Manuscript Cultures
Workshop ReportNew Perspectives on Palimpsests
1 November 2021
Photo: CSMC
From 7-8 October 2021, the CSMC hosted the workshop 'Removed and Rewritten: Palimpsests and Related Phenomena from a Cross-Cultural Perspective'. In this contribution, the organisers reflect on what has been achieved – and look ahead to future work in the field.
Due to the restrictions on travelling and in-person meetings caused by the pandemic, the workshop adopted a hybrid format. Seven of the speakers were present in Hamburg, while nine participated online. In addition, more than sixty colleagues from all around the world attended the sessions online. After more than one and a half years of holding workshops exclusively online, such a hybrid event was a novelty and a successful experiment at the CSMC.
Organised by Jost Gippert, José Maksimczuk, and Thies Staack, the workshop featured sixteen leading scholars with expertise in palimpsests and related phenomena from a wide range of manuscript cultures: Greek, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Georgian, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Caucasian Albanian, Coptic, and Latin. The talks provided a near-to complete overview of recent advances in research on palimpsests. Discussions were centered on the advantages of new digital technological developments for the recovering of erased writing, and, equally important, on difficulties and current shortcomings of the existing technologies.
Moreover, the workshop included several presentations that challenged some of the traditional views on palimpsests. Although parchment is doubtless the most common writing support for palimpsests, some of the talks addressed examples of paper palimpsests and closely-related phenomena of ‘removing and rewriting’ in bronze or stone inscriptions, thereby extending the scope of the workshop to epigraphy. The speakers not only demonstrated that these very different writing supports required specific ‘palimpsesting’ techniques. It also became clear that the co-presence of two layers of writing, which is often interpreted as an unwanted trace of re-use, was in some cases brought about intentionally.
At the end of the programme, Axel Malik, one of the Centre’s Artists in Residence, presented his Intervention Palimpsests, which introduced an aesthetic perspective and artistic strategies to deal with the topic. For this purpose, he installed artworks from his ongoing project Library of Unreadable Signs and from his series Palimpsest in the lecture theatre where the workshop took place. Malik showed that palimpsesting is a performative process that intends to respond to and connect with a piece of writing or even another writer.
Overall, Removed and Rewritten represented an initial step for a more extended discussion about the definition and the typologies of palimpsests and related phenomena from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. The organisers and other CSMC members are planning a follow-up workshop in which many of the innovative and original ideas issued by the speakers will be further explored.