy, and its eventual transmission into Middle English poetry has garnered little attention since it was first explored by literary critics in the twentieth century. Yet, when considered from the viewpoint of the manuscript tradition that informed this complex religious transfer, I contend there is much more to be uncovered. In this paper, I suggest that we can further unbind Chaucer's Sufism through an examination of not only Latin manuscripts that the poet may have had to hand, but the Arabic textual culture that informed the intellectual history encapsulated in Chaucer's call for a code of secrecy in the Canterbury Tales. By doing so, we can explore how faith and ritual converged with technology not only in the development of early chemistry in the Islamic world, but as it was transferred into the Latin West. Manuscript copies of Chaucer's Sufi authority in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, Muhammad ibn Umail al-Tamimi's Risala al Shams al- Hilal (France, Bibliotheque Nationale MS Arabe 2610), in addition to the wider integration of the esoteric/exoteric philosophy that can be witnessed in the pseudo-Aristotelian Kitab Sirr al-Asrar (Pennsylvania, Schoenberg Institute LJS 459) and Philip of Tripoli???s Latin translation, the Secreta Secretorum (London, British Library MS Additional 47680) can help us uncover how an Islamic spiritual experience was so seamlessly adapted into an esoteric cosmology inflexed by Christian theology. So fluidly in fact that by the fourteenth century an English poet could unwittingly engage in a metaphysical Sufi discourse that intertwined and crossed religious, geographical, linguistic, and aesthetic worlds.

Ellen Gough, Emory University

One of the most commonly found manuscripts in Jain collections, both Digambara and Śvetāmbara, is the Sanskrit praise poem the Bhaktāmara Stotra (ca. 6th century CE). Bhaktāmara Stotra manuscripts remain popular in part because of the association of this poem with a set of either forty-four or forty-eight geometric diagrams (yantra) thought to grant miraculous results if properly used in ritual. Today, a particular set of forty-eight yantras has formed the basis for an increasing number of Śvetāmbara and Digambara temples dedicated to the Bhaktāmara Stotra, but other sets of yantras exist, and little research has been done on how particular yantras became associated with the verses of this poem. This paper thus compares the yantras depicted in about a dozen early modern illustrated manuscripts of the Bhaktāmara Stotra from collections in Varanasi, Ahmedabad, London, and Indore to examine how different mantras and geometric figures became associated with the verses of the Bhaktāmara Stotra. Ultimately, we will see how one Digambara set of 48 yantras promoted by the sixteenth-century Digambara Bhaṭṭāraka Śubhacandra became the standard set for Jains of both sects. Because of this adoption of Digambara yantras, Śvetāmbaras today have promoted the lay use of a mantra that they in other contexts understand as an esoteric spell only to be recited by ācārya's -- mendicants who have undergone the highest level of initiation. Jains have thus "domesticated" an originally "tantric" practice.

Saymon Zakaria, Bangla Academy

This essay focuses on various facets of contemporary, Bangladeshi hand-written manuscript culture, their secrecy and use. Initiatives for preserving medieval manuscripts of Bangladesh via Microfilm and Digitization both inside of Bangladesh and internationally are well documented. Along with these technological innovations is seen a focus on traditional scholarly methods of defining, editing, and contextualizing texts. However, this presentation will look at a neglected element of Bangladeshi manuscripts culture: The history of contemporary use and preservation of "living" manuscript culture. It is positive that Bangladesh is recently experiencing the availability of technology on a wide scale -- use of computer and mobile phones with internet access spread across even remote rural areas. An informed population can easily take the opportunity of going through manuscripts made available through digitization. Despite this availability, people still love the experience of hand-written, ritualistic manuscripts, considering them to be sacred resources. Access to sacred manuscripts, however, is limited to a few "Boi Master" (Manuscript Reader). Hand-written manuscripts are preserved in secret locations, the entrances to which are restricted to a few, select people. There are various prejudices, cultural practices, and ritual performance surrounding manuscript writing and preservation. This is especially true of manuscripts connected to ascetic practice and performance. Following traditional rural culture, most of the hand-written manuscripts are preserved by lead performers in their own confidential manner. Generation to generation, Guru to disciple, the manuscripts are believed to be sacred sources and are never given to outsiders. This "living" culture may be unbelievable and strange to contemporary researchers. If we can address this verity, I think, we will be able to open new avenues towards collection, preservation and editing Bangladeshi manuscripts.

Iqbal Akhtar, Florida International University

The merchant Khōjā communities of East Africa consumed and produced remarkable religious manuscripts that circulated the Indian Ocean littoral. This vernacular Western Indic tradition, as a historical archive, provides remarkable perspectives on how Indic cosmogonies were transported to Khōjā settlements and reimagined in new contexts. Drawing on the French anthropological and textual traditions, this paper will examine the characteristics, content, materiality, and social place of Khōjā manuscript circulation in the 19th century.

