10-12 September 2025: Writing as an event and a process: Ancient and Medieval scribes at work
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19. August 2025
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Veranstaltungen
Writing as an event and a process: Ancient and Medieval scribes at work
International Conference
Basel, 10-12 September 2025
Attendance to this event is open upon previous registration via email to i.marthot-santaniello@unibas.ch.
The study of ancient manuscripts has long focused on their textual content, neglecting their material aspects until these last decades. The “material turn” taken by recent research has shown how fruitful it can be to interrogate manuscripts as ancient objects, representative of their historical, cultural and technical context of production. Massive digitisation of cultural heritage collections now provides new materials to specialists, digital “avatars” that are extremely useful for the study of layout and handwriting (palaeography), but capture only partially the complex nature of these objects, often reducing them to 2D photographs. The aim of the present conference, organised by the SNSF-funded project EGRAPSA in Basel, the ERC project MIDRASH and the Centre Jean-Mabillon, École nationale des chartes (Paris), is to tackle the challenge of reconstructing the event of writing understood as specific persons in a specific place with specific equipment, and the process of writing as chains of movements producing written traces.
The conference will bring together presentations from specialists in Ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and vernacular scripts, covering Antiquity and the Middle Ages with a glimpse into the Renaissance. Including two hand-on workshops (experimental and digital palaeography) and various moments devoted to discussion, it will foster multidisciplinary exchanges between palaeography, history, archaeology, iconography, digital humanities, and computer science, on methods and tools for extracting evidence from handwritten artifacts concerning their contexts and processes of production, investigating the possibilities but also the limits of reconstructing how people used to write in the past.
The complete programme and further information can be found on the conference website.
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