Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-007
Yehudah B. Cohn
For fifty years or so, after the Qumran tefillin and mezuzot first came to light, scholarly focus centered on the biblical texts they contained, and on the relation of these artifacts to practices later discussed by post-destruction rabbis.1 More recent works by Adler and Cohn have treated material features independently of the rabbinic corpus, alongside textual ones,2 and here I will “reread” material features. To put it slightly differently, my goal in this article is to highlight the extent to which material considerations have informed the analysis of the Qumran tefillin and mezuzot—including instances where the material record shows less than has sometimes been claimed.3
{"title":"Reading Material Features of Qumran Tefillin and Mezuzot","authors":"Yehudah B. Cohn","doi":"10.1515/9783110639247-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-007","url":null,"abstract":"For fifty years or so, after the Qumran tefillin and mezuzot first came to light, scholarly focus centered on the biblical texts they contained, and on the relation of these artifacts to practices later discussed by post-destruction rabbis.1 More recent works by Adler and Cohn have treated material features independently of the rabbinic corpus, alongside textual ones,2 and here I will “reread” material features. To put it slightly differently, my goal in this article is to highlight the extent to which material considerations have informed the analysis of the Qumran tefillin and mezuzot—including instances where the material record shows less than has sometimes been claimed.3","PeriodicalId":414761,"journal":{"name":"Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116715179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-012
C. Markschies
For a contribution on key aspects of reading in the various book-based religions of antiquity and their religious groupings, to look at non-reading probably sounds like something of a paradox. Too often however, we have become accustomed (as the term “book-based religion” itself shows) to regarding ancient Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities as first and foremost textual communities i. e. as religious communities which, according to Brian Stock’s definition “came to understand their identities through the mediation of written texts, which often were interpreted for them by key individuals.”1 Images of “textual communities” from Jewish, Christian and Muslim life spring to mind immediately: readings during the mass, the liturgical veneration of the book during Christian and Jewish worship, exegesis in Jewish synagogue sermons and Christian homilies, commentaries in Biblical books based on the ancient Alexandrian or Pergamenian commentary technique, excerption, citation, the paraphrasing of biblical texts in various genres, the compilation of lemmatised anthologies such as the Byzantine chain commentaries, the catenae.2 Besides as textual communities, we also have a tendency to regard the three more or less monotheistic religions (to use, for the sake of simplicity, a term from modern religious studies that is far from unproblematic) of late antiquity as reading communities, as an accumulation of reading circles and of networks circulating reading matter. Religious communities such as in Qumran, monastic movements like the Pachomian abbeys, institutions of higher learning like the Private University of the first Christian polymath Origen in Caesarea Maritima and of course the ancient Christian synods and councils too were, at least in our minds, not just textual but also very much reading communities. That the same Origen in his sermons, which he gave to a house community comprising about thirty members in the late 30s and 40s of the fourth century somewhere near the port of Caesarea Maritima, repeatedly called upon his audience to read up on the biblical texts he was referring to is another example of the existence of both a textual and a reading community.3 At a synod in the fourth century, to which guests were invited from throughout the empire to discuss problems with Trinitarian theology for example, it is documented that, naturally in the back rooms and during breaks in proceedings, those taking part grappled to arrive at common explanations—usually in the form of what were known as credos. Text drafts, which were also subject to intense discussion, were circulated at these and also significantly amended. In order to do this, it
