Volume 20Multilayered Written Artefacts and Their Internal Dynamics

20 August 2024

Photo: CSMC

The new volume of the journal ‘manuscript cultures’ focuses on written artefacts that have acquired a complex structure of different ‘layers’ over the course of their life cycle.

For a long time, the main, if not the entire, attention of researchers working with manuscripts was focused on the text. They did not perceive the object on which this text was written as an object that was worth investigating in its own right. In other words, insofar as their focus was on the surface from which the text could be retrieved, their perspective on the manuscripts was merely two-dimensional.

Since the ‘material turn’ at the end of the 20th century, researchers have become increasingly interested in the material objects carrying the texts. No longer dismissing them as arbitrary containers of the text, the range of potential insights was expanded significantly. Including the material properties of a written artefact, so the basic idea, enables new insights into the historical and cultural circumstances of its production, use, and archiving. With this paradigm shift, written artefact research became three-dimensional.

For about 20 years, researchers have increasingly been including the fourth dimension in their examination of written artefacts: time. Instead of viewing them as static objects that undergo no significant changes after their production, the new focus is on the development, change, and transformation of written artefacts. Over time, these acquire ‘layers’, similar to rock. Analysing these layers individually and in relation to each other provides a deeper understanding of the complex interactions that many written artefacts have been exposed to over time, and in some cases are still exposed to.

At the CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, a whole research field is dedicated to these ‘multilayered written artefacts’. The new volume of the journal manuscript cultures, the 20th in the series, shows some recent outputs of their research. After an introduction by the editors of this part of the volume, Thies Staack, Janine Droese, and José Maksimczuk, five articles deal with multilayered written artefacts, focusing in particular on questions of authority and hierarchy – how do the different layers of a manuscript relate to each other and to what extent are they in a hierarchical order? The contributions are based on presentations given by the authors during the workshop ‘Authority of Layers – Layers of Authority: On the Internal Dynamics of Multilayered Written Artefacts and their Cultural Contexts’ at CSMC in December 2021.   

The second part of the volume contains a selection of papers on manuscripts in art, religion, and the sciences, including contributions from Cornelius Berthold, Martin Jörg Schäfer and Alexander Weinstock, Diana Lange, and Bidur Bhattarai. Also represented – with a ‘text’ of a somewhat different kind – is Axel Malik, the former Artist in Residence at the CSMC.

The volume is available open access and can be downloaded from our website. It is one of the last to appear in the old format of the journal manuscript cultures. With issue 24, which has already been published this August, the journal is getting a new look and its own website, which is hosted by the Hamburg University Press.