Jinah Kim, Harvard University

In the context of trans-cultural interactions and exchanges, a manuscript's format is an important marker of a cultural identity. Introduction of new material resources and new technology does not change a manuscript's format immediately. Establishment of Islamic ruling houses in South Asia brought paper manuscripts in codex format by the thirteenth century, but it took centuries for this format to gain some acceptance among indigenous circles of manuscript production, that too, after many creative interventions and innovations, and the horizontally long Indic manuscript format remained an important marker of the Indic cultural identity well into the nineteenth century. This paper looks to the east of the South Asian sub-continent and considers a few unique examples that bear out the interactions between the Indic manuscript culture and the Chinese counterpart. A ninth century Dunhuang manuscript used for healing rituals demonstrate the multi-lingual and multi- cultural context in which such a manuscript was produced and used, while an undated xylograph manuscript of a dhāraṇī collection and its seventeenth century hand written copy may indicate shifting political dynamics and creative experiments with available formats and technologies for manuscript making in Nepal. Regardless of their unique formats, these manuscripts of spells and magical diagrams were not only important apotropaic tools but also powerful insignia for ritual specialists. This study underscores the importance of manuscripts as essential vehicles for empowerment and selective knowledge transmission in pre-modern cultures.

Columba Stewart, Hill Museum & Manuscript Library and Saint John's University

In its first fifty years, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) microfilmed 93,000 manuscripts from hundreds of libraries. More than 90% were from European collections, almost all of them consisting of western manuscripts. The great exception was a trove of some 8000 manuscripts filmed in Ethiopia in the turmoil and aftermath of revolution in the 1970s, a harbinger of HMML's work in the digital era, which has been largely focused on endangered manuscript collections in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Since 2003, high-resolution color images of more than 50,000 manuscripts from Eastern Christian and Islamic libraries have complemented the earlier European focus of HMML's image collections. This range of material offers an opportunity for comparative manuscript studies across regions, languages, and religious traditions. To make these resources as widely available as possible, HMML has created vHMML, an online platform that includes tools for manuscript studies as well as access to tens of thousands of born-digital images and scanned microfilm. This presentation will briefly describe the scope of the digitization project and the features of vHMML before turning to the opportunities these initiatives provide for comparative manuscript studies.

Justine Walden, University of Toronto

This paper examines some of the insights made possible by my SMDB project to digitize and quantify a corpus of Florentine manuscript records. An analysis of the manuscript patrimony of Europe's most dynamic fifteenth-century city reveals the existence of several vernacular manuscripts for which there is evidence of wide circulation among the literate popolo classes of fifteenth-century Florence and which provide insight into the contradictory ways in which Europeans negotiated the customs and cultures of the peoples, ideas, and beliefs they classed as "other."

Samantha Kelly, Rutgers University

This talk will focus on a sample of Gə'əz manuscripts that belonged to the Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrim community of Santo Stefano "degli Abissini" ("of the Abyssinians") in the sixteenth century. In addition to bringing liturgical and devotional manuscripts from Ethiopia or from one of the Ethiopian diasporic communities scattered around the eastern Mediterranean, the Ethiopian pilgrims also copied Gə'əz manuscripts in Rome itself. The content of these freshly-produced manuscripts remained Ethiopian Orthodox, but marginal notes and images added to the main texts bear witness to the pilgrims' engagement with Latin Christian culture: its languages, saints, calendar, and religious rites and formulae. Conversely, other Gə'əz manuscripts produced by the pilgrims attest to Catholic prelates' interest in Ethiopian Orthodoxy, particularly as a potential window onto the primitive church and as a weapon against Protestant critique. In both ways, these Gə'əz manuscripts attest to a sort of golden age of Catholic-Ethiopian ecumenical relations and cross-cultural exchange, before a more staunchly anti-heretical Catholic stance and Jesuit missionary activity in Ethiopia led to disaffection on both sides.

Michael Pregill, Boston University

British Library manuscript Or. 8419 is catalogued as a qisas al-anbiya' or collection of Islamic "Tales of the Prophets." However, closer examination reveals that it is actually a work of Shi'i ta'wil or figurative-symbolic exegesis in which the Shi'i community of its day is presented as heir to the legacy of the biblical prophets, Muhammad, and the early Shi'i imams. The text, anonymous and seemingly otherwise unknown outside of this unicum, represents a complex intersection of biblical-qur'anic prophetology, anti-Judaism, anti-Sunnism, and apocalyptic ideology. Various indications in the text suggest that it was produced as propaganda supporting the claims of the early Fatimid empire, possibly as part of their extensive preparations to invade Egypt after consolidating their power in the Maghrib at the beginning of the tenth century CE. In my presentation, I will discuss the text's unique approach to Fatimid imperial propaganda, its possible relationship to other texts in its milieu, and conclude with some remarks on its conjectured provenance.

Thibault d'Hubert, SALC, University of Chicago

Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Northern Arizona University

Manuscripts that feature their illustrations systematically sideways, that is, at a direct angle in relation to the overall make of their codices, are unusual in the history of medieval book art. The forty-four known Christian examples are Armenian and Syrian gospel-books that date from between the 8th/9th and 15th/16th centuries--the vast majority from the 11th century. An analogous approach to religious book design is attested by the remains of forty-one Iranian service-books produced by the Manichaeans, all of which date from between the 8th and 11th centuries and derive from Central Asia. Since these Manichaean and Eastern Christian books share Syro-Mesopotamian scribal and book-making practices, and also simultaneously started to feature their illustrations (including scenes from Jesus' life) sideways in vertical codices, a comparative cross-cultural study of their respective corpuses is well justified. Based on decades of codicological analysis of these manuscripts scattered today among various collections in Europe, North America, and West Asia, this paper aims to outline the typology of their book design.