{"title":"What Ancient Christian Manuscripts Reveal About Reading (and About Non-Reading)","authors":"C. Markschies","doi":"10.1515/9783110639247-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-012","url":null,"abstract":"For a contribution on key aspects of reading in the various book-based religions of antiquity and their religious groupings, to look at non-reading probably sounds like something of a paradox. Too often however, we have become accustomed (as the term “book-based religion” itself shows) to regarding ancient Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities as first and foremost textual communities i. e. as religious communities which, according to Brian Stock’s definition “came to understand their identities through the mediation of written texts, which often were interpreted for them by key individuals.”1 Images of “textual communities” from Jewish, Christian and Muslim life spring to mind immediately: readings during the mass, the liturgical veneration of the book during Christian and Jewish worship, exegesis in Jewish synagogue sermons and Christian homilies, commentaries in Biblical books based on the ancient Alexandrian or Pergamenian commentary technique, excerption, citation, the paraphrasing of biblical texts in various genres, the compilation of lemmatised anthologies such as the Byzantine chain commentaries, the catenae.2 Besides as textual communities, we also have a tendency to regard the three more or less monotheistic religions (to use, for the sake of simplicity, a term from modern religious studies that is far from unproblematic) of late antiquity as reading communities, as an accumulation of reading circles and of networks circulating reading matter. Religious communities such as in Qumran, monastic movements like the Pachomian abbeys, institutions of higher learning like the Private University of the first Christian polymath Origen in Caesarea Maritima and of course the ancient Christian synods and councils too were, at least in our minds, not just textual but also very much reading communities. That the same Origen in his sermons, which he gave to a house community comprising about thirty members in the late 30s and 40s of the fourth century somewhere near the port of Caesarea Maritima, repeatedly called upon his audience to read up on the biblical texts he was referring to is another example of the existence of both a textual and a reading community.3 At a synod in the fourth century, to which guests were invited from throughout the empire to discuss problems with Trinitarian theology for example, it is documented that, naturally in the back rooms and during breaks in proceedings, those taking part grappled to arrive at common explanations—usually in the form of what were known as credos. Text drafts, which were also subject to intense discussion, were circulated at these and also significantly amended. In order to do this, it","PeriodicalId":414761,"journal":{"name":"Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132826306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-008
A. Perrot
The opisthograph manuscripts from Qumran, scrolls written recto and verso, have already received some attention in the history of research. Scholars such as Wise,1 Tov,2 Brooke,3 and most recently Falk4 have proposed lists and in-depth studies of these texts. However, none of them really dwelt on the reading of this corpus in Qumran.5 Is it possible to know how the reading of these particular manuscripts was “performed” at Qumran? Based on Falk’s article, the most recent to date, we would like to propose a typology of the reading of opisthograph texts based on voluminological aspects.6
{"title":"Reading an Opisthograph at Qumran","authors":"A. Perrot","doi":"10.1515/9783110639247-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-008","url":null,"abstract":"The opisthograph manuscripts from Qumran, scrolls written recto and verso, have already received some attention in the history of research. Scholars such as Wise,1 Tov,2 Brooke,3 and most recently Falk4 have proposed lists and in-depth studies of these texts. However, none of them really dwelt on the reading of this corpus in Qumran.5 Is it possible to know how the reading of these particular manuscripts was “performed” at Qumran? Based on Falk’s article, the most recent to date, we would like to propose a typology of the reading of opisthograph texts based on voluminological aspects.6","PeriodicalId":414761,"journal":{"name":"Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120956388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-001
Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, Friederike Schücking-Jungblut
Reading and its different practices and modes belong to the most important forms of the reception of script-bearing artefacts, covering a wide range of perceptive modes in the reception of writing.1 There are manifold possible approaches how to analyse reading. The main reason for this is the fact that the act of reading is dependent on several variables, e. g. material and formal aspects of the writing surface and the writing itself, the text, the reader, and the context(s) in which something is read. As Sterponi puts it: “[R]eading positions one in a web of culturally stipulated relations between bodies, minds, and texts as artifacts and symbols.”2 As the title of this volume indicates, the main focus here lies on the material aspects of inscribed artefacts and their influence on the act of reading. Although it is not the material artefact, but the text written on it, that is the actual object of reading, the reception of texts is inextricably linked to the material objects bearing them.3 While the media and artefacts of writing have not been at the forefront of research on reading and reading practices for a long time, the beginning of the digital age and with it the de-materialisation of texts brought into focus also the materiality of non-/pre-digital objects of reading. Starting with the reconstruction of the meaning of (printed) books for the interpretation of their content in the merely French history of the books in the late 1970s and 1980s (esp. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier) the materiality of the artefacts of reading has increasingly been taken into consideration both in the research on reading practices and in a wide variety of historical and philological disciplines.4 Accordingly, the present volume joins an ever-growing field of research.5
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Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-016
{"title":"Indices","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110639247-016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":414761,"journal":{"name":"Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures","volume":"55 27","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141206662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-006
Friederike Schücking-Jungblut
Reading is a social mode of reception of a script-bearing artifact. Whereas by no means all writing was and is meant to be read,1 the scribal production and reproduction of literary compositions—in a broad sense—aimed and aim at being read. Dealing with ancient manuscripts that show literary compositions, two dimensions of reading come to mind: first, reading ancient manuscripts in a present-day scholarly perspective, and second, asking about the reading practices of the ancient readers. In the first context, one could evaluate the state of preservation of the manuscripts, the possibilities for reconstruction, the variances (“readings”) between different manuscripts, et cetera. In the second direction of research, one is asking about the modes of reception in the historical and social contexts from which the documents were produced. The first dimension is mainly the concern of editions of ancient manuscripts. Since the manuscripts of interest in this paper are all published in several editions from the last thirty years,2 I can focus on the second question, the ancient reading practices. But since reading—as most practices of reception—is a momentary act, that only rarely leaves marks in the manuscripts themselves, it is almost impossible to explore ancient modes of reading from the manuscripts that have been or can be assumed to have been read. What is accessible for research, however, are hints about intended modes of reading and reception in the documents themselves. Such hints might be found in the texts. However, codicological features of the manuscripts, for example, the choice of material, its preparation for the act of writing, and the design and the layout of the script can perhaps better shed light on the intended reading of the concrete document than the text itself.3 Along these lines, the present paper analyzes the manuscripts of the early Jewish Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice that were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls by considering not only the scholarly editions of the texts, but
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Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-011
John J Heilmann
In his recent publication on the production and transmission of early Christian gospels,1 Scott D. Charlesworth works out criteria to distinguish early Christian manuscripts that have been produced/copied in controlled settings for “public” use from those that have been copied in uncontrolled settings for “private” usage. Charlesworth defines the category “public manuscripts” as “intentionally produced to be read aloud by lectors in Christian meetings.”2 As the main indicators for identifying public manuscripts, he points to “sense breaks,” “punctuation,” and “lectional signs,” which would “greatly assist the task of the lector (ἀναγνώστης)” of “rightly dividing the continuous lines of letters in ancient texts (scriptio continua)”3 during ancient Christian worship.4 The term “sense break” refers to the paragraphos, a horizontal stroke found in the margins of ancient manuscripts. According to W. A. Johnson, on whom Charlesworth relies here, in papyri with literary texts, the paragraphos “was added primarily to assist with reading aloud—the typical way in which these literary texts would have been used.”5 Under the term “lectional signs”, Charlesworth includes markings on the level of letters and words, i. e. diacritics such as the trema, breathings and accents, as well as the apostrophe. In contrast, he suggests that the absence of these “reader’s