‘Material features are crucial for my research of papyrus fragments’Elena Chepel Starts Visiting Professorship ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’

6 April 2023

Photo: Elena Chepel

This summer semester, Elena Chepel from the University of Vienna becomes the first researcher to take up the new Visiting Professorship ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’ at CSMC. Here she talks about her plans for her time in Hamburg and explains the role gender issues play in her own research.

Elena Chepel, please tell us a little about your background. Where are currently based and what are you primarily working on?

I am based in Vienna, Austria, where I have been working as postdoctoral scholar since 2018 on Greek papyri at the Papyrus collection of the Austrian National Library and at the Department of Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy of the University of Vienna. I am currently working on editing Greek papyrus fragments from various collections, including Tbilisi, Vienna, and Berlin. I also take part in the archaeological excavation of the necropolis Deir el-Banat in the Fayyum, Egypt, where I study papyri found in mummy cartonnages.

For how long will you stay at the Cluster and what are your plans while you are in Hamburg?

I stay in Hamburg for the summer semester and I plan to take part in the vibrant life of the Cluster, to present my research, and to organise a workshop. I am looking forward to contributing to the ongoing projects at CSMC, to hearing more about other people’s work, and to having fruitful exchanges with colleagues on various topics in the study of Manuscript Cultures. Last but not least, I am going to prepare an edition of a new fascinating papyrus document from Egypt – a petition of a Greek woman addressed to the King about a marriage fraud she suffered from.

Are there any research fields or topics at the Cluster that are particularly interesting to you?

I am interested in the research field Archiving Artefacts, as I have been working for several years on an archive of papyrus documents that comes from Memphis (the so-called Archive of a Memphite official) and is dated to the Roman period. One of the main questions about this archive is who it belonged to and by what principles it was organised.

I am also interested in the materiality of manuscripts, since the handwriting, the layout of the text, material production, storage, use of ink, recycling of papyrus sheets, and other material features are crucial for my research of papyrus fragments. Finally, I am looking forward to discuss with the members of the Cluster new technologies in the studies of manuscripts that open up new prospects in our work with manuscripts both as texts and objects.

You are the first researcher who is appointed to the guest professorship ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’. In what way is your research on written artefacts related to the issue of gender roles?

I am very much honoured to be the first researcher in this role and as part of my appointment I am going to study the question of women’s authorship of papyrus documents, such as petitions and other legally significant documents. Petitions in which complaintees are women share certain gendered topoi about women’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities as a rhetorical strategy of self-representation to make the plea more persuasive. This undermining of women’s agency for the sake of persuasiveness strongly contrasts with the very act of submitting a petition by a woman which is in fact empowering. Whereas women’s involvement in writing has been discussed in scholarship, the more fundamental question of women’s participation in creating a document, that is, their authorship, has never been thoroughly addressed.

I aim to closely examine the content of women’s petitions, in particular their language and rhetoric, in order to try to reconstruct the process of creating a petition and to better understand how the male perspective of scribes influenced the gender (self)identification of women in these texts. To explore the general question of women’s participation in the written culture in Graeco-Roman Egypt, I compare petitions with other papyrus documents where women are ‘speaking’ in the first person, such as private letters and economic documents, some of which could have been full or partial autographs.