Conference report about «Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings», co-organized by Claire Clivaz (SIB, CH &amp; RSCS, UCLouvain) and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (University of Basel), 7-8 December 2023 from Basel. Videos available on https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/event/details/perceptions-of-writing-in-papyri-crossing-close-and-distant-readings/

Sokolinski, Eugenie

English

Conference report about «Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings», co-organized by Claire Clivaz (SIB, CH & RSCS, UCLouvain) and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (University of Basel), 7-8 December 2023 from Basel. Videos available on https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/event/details/perceptions-of-writing-in-papyri-crossing-close-and-distant-readings/

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Conference Report: Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings.

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Edited byAlessandro Bausi, Paola Buzi, Javier Del Barco, Emiliano Fiori, Marilena Maniaci,Eugenia SokolinskiBulletinVolume 9 • 1-2 • 2023COMStISSN 2410-0951Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin is the biannual on-line and print-on-demand journal of the European research network Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies. Born in 2009 as a European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme, the network has been af-filiated to the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/) since 2016. Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin welcomes articles, project descriptions, con-ference reports, book reviews and notes on all topics connected with the written cultures of the Mediterranean Near and Middle East and related traditions or offering a comparative perspective. Contributions should be sent to Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies, Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, Alsterterrasse 1, 20354 Hamburg, Germany; eugenia.sokolinski@uni-hamburg.de. For submission guidelines and former issues visit <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/comst/publications/bulletin.html>.Editorial BoardAlessandro Bausi, Hamburg, GermanyPaola Buzi, Rome, ItalyJavier Del Barco, Madrid, SpainEmiliano Fiori, Venice, ItalyMarilena Maniaci, Cassino, ItalyEditorial SecretaryEugenia Sokolinski, Hamburg, GermanyAdvisory BoardTara Andrews, Vienna, AustriaPatrick Andrist, Munich, GermanyEwa Balicka-Witakowska, Uppsala, SwedenMalachi Beit-Arié, Jerusalem, Israel (d. 2023)Pier Giorgio Borbone, Pisa, ItalyFrançoise Briquel Chatonnet, Paris, FranceValentina Calzolari, Genève, SwitzerlandRalph Cleminson, Winchester, UKCopyright © COMSt (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies) 2023Publication date January 2024This journal is published under the Creative Commons Attribu-tion-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) <www.creativecommons.org>.ISSN 2410-0951Matthew Driscoll, Copenhagen, DenmarkAlessandro Gori, Copenhagen, DenmarkDickran Kouymjian, Fresno, USA – Paris, FranceMarco Palma, Cassino, ItalyIra Rabin, Berlin – Hamburg, GermanyLara Sels, Leuven, BelgiumGaga Shurgaia, Naples, ItalyJan-Just Witkam, Leiden, The NetherlandsFunded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy, EXC 2176 ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interac-tion and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures’, project no. 390893796, at Universität Hamburg (2019–2025)ContentsEditorial. In memoriam Malachi Beit-Arié (20 March 1937–17 October 2023) 5Articles and notes  Recovering Some Lost Lines in the Mēmrē of Narsai (d. c.500),  with an Appendix on a Stemma of Manuscripts of Narsai  (Aaron Michael Butts) 7Nineteenth-century Kashmiri Paper: Victor Jacquemont’s Account of an Unparalleled Craftsmanship (Amélie Couvrat Desvergnes) 25The Colophon of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu and Ethiopic ḥassāb (Daria Elagina)  59The Byzantine Reception and Transmission of William of Ockham’s Summa totius logicae (José Maksimczuk) 67Osservazioni filologiche su Galeno, De antidotis XIV 3,16–4,4 K.  (Simone Mucci) 89Representations of the History of Beta ʾƎsrāʾel (Ethiopian Jews) in the Royal Chronicle of King Śarḍa Dǝngǝl (r.1563‒1597): Censorship, a Philological and Historical Commentary (Solomon Gebreyes Beyene) 95The Collector’s Heir: Käthe Rehfeld (Previously Grote, Née Hahn)  (Peter Tarras) 115Mind the Gap: On Columns and Other Patterns of Visual Organisation in Manuscripts (Hanna Wimmer) 129Research projects  Editing Paratexts: Observations from the New Testament’s Titles (Garrick V. Allen, Kimberley A. Fowler, Kelsie G. Rodenbiker, Maxim Venetskov, Martina Vercesi, and Lily Su) 187  ReviewsLara Sels, Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Vittorio Tomelleri, and Ilse de Vos, eds, Editing Mediaeval Texts from a Different Angle: Slavonic and Multilingual Traditions, together with Francis J. Thomson’s Bibliography and Checklist of Slavonic Translations, To Honour Francis J. Thomson on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, together with Proceedings of the ATTEMT Workshop held at King’s College, London, 19–20 December 2013 and the ATTEST Work-shop held at the University of Regensburg, 11–12 December 2015, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 276, Bibliothèque de Byzantion, 19 (Leuven–Paris–Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2018) (Susana Torres Prieto) 205Stéphane Ancel, Magdalena Krzyżanowska and Vincent Lemire, The Monk on the Roof: The Story of an Ethiopian Manuscript Found in Jerusalem (1904). Translated from the French by Kate Matthams Spencer, Open Jeru-salem, 4 (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2022) (Daria Elagina) 211Conference reports  Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 19, University of Copenhagen, 19–21 April 2023 (Red.) 215Byzantium from a Global Perspective II: Byzantium and the Islamicate World, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 28–30 June 2023 (Red.) 216Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives, Universität Hamburg, 27–29 September 2023 (Red.) 218Archäologie der Handschrift – Erschließung, Präsentation und Forschung im digitalen Raum, Freiburg im Breisgau, 9–11 Oktober 2023 (Red.) 225Priests and their Manuscripts in the Holy Land and Sinai, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 8–10 November 2023 (Red.) 227Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings, Basel University, 7–8 December 2023 (Red.) 228Conference reports 228COMSt Bulletin 9 (2023)Owners’ and Maxim Venetskov (Glasgow), ‘Sinaitic Readers of Gospel and Apostle Manuscripts: Between the Text and Multiple Paratexts’.Among the presenters of the first part of the session ‘Multilingual Le-vant’, Nina Glibetić (University of Notre Dame) spoke on ‘Glagolitic Sinai Manuscripts and their Scribes: Negotiating Ecclesial Identity in an Interna-tional Monastic Community’, Tinatin Chronz (Mainz) referred on ‘John Zos-ime, the First Georgian Liturgiologist in the Holy Land and Sinai’, and Denis Nosnitsin and Dorothea Reule (Hamburg) offered a presentation on ‘Ethi-opian Christian Manuscript-Making Abroad: The Ethiopic Collection of St. Catherine’s Revisited’. The second part of the ‘Multilingual Levant’ session included presentations by Adrian Pirtea (Berlin) on ‘Safeguarding the Patris-tic Heritage at the Dawn of the First Crusade: Sinai Arab. 481 and its Scribe, the Priest Butrus (Peter)’ and Natalia Smelova (Manchester) on ‘Jerusalem and Antioch on Sinai: A Study into the Syriac Liturgical Manuscripts Copied by Priests’.The final session was dedicated to ‘Priests and Book-Production’. Here, Samuel Bauer (Regensburg) talked on ‘Early Printed Greek Euchologia on Mt. Sinai’ and Georgios Boudalis (Thessaloniki) presented an overview of ‘Manuscript Repair, Binding and Rebinding at Saint Catherine’s Monastery during the 17th and 18th Centuries’. For a full programme, visit <https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/imafo/events/event-details/priests-and-their-manuscripts>.Red.Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant ReadingsBasel University, 7–8 December 2023 (online)The online conference was convened on 7 and 8 December 2023 by Claire Clivaz (DH+, SIB, CH & RSCS, UCLouvain, BE) and Isabelle Marthot-San-taniello (Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Basel), and organized in the framework of the SNSF starting grant EGRAPSA (n° 211682), led by Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello. The conference’s purpose was to analyse how digital culture has changed the perceptions of writing styles in papyri. Studies conducted by modern scholars have always been the main way of evaluating papyri, determining their dates and content. Selected papers focused on the current ways scholars view the aesthetics of papyri in a world where close and distant readings are intersecting more every day. A large part of ancient scholarship successfully used the traditional close read, whereas today, a small group of newer scholars have integrated Conference reports 229COMSt Bulletin 9 (2023)computer analysis into their research. The following questions were addressed: To what extent is computer analysis of quantitative data bringing objectivity