Projekt Area A: Paratexts

Linked poetry (renga) was one of the most popular literary genres in medieval Japan. Noting down the collaborative works by hand as they were being created orally was a procedure governed by precise rules and was an integral aspect of this kind of poetry along with the inclusion of the scribe’s role. The aim of this project is to shed more light on these practices of manuscript production and the ritual context in which they were embedded. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to look into the way in which the practices developed over time, what conditions they arose in and what influenced them. Historically, the aspect of poetic contests at court needs to be taken into account. The proximity of renga poetry to the sphere of religious manuscript culture in the Middle Ages also requires clarification.

Principal Investigator: Jörg B. Quenzer

Research Associates: Heidi Buck-Albulet

This research project on Tamil aims to examine a group of manuscripts containing excerpts from treatises on grammar in a broad sense, including not only syntax, morphology and phonetics, but also poetics, metre and rhetoric. This will allow us to understand the various contexts of teaching Tamil grammar more easily, this being a basic discipline first taught at primary level. The undertaking will acquaint students with the more formal levels of a highly diglossic language, not to mention the Tamils’ literary heritage.

Principal Investigator: Eva Wilden

Research Associates: Giovanni Ciotti (2015-2017) and  Suganya Anandakichenin (2017-2020)

The West African Islamic manuscripts with wide space between the lines apparently point to teaching practices wherein extra space was planned for annotations. This project will explore possible correlations between the ample-space layout and textual genres in the Old Mande and Old Kanembu manuscript traditions and will investigate the questions of how teaching defined this specific layout and how these manuscripts mediated teaching practices.

Principal Investigator: Dmitry Bondarev

Research Associate: Darya Ogorodnikova

The advent of lithographic printing and the ongoing monetization of the indigenous society in the Malay world in the course of the 19th century had profound implications for the manuscript culture and the attitude of people towards manuscripts, their production and consumption. This research continues to map and investigate such changes by mining paratexts found in the manuscripts of a 19th-century lending library collection. It is hypothesized that manuscripts spawned new interactive networks of human agents and affected the reading habits of the recipients, thereby crossing ethnic and religious boundaries in a colonial cosmopolitan context.

Principal Investigator: Jan van der Putten

Research Associate: Siti Nurliyana Binte Taha

This project examines several manuscript corpora containing Buddhist texts of one of the most popular and widespread genres in the Thai-Lao world, namely preaching or homiletic texts known as Anisong. Usually written on palm leaf and generally quite short in nature, Anisong describe the rewards in terms of merit that a believer may expect from doing a particular pious deed. Anisong manuscripts have played a key role in Thai-Lao religious life for centuries, notably in transforming local customs into ‘Buddhist’ orthopraxy. They also reflect processes of modernisation in a lively and innovative manuscript culture.

Principal Investigator: Volker Grabowsky

Research Associate: Silpsupa Jaengsawang

Gospel manuscripts are widely considered to be the most important books in medieval liturgy. They not only contain the Gospels as the Word of God that the priest read aloud during Mass, but also include a standardised corpus of paratexts. This project will examine how the physical characteristics of Gospel manuscripts were related to the usage of these books in liturgical reading, considering in particular the functions served by their paratexts and indices.

Principal Investigator: Bruno Reudenbach

Research Associate: Jochen Hermann Vennebusch

The Islamic traditions (ḥadīth), attributed to the prophet Muḥammad and his Companions, were first transmitted orally, later written down and finally compiled for major collections from the 8th and 9th centuries CE on. From here, ḥadīth sciences and commentaries evolved further. While the academic discipline of Islamic Studies has produced a number of studies on text transmission and teaching methods, it has dedicated only limited attention to ḥadīth commentaries. This sub-project investigates the concrete use of a ḥadīth manuscript in teaching practice and ḥadīthscholarship by studying a manuscript of the known collection of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaḥīḥ. Due to its rich annotations and user entries (ijāzāt, samāʿāt, silsila), the Leipzig manuscript B. or. 227 (copied in 800/1398, most probably in Shiraz) is best suited for such a case study that aims at a comprehensive analysis of the material object, its users, and its commentaries.

Principal Investigator: Stefanie Brinkmann

Research Associate: Ali Zaherinezhad