aids” in early manuscripts of New Testament texts indicates a private setting “where MSS were read by individuals or where ‘private’ readings for family or friends were conducted, there was more leisurely interaction with the text and the need for reader’s aids was less pressing.”6 There is a fundamental methodological problem with Charlesworth’s approach: the fragmentary state of most of the papyri he examines does not allow for any definite conclusion about the absence of (in his terminology) “reader’s aids,” especially diacritics. Even more problematic, in my view, is that he assumes the presence of an official early Christian worship with a communal reading or even a liturgy of the word. However, the question of the broader social context of early Christian worship is not
在他最近出版的关于早期基督教福音书的制作和传播的出版物中，1 Scott D. Charlesworth提出了区分早期基督教手稿的标准，这些手稿是在受控环境下制作/复制供“公众”使用的，还是在不受控环境下复制供“私人”使用的。查尔斯沃斯将“公开手稿”定义为“故意制作出来供基督徒聚会上的牧师大声朗读”。作为识别公开手稿的主要指标，他指出“断续符号”、“标点符号”和“拣选符号”，这些符号将“极大地帮助诵经者(ά ναγνώστης)”在古代基督教崇拜中“正确地划分古代文本(scriptio continua)中连续的字母行”“断行”指的是段落，在古代手稿的空白处发现的一种水平笔画。根据查尔斯沃斯在这里所引用的w·a·约翰逊的说法，在有文学文本的莎草纸上，段落“主要是为了帮助大声朗读——这是这些文学文本的典型使用方式。”在“选举符号”这个术语下，查尔斯沃思包括了字母和单词层面的标记，即变音符，如颤音、呼吸和重音，以及撇号。相比之下，他认为在新约文本的早期手稿中缺乏这些“读者的辅助”表明了一个私人环境，“MSS是由个人阅读的，或者是为家人或朋友进行的‘私人’阅读，与文本的互动更悠闲，对读者辅助的需求也不那么紧迫。”查尔斯沃斯的研究方法存在一个基本的方法论问题:他所研究的大部分纸莎草纸的残缺状态，无法得出任何关于(用他的术语来说)“读者辅助工具”缺失的明确结论，尤其是变音符号。在我看来，更有问题的是，他假设官方早期基督教崇拜的存在，是一种公共阅读，甚至是一种礼拜仪式。然而，早期基督教崇拜的更广泛的社会背景的问题不是
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Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-004
L. Quick
My interest in a comparative codicological approach to ancient Jewish manuscripts was preempted by a disjuncture that I had begun to notice between scholarship on two different genres written in Aramaic and recovered from among the literary finds from the Dead Sea. On the one hand, there is an increasing body of scholarship that has related the Aramaic apocalyptic, astronomical and physiognomic material to the direct knowledge of the scribes behind these texts with the Babylonian scholarly tradition.1 On the other, scholars have been reticent to associate the Aramaic court tales with a Mesopotamian horizon—despite the diaspora setting of much of this material— precisely because this literature has been deemed to stand outside of the scholarly tradition, and hence the scribes who produced these texts unable to access Babylonian literature.2 These sort of assumptions have also governed scholarly approaches to biblical texts, with the generic division found in the book of Daniel related to the differing social groups at which the material was apparently aimed: so the high-register Hebrew apocalyptic visions aimed at a scholarly audience; and the low-register Aramaic tales at a lower-class readership.3 Underlying this supposition is the idea that
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Pub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-fm
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110639247-fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":414761,"journal":{"name":"Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126619228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-07DOI: 10.1515/9783110639247-003
Lindsey A. Askin
The study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Qumran entails at times a narrative of a “poor intellectual community” of wise and pious scribes and sages—in other words, a scribal centre humming primarily with manuscript production, study, and even composition of new texts.1 The creators of the Scrolls are regarded as a collective society, still bordering somewhere near the proto-monastic, characterised by exceptional levels of literacy. The unusually high literacy attributed to the Qumran community is reminiscent of that attributed to other social pockets whose written outpourings were preserved by the accident of history such as the workman’s village of Deir al-Medina in Egypt. The Scrolls are a collection of between 700 and 900 manuscripts, dating from the mid-third century BCE to mid-first century CE. The scrolls tell us about the activities of writing and reading in early Judaism, about religious thought, biblical interpretation, and the early Jewish literary spirit.2 The collection is associated with the archaeological site of Khirbet Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea due to the geographical and chronological proximity of the twelve caves in which the Scrolls were found and inhabitation of the site during the same era. Locating the provenance of the Scrolls with Qumran is not beyond dispute, it is close to scholarly consen-sus.3 The Scrolls some of the earliest manuscript witnesses to the Hebrew Bible, offering a glimpse into the life of an early Jewish movement living along the Dead Sea. These manuscripts present a useful material-textual example of the rich religious and literary variety of Judaism before the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.
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