Working Group L: Learning

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 Associate: Suganya Anandakichenin

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 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

The project is a study of the production and history of a single manuscript, Royal Asiatic Society, London, MS Hodgson 35, which has been shown to be an autograph of the famous 15th century Buddhist scholar Vanaratna. It contains, in its second part, mainly material translated by Vanaratna into Sanskrit from esoteric teachings received in Tibet and in Tibetan, as well as some verses of his own composition. This offers a unique window into the working methods of a learned Buddhist scholar, and into cross-cultural transmission of esoteric material.

Principal Investigator: Harunaga Isaacson

Research Associate: Martin Delhey

This project focuses on the manuscript culture that existed in Alevi village communities in Turkey, among which the level of literacy was still low up to the middle of the 20th century. Fourteen private collections of manuscripts will be scrutinised in order to examine the use of manuscripts in learning and teaching mainly of a religious character. The history, compilation and context of the collections will be investigated as sources for studying the use of these manuscripts in cultural practices. Questions to be addressed are: who wrote or used certain manuscripts, how did the various collections help to retain and impart knowledge, did their practical usage, e.g. reading them aloud, memorising them and making notes about them, had an effect on their subject matter or appearance, and if so, what kind of effect.

Principal Investigator: Raoul Motika

Research Associate: Janina Karolewski

Codices of Aristotle’s Organon, a work of fundamental importance in training students’ intellect, are particularly suitable for researching the role that manuscripts once played in the classroom. These manuscripts contain highly com­plex layers of annotations attesting to a dialogue between teachers and their pupils and sometimes even connecting them to each other at different times and places. This project will use selected ma­nuscripts from Posterior Analytics to examine the layers of commentary and explanatory anno­tations in detail and to determine what function they had as part of classroom social practice and scholarly exegetical dialogue.

Principal Investigator: Christian Brockmann

Research Associate: Stefano Valente

This project will investigate manuscripts written in the eastern regions of the Frankish Empire during the 9th and 10th century which contain collections of formulae, i.e. sample letters and charters. Manuscripts of this kind are of great importance in understanding the culture of this period as they give us insights into the way in which scholars wanted to organise their knowledge and pass it on to others in the early Middle Ages. The aim of the project is to examine such manuscripts by treating them as textual evidence of monastic culture and investigating how they arose, what they contain and how they were used.

Principal Investigator: Philippe Depreux

Research Associate: Till Hennings

Cuneiform clay manuscripts are 3D objects on which signs appear as negative imprints. Thousands of school tablets from Nippur dated to the 18th century BCE have enabled assyriologists to reconstruct the curriculum of scribal education, which looked quite academic. School texts found in the archives of Assyrian merchants who settled in Central Anatolia (19th cent.) bear witness to on-the-job training. In fact, it has been suggested that, besides professional scribes, many Assyrian men and a number of women would have learnt the basics of writing at home.
Such an assumption can only be confirmed by systematic paleographical and scribal studies and by the analysis of text layout and the typology of tablets in specific private archives that have recently been excavated.

Principal Investigator: Cécile Michel

Research Associate: Wiebke Beyer