into the study of writing styles in papyri? What are the potential limits or biases of computer analysis? Does this confirm insights from the past, or to the con-trary, does this change our evaluation of dates, content, and genre implications within papyri studies? These questions were reviewed considering the various fields currently working with papyri in different languages. The conference was opened by Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello, who sum-marized the ‘State of the Art in Computational Paleography of Papyri: at Hand, Hopes and Wishes’ with a focus on recent works on Greek papyri especial-ly identification of writers and evaluation of stylistic similarities. An opening lecture by Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France, Paris) followed, who con-templated on ‘Understanding a Text before Reading it? The Contribution of a Document’s form to its Interpretation’. He showed how the materiality of the papyrus as an object contributes to the understanding of the nature and purpose of the transmitted text, and offered possibilities to consider it in the computer analyses that are developing in the field of papyrology.The first panel, ‘Distant View’, featured the talk by Dominique Stutzmann (IRHT, Paris and Humboldt-Universität, Berlin), who presented on ‘Closeness, Distance, and Identification of Writers in Latin Paleography’. Detailed taxono-mies have been developed in Latin palaeography, which has been able to quick-ly benefit from the contributions of computer vision. The scholar showed how computer-supported analysis of such elements as spacing between the letters can reveal the ‘rhythm’ of handwriting and contribute to dating and localizing of entire manuscripts. In her paper on the ‘Hieratic Script in the Graeco-Roman Period: New Perspectives in the Wake of a Project Devoted to Funerary Texts’, Sandrine Vuilleumier (University of Basel) used the findings of the project ‘Be-yond the Text. New Funerary Compositions from the Graeco-Roman Period: Textualities and Archaeology in Thebes’, supported by the Swiss National Sci-ence Foundation (SNSF). She illustrated the methodology developed within the project to analyse hieratic script in funerary manuscripts, highlighting the limitations and scientific advantages that can be derived from such an analysis. Three papers were grouped in the panel ‘Christian Papyri’. Claire Clivaz inquired about the evolution of the scholarly perception of P45 (Dublin, Chester Beatty, BP I) and in 0171 (PSI I 2 + PSI II 124) in her paper ‘Looking Digi-tally at  two manuscripts: 0171 and P45 in Scholarship’. She showed how the availability of digital images of these two manuscripts allowed the scholars to make assertions that would have been difficult to demonstrate before the digital era. Laurent Pinchard (Institut Catholique de Paris) addressed the issue of how ‘classical’ textual criticism can benefit from electronic resources especially Conference reports 230COMSt Bulletin 9 (2023)when addressing the question of ‘free’ transmission in early manuscripts in his paper ‘Testing the Boismard-Lamouille Theory on Acts 16.13–17.10 in P127: Heresy or Evidence?’. In her paper ‘What a Magical Tool! Studying Coptic Apocrypha and Magic in the Age of Databases’, Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin (University of Oslo) discussed how two recently created databases (the Apoc-rypha Database and the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts) impacted her own research on the relationship between Coptic apocrypha and magic, in particular with regards to the analysis of content and paratextual features, as well as the evaluation of dates and provenance. A fourth paper on Christian Pa-pyri by Garrick V. Allen (University of Glasgow), ‘The Aesthetics of Handwrit-ing in Greek Papyri. Paleography and Understanding’ was scheduled but not presented orally (a written contribution to the proceedings is being considered). The first panel of the second conference day was dedicated to ‘Digital Pal-aeography’. Mladen Popović (University of Groningen) spoke on ‘Assessing Writing Style and Quality by Combining Traditional Palaeography and AI: the Case of the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls’. He explored how quantitative data from computer analysis can assist in palaeographic analysis when assessing writing style and quality, also with regard to basic questions such as: what is quality and how do we know? Pedro Garcia-Baro and Giuseppe de Gregorio  (Universities of Zurich and Basel) illustrated the work done with their colleagues Olga Serbaeva and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello based on the results of the