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Emerging Book Cultures in Asia and the Middle East: Materiality, Paratexts, Practices

Saturday, April 6, and Sunday, April 7, 2024

British and Irish Studies Room, Norlin Library, ºÚÁÏÉçÇøÍø

Saturday, April 6

10:25-11:00
¡°Knowledge in a Book is Like Money in Another¡¯s Hand¡±: Thoughts on the (Late) Origin and (Unusual) Development of the Book in Early South Asia
Richard Salomon, University of Washington

The history of the book in India follows a path that is markedly different from what is typically seen in other major literate cultures of the ancient world. First of all, we have no direct evidence as to the very existence of books as material objects before the first century BCE at the earliest. Then, even as books become somewhat more common in the following centuries (though surviving early examples remain quite rare), they still do not attain the central role that they enjoyed in, for example, contemporary China. For in classical India the physical book was typically thought of as a secondary imitation, a shadow as it were, of the oral text, which tended to be considered the primary representation. With this background in mind, I will trace the early development of books in the Indian/South Asian world by showing rare examples of early birch-bark scrolls and palm-leaf po?h¨©s (unbound stacked leaves).

11:00-11:35
Towards a History of the Birchbark Codex in Kashmir
Luther Obrock, University of California Berkeley

In this brief presentation I will focus on the development of the codex form in Kashmir. While Kashmiri birchbark manuscripts have long been prized by philologists for their preservation of separate, often divergent, recensions of Sanskrit texts, they have rarely been studied as objects in histories of technological exchange and innovation. Although the earliest codices from the Himalayan Valley are written in Sanskrit and show deep intellectual, literary, and religious ties with the Indian Subcontinent, the material instantiation of these codices is markedly different than other Sanskrit manuscript traditions. While Sanskrit texts from elsewhere in South Asia tend to be written on palm leaves tied together in bundles called?pothi, Kashmiri manuscripts are written on birchbark sheets and bound together in codex form. While the unique mountain ecology of Kashmir accounts for the prevalence of birchbark as a writing substrate, the construction of a Kashmiri birchbark codex speaks to technological borrowings and innovations distinct from the rest of the Indian Subcontinent with ties to Central and West Asia. This presentation will be a brief introduction to the birchbark codices of Kashmir and suggest future directions for the conceptualization of these codices both as objects speaking to connected histories in Central Asia (specifically with forms of the Manichean codex) as well as a specifically grounded to the Kashmiri material and social world.?

11:40-12:15
Durable Ephemera: Contextualizing Ink Inscriptions on Wood from Early Korea and Japan
Marjorie Burge, ºÚÁÏÉçÇøÍø

This paper explores the significance of archaeologically recovered wooden slips, known as mokkan, for understanding the early written cultures of Japan and the southern kingdoms of Korea. These objects have received a great amount of attention in recent years due to the great numbers with which they have been recovered in Japanese contexts, and the remarkable insights they bring to the study of early Korea due to the lack of any substantial transmitted textual tradition. While they have no doubt been a boon to early historical studies, to what extent they were a significant or marginal piece of an overall written culture that utilized multiple writing surfaces remains questionable. The archaeological record is biased toward durability, and mokkan were probably used most in contexts where inscriptions needed to endure harsh conditions, being passed among many hands, perhaps somewhere far from ¡°civilization.¡± However, these objects hint at one further important function they fulfilled in textual culture, as surfaces for drafting and practice. This paper will examine examples of mokkan which clearly were utilized multiple times in the process of practicing or composing, highlighting the ways in which these wooden inscriptions formed an important part of a larger written culture by serving as a space for students to learn/practice their writing, and for more advanced scribes to pen initial drafts of important documents or compositions.?

12:15-12:50
The Art of the Book in the Lands of Islam
Jonathan Bloom, Boston College

My illustrated talk will survey the development of books in the lands of Islam from its beginnings to the advent of printing. The Qur¡¯an had been revealed aurally to the Prophet Muhammad, but the revelations were collected and compiled as parchment books almost immediately. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia in the early eighth century, however, they quickly began to use this relatively cheap writing material to supply their empire¡¯s vast bureaucracy. Although conservative scribes continued to copy the holy text on parchment for several more centuries, the availability of paper quickly encouraged authors and writers to produce texts on every imaginable subject from theology to cookery. Indeed, it has been argued that for the first time in human history an individual could earn his living as a writer, without an independent income, a supporting institution. or a wealthy patron. The physical characteristics of paper encouraged calligraphers to develop new and more legible scripts for an expanding reading public, in not only Arabic but also Persian and Turkish, and discerning patrons developed a taste for beautifully calligraphed and finely-bound books, which became one of, if not the most characteristic and enduring art forms in all the lands of Islam.

14:00-14:35
Paratext and Textual Production in Early China
Heng Du, Wellesley College

With the publication of Seuils (Thresholds) in 1987, G¨¦rard Genette coined the term ¡°paratext¡± to refer to the textual elements enveloping the main text of modern print publications, such as the title, author¡¯s name, and preface. In this monograph, Genette frequently commented on the notable absence of such paratextual elements from manuscript writing, at one point describing texts before the advent of print as circulating in an ¡°almost raw (presque brut) condition,¡± without any paratextual packaging. In this paper, I treat the absence of conventional paratext (e.g., the absence of title or author¡¯s name) as a type of information, rather than merely an indication that something is lost and needing to be recovered. The introduction of elements such as titles, author¡¯s names, and prefaces, I suggest, tends to reflect an attempt to dictate the identity and interpretation of a text by privileged textual producers, whereas the absence of such elements is more strongly associated with non-hierarchal forms of textual production and circulation. I will illustrate this hypothesis by examining different degrees of paratextual packaging in early Chinese manuscript and received texts.

14:35-15:10
The Function of Titles in the Process of Compiling Books in Early China: The Case of the Zhuangzi ׯ×Ó
Kun You, ºÚÁÏÉçÇøÍø

Many titles in early Chinese texts function as mere names rather than performing other functions that we tend to take for granted, such as indicating the theme or the genre of the text. Investigating how and why titles came to perform functions aiding interpretation can enhance our understanding of the cultural role that written texts have played in early China (mid. 5th c. BCE¨C2 c. CE). In this paper, I argue that the interpretive relationship between the title and the text underpins the unity of a complex work. The early Chinese text Zhuangzi exemplifies how interpretive titles enable the thematic coherence of the heterogeneous compilation on the one hand, and how the coherence effects t