Events
April 2026
Informal Talk: Mallory E. Matsumoto
Weaving in Stone: Classic Maya Dedication Rituals and Cross-Media Exchange
Mallory E. Matsumoto (The University of Texas at Austin)
Archaeological, ethnohistorical, art historical, and ethnographic evidence attests to extensive use of reed mats over millennia across the Maya region. In addition to being used for sleeping or sitting atop benches or floors, mats partitioned space within the built...
Informal Talk: Elsa Cardoso
Gendered Affects and Visuality in Bayād wa Riyāḍ
Elsa Cardoso (School of Arabic Studies, Spanish National Research Council – CSIC)
This talk presents preliminary, work-in-progress results from my one-month research stay (April 2026) at the Center for the Study of Manuscripts’ Culture at the University of Hamburg. The project undertakes a focused study of Bayād wa Riyāḍ (Vatican Library, Codex...
Informal Talk: Javier Albarrán
Saladin in the Islamic West: A copy of al-Iṣfahānī’s al-Fatḥ al-Qussī fī l-fatḥ al-Qudsī in Fes
Javier Albarrán (University of Granada)
In 1105, the Damascene scholar ʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir al-Sulamī (d. 1106) composed his Kitāb al-Jihād, the first treatise on holy war written after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem. In this work, he interpreted the Crusades as a form of Christian jihād taking place...
Lecture: Barbara Böck
Lexico-pharmacological cuneiform manuscripts: Thoughts on the tradition of Uruanna-mashtakal
Professor Dr Barbara Böck (Institute for Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
Sometime in the second half of the 7th century BCE the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal decided to issue a new edition of the lexico-pharmaceutical treatise Uruanna. The title comes from its first word, which is a...
May 2026
Philosophy By Hand. The Agency of Manuscripts in Shaping Human Thought
Lecture 5/7
Anke Graness:
Philosophy by Hand or Mouth-to-Ear Philosophy? Philosophy in Oral Traditions
June 2026
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Evolution of Writing Systems
Digital Lunch Seminar Series
Evolution of Writing Systems: How the Material Choice and Phenomenology of Handwriting Shaped Southeast Asian Scripts
Małgorzata Grzelec, Laura Gallardo, and Elisa Barney Smith
The graphical forms of handwriting are thought to develop under the influence of multiple factors, including the tools and materials used in their production. Certain Southeast Asian writing...
CSMC Keynote Lecture: Shari Boodts
Manuscripts as Witnesses to the Cultural Contexts and Material Conditions of Textual Transmission: The MsPhys Project
Professor Dr Shari Boodts (Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University
Medieval manuscripts are an inexhaustible source of information about the past. By their very nature, they facilitate, even encourage, modifications from copy to copy, providing a distinctive...
Philosophy By Hand. The Agency of Manuscripts in Shaping Human Thought
Lecture 6/7
Isabelle Ratié:
Reading, Writing, Philosophising in Medieval India
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Milk, Brain, Blood
Digital Lunch Seminar Series
Milk, Brain, Blood: Proteinaceous Substances of Animal Origin Used in Tibetan Manuscript Production. A Case Study of Khams Brygyd Volumes from the Oslo University Library Collection
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Małgorzata Grzelec
The process of religious manuscripts production in Tibet concerns various raw materials of local origin used in their production, primarily...
Workshop: The Material Tradition of the Psalms
For over two millennia, the Psalms have served as a source of devotion, identity, and artistic inspiration across cultures and traditions. While their textual traditions are relatively well studied, the extent of the Psalms’ rich material and visual heritage—transcribed on parchment, carved in stone, woven into textiles, and integrated into diverse media—has never been fully investigated. This...
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: A Case Study of Rilke’s Notebooks
Digital Lunch Seminar Series
Computational Visual Cataloguing: A Case Study of Rilke’s Notebooks
Sandra Richter and Hussein Mohammed
This talk presents a case study on Rainer Maria Rilke’s notebooks. In this work, page-level and word-level attributes, such as orientation, colour and writing implement, are detected and linked to specific locations. This process yields “computational visual...
July 2026
Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Japanese Paper Clothing
Digital Lunch Seminar Series
Japanese Paper Clothing
Eike Grossmann and Agnieszka Helman-Ważny
Japanese washi—a paper celebrated for its unmatched strength, durability, and versatility—transcends its conventional role as a writing surface. Far more than writing surface, washi has been ingeniously adapted into sliding doors (shōji), umbrellas, lampshades, toys, and even clothing, blending...
Philosophy By Hand. The Agency of Manuscripts in Shaping Human Thought
Lecture 7/7
Yael Gazit:
Don’t Look Back in Anger: Reconsidering Appropriation of Past Philosophy
CSMC Keynote Lecture: Matthew Collins
Parchment as 11 Layers of Language
Matthew Collins (University of Cambridge)
I will argue that the future of the humanities lies in a "knowledge ecology" where in areas such as the biomolecular humanities, biologists, historians, and digital researchers should co-create meaning from the inception of research. Just as the Danish Kitchen Midden Commission of 1848 revolutionized interdisciplinary...