recently ended SNSF project, ‘Reuniting Fragments, Identifying Scribes and Characterizing Scripts: the Digital Paleography of Greek and Cop-tic Papyri (D-scribes)’. In their paper ‘Biblical Majuscule: Computer Spotted Features and Palaeographer’s Perception’, they showed how the annotation of c.150 Iliad papyri (with the help of the platform called ‘READ: Research Envi-ronment for Ancient Documents’) opens new possibilities in the analysis of dif-ficult cases, in particular on the specific question of the variability within one hand (intrawriter variation) and variation among different hands (inter-writer variation). They illustrated how computer-based methods can assist palaeogra-phers handling and visualizing a massive quantity of data, but also extracting features that do not correspond to traditional palaeographical categories. An-other project, aimed at developing a reliable digital tool that can automatically identify handwritings and accurately date chronologically uncertain documents on papyrus, headed by Giuseppina Azzarello at the University of Udine, was showcased by Nicola Reggiani (University of Udine) in his talk on ‘The Arti-ficial Papyrologist at Work: Automatic Identification of Scribes and Dating of Handwritings in an Ongoing Project at the University of Udine—Theoretical Outlines and Case Studies’. He focused on the case studies of the Ptolemaic archives of Zenon and Menches. Conference reports 231COMSt Bulletin 9 (2023)The final conference panel was dedicated to ‘Natural Language Process-ing and Documentary Papyri’. In her paper ‘Writer’s Style in Greek Documen-tary Papyri: Issues of Orthography, Linguistic Style and Authorship’, Marja Vierros (University of Helsinki) showed how the analysis of linguistic infor-mation produced by ERC Starting Grant project ‘Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri’ can contribute to the identification of authors and writ-ers, among the many other aspects. Victoria B. Fendel (University of Oxford), in her paper ‘When the Lines get Blurred: Support-verb Constructions in the Documentary Papyri’, showed that quantitative data (i) is only as good as the premises on which it has been collected and that not every data sample lends itself to quantitative analysis, (ii) has to be interpreted with care considering confounding variables, and (iii) demonstrates how support verb constructions in small and diverse corpora such as the documentary Greek papyri withstand computational models so far. Aneta Skalec (La Sapienza University, Rome) spoke on ‘Misthosis Monogram in the Late Antiquity Hermopolites Lease Con-tracts’. In focusing on the particular abbreviation common in a specific type of documentary papyri and its evolution, she showed how important the careful image analysis is. She also showed how studying the evolution of writing of only one word could be useful to narrow down the dating or indicate the place where the document was written. In his presentation ‘To <g> or not to <g>: Paratext, Materiality, and the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri’, C. Michael Sampson (University of Manitoba) illustrated how the recently-created Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri provides a revealing lesson in both the imperfections of work-in-progress and the challenges of anticipating the needs of future users and research. Inconsistencies in (TEI XML) encoding and abuse of certain el-ements may have to be carefully fixed in order to make the corpus more useful in the future. Finally, Lea Packard-Grams (UC Berkeley) presented on ‘Digital Papyrology as a Method for Reassembling an Archive: A Case Study in Digital-ly Reuniting Papyri Near and Far’. Hauling from her experience in a project at the Center for Tebtunis Papyri, she showed how digital tools have proven to be invaluable to analyse a scribe’s distinctive handwriting and aesthetic features. Notably, digital methods aid in identification of fragments as belonging to the scribe’s documents based on paleography. These tools include infrared pho-tography, digital manipulation of fragments, and analyses of databases.The conference programme and the abstracts are available at <https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/events-1/papyri-conference/>, and videos will be available early 2024 on <https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/>. Papers of the conference are proposed to be submitted in the Open Access journal Pylon: Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts.Red.

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Conference Report: Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings.

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