SMC 48Erasing and Rewriting in Manuscript Cultures

20 October 2025

Photo: De Gruyter

The new volume of ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ systematically explores the fascinating intersection between the potential ephemerality of the written word and the reusability of its supports.

In 480 BCE, the Greek exile Demaratos sent a message to his compatriots that caused some puzzlement among the recipients: they had been sent a wax tablet, one of the most important writing supports in Greco-Roman antiquity. However, Demaratos had apparently written nothing on it, but had simply sent a blank tablet. A letter with no content — what was the purpose of that? It was the wife of King Leonidas who had the crucial idea: she suggested scraping off the layer of wax. And indeed, Demaratos had written his secret message beneath it: in this message, he warned the recipients of an imminent invasion by the Persian king Xerxes, in whose court he was employed. In order to conceal this warning from the Persians, he had first removed the wax from a writing tablet, then written directly onto the underlying wood, and finally reapplied the wax. Thanks to this ruse, the Greeks were able to prepare for the Persian attack and deal them a decisive blow at the Battle of Salamis later that year.

This episode illustrates one of the central theses of the volume Erasing and Rewriting in Manuscript Cultures: Practices of Text Obliteration and Manuscript Reuse in a Global Perspective, which has just appeared as volume 48 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures published by De Gruyter: the erasure of text from writing surfaces and their subsequent reuse was never simply a matter of economic necessity, but rather a much more complex practice that, in a wide range of contexts, could serve a great variety of different functions. For example, wherever administrative procedures were subject to constant change, the reusability of a material was an important quality, often taken into account during its production in order to facilitate later modifications. In religious contexts, especially within the Islamic tradition, erasing a previously memorised text represented a significant step in the internalisation of sacred words. More than mere substitution, rewriting can therefore be seen as an attempt, as Marilena Maniaci formulates in her contribution to the present volume, ‘to navigate the tension between the urge to fix knowledge and the need to replace or revise it, reflecting how societies have continually redefined memory, intellectual labour, and the delicate balance between continuity and change.’

The present volume thus attempts to complement the history of writing with the outlines of a history of erasure and rewriting. Given the complexity of the phenomenon under consideration — a complexity that renders all efforts towards a unified taxonomy obsolete — this endeavour must necessarily remain unfinished, as Michele Cammarosano, the editor of the volume, is well aware: ‘This volume aims not at completeness or systematic coverage but rather at presenting a series of exemplary spotlights that highlight the deep impact of rewriting practices in literate societies, as well as the great potential that a comparative investigation of such practices holds for the study of manuscript cultures’, he writes in his introduction.

Structured in two main parts, the book begins with studies of materials designed for frequent and recursive rewriting, such as clay and wax tablets used in the ancient Near East and the classical and medieval Mediterranean. It then turns to supports that allow for more limited reuse, including papyrus, parchment, and wood, offering case studies from Egypt, the Islamic world, Japan, and West Africa. Overall, the volume takes into account the increasing importance that analytical techniques from the natural sciences have gained for scholarly engagement with written artefacts and their ‘biographies’. By providing non-destructive and ever more precise methods for detecting and analysing changes to a text, such techniques have become an indispensable partner to the humanities, particularly in relation to the subject of this collected volume. The creators of this book are actively advancing the deepening of this cross-disciplinary exchange: already in the spring of this year, Michele Cammarosano, together with Claudia Colini—who leads the Mobile Lab at the CSMC and has also contributed as a co-author to a chapter in the present book—organised the conference ‘Ephemeral Writings. Exploring rewritability in manuscript cultures’.

Erasing and Rewriting in Manuscript Cultures: Practices of Text Obliteration and Manuscript Reuse in a Global Perspective is the 48th volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures book series and is available as an open access publication. Like almost all other volumes of the series, it can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.