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Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures Materiale Textkulturen Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures Materiale Textkulturen Schriftenreihe des Sonderforschungsbereichs 933 Herausgegeben von Ludger Lieb Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Jan Christian Gertz, Markus Hilgert, Hanna Liss, Bernd Schneidmüller, Melanie Trede und Christian Witschel Band 26 Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures Materiality, Presence and Performance Edited by Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut ISBN 978-3-11-063585-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063924-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063603-1 ISSN 2198-6932 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930897 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 by Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published in open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover: P. Heid. Inv. G. 608 a, © Institut für Papyrologie, Universität Heidelberg Typesetting: Sonderforschungsbereich 933 (Nicolai Schmitt), Heidelberg Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements The present volume is the work of many hands. For this reason, we would like to thank everyone who helped to realise it: First and foremost the speakers of our conference “Material Aspects of Reading” (Heidelberg, February 11–13, 2018) and authors of the articles for their multifaceted contributions and their patience and support during the editing process; all partici- pants of the conference for the fruitful discussions that helped to further improve the articles; Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Christoph Markschies (Berlin) for enhancing our meeting by giving the public keynote and allowing us to include it in this volume; the Heidelberg Center for Jewish Studies and its rector Professor Dr. Johannes Heil for hosting the conference; our student assistants Bettina Burghardt, Simon Gottowik, Elias S. Jungheim, Hanna-Barbara Rost, and Christoph Wind, who helped us during the conference, and especially Konstanze Kupski, who additionally assisted us by proofreading the articles and the indices; Jessica Dreschert for her assistance in pre- paring the manuscript and Nicolai Schmitt for carefully typesetting the text; Prof. Dr. Ludger Lieb and Dr. Nele Schneidereit for their kind support and advice; the editors of Material Text Cultures for their helpful review of the manuscript and for including the volume in the series; all museums, institutions and individuals who very kindly granted us permission to reproduce images in this volume; and finally the German Re- search Foundation (DFG) whose financial support enabled us to hold the conference and produce this volume. Last but not least we would like to thank Professor Dr. Jan Christian Gertz and Professor Dr. Hanna Liss for giving us the opportunity to organise the conference and to edit this volume, and for supporting us with their help and advice. February 2020 Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut Contents Acknowledgements V Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, Friederike Schücking-Jungblut Material Aspects of Reading and Material Text Cultures. An Introduction 1 Christoffer Theis Material Aspects of Rituals Beyond Their Instructions 9 Lindsey A. Askin Scribal Production and Literacy at Qumran. Considerations of Page Layout and Style 23 Laura Quick Scribal Habits and Scholarly Texts. Codicology at Oxyrhynchus and Qumran 37 Mika S. Pajunen Reading Psalm and Prayer Manuscripts From Qumran 55 Friederike Schücking-Jungblut Reading the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. Observations on Material, Layout, and Text 71 Yehudah B. Cohn Reading Material Features of Qumran Tefillin and Mezuzot 89 Antony Perrot Reading an Opisthograph at Qumran 101 Andrea Jördens Codices des Typs C und die Anfänge des Blätterns 115 Jonas Leipziger Ancient Jewish Greek Practices of Reading and Their Material Aspects 149 Jan Heilmann Reading Early New Testament Manuscripts. Scriptio continua, “Reading Aids”, and Other Characteristic Features 177 VIII Contents Christoph Markschies What Ancient Christian Manuscripts Reveal About Reading (and About Non-Reading) 197 Daniel Picus Reading Regularly. The Liturgical Reading of Torah in its Late Antique Material World 217 Binyamin Y. Goldstein Encountering the Grotesque. The Material Scribal Culture of Late Medieval Jewish Magic 233 Notes on Contributors 251 Indices 255 Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut Material Aspects of Reading and Material Text Cultures An Introduction Material Text Cultures and Text-Anthropologies Reading and its different practices and modes belong to the most important forms of the reception of script-bearing artefacts, covering a wide range of perceptive modes in the reception of writing.1 There are manifold possible approaches how to analyse reading. The main reason for this is the fact that the act of reading is dependent on several variables, e. g. material and formal aspects of the writing surface and the writ- ing itself, the text, the reader, and the context(s) in which something is read. As Ster- poni puts it: “[R]eading positions one in a web of culturally stipulated relations be- tween bodies, minds, and texts as artifacts and symbols.”2 As the title of this volume indicates, the main focus here lies on the material as- pects of inscribed artefacts and their influence on the act of reading. Although it is not the material artefact, but the text written on it, that is the actual object of reading, the reception of texts is inextricably linked to the material objects bearing them.3 While the media and artefacts of writing have not been at the forefront of research on read- ing and reading practices for a long time, the beginning of the digital age and with it the de-materialisation of texts brought into focus also the materiality of non-/pre-dig- ital objects of reading. Starting with the reconstruction of the meaning of (printed) books for the interpretation of their content in the merely French history of the books in the late 1970s and 1980s (esp. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier) the material- ity of the artefacts of reading has increasingly been taken into consideration both in the research on reading practices and in a wide variety of historical and philological disciplines.4 Accordingly, the present volume joins an ever-growing field of research.5 1 Cf. Berti et al. 2015, 639. 2 Sterponi 2008, 558 f. 3 Cf. e. g. Rautenberg/Schneider 2015a, 95. 4 Cf. Littau 2006, 24 f.; Rautenberg/Schneider 2015a, 92–101. 5 One example of the growing interest in the material aspects of reading can be found in the most This publication originated in the Collaborative Research Centre 933 “Material Text Cultures. Materia- lity and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies” (subprojects C02 “Tales of the Scriptural as the Basis of a ‘Textual Anthropology’ of the Old Testament” and B04 “Scholarly Knowledge, Drollery or Esotericism? The Masora of the Hebrew Bible in its Various Material Properties”). The CRC 933 is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Open Access. © 2020 Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut, published by De Gruy ter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639247-001 2 Anna Krauß, Jonas Leipziger, Friederike Schücking-Jungblut Focusing on material aspects means to aim at the centre of reading and reading practices since the physical characteristics of an inscribed object relate to all the as- pects of reading mentioned above. On the one hand, both the object and its inscription are shaped by cultural conventions. This does not only refer to the practical and tech- nical aspects of producing an inscribed object which is based on a culture’s shared know-how. It also refers to the way in which the producers expected this object to be used based on the shared norms or standards of a reading community’s reading prac- tice(s). That is to say that “the specific forms of literacy are defined by the nature of objects and social settings that mediate and shape the practices of writing and read- ing.”6 On the other hand, the material and formal features of such an inscribed object influence a reader’s handling and reception of both the object and the text. In short: The practice of reading with all its facets cannot be separated from its material pre- conditions. Moreover, the material artefacts are the only direct access to past reading communities and their respective reading practices.7 This point is of utmost impor- tance to this volume as the articles are all dealing with such past reading communi- ties. Furthermore, all of these reading communities are placed in a non-typographical setting, i. e. they had no means for an automated mass production of manuscripts and such like. The obvious downside of choosing reading communities which no longer exist as an object of investigation is the simple fact that one is unable to question the actual members about their reading practices or performance of texts. The great ad- vantage of reading communities set in a non-typographical society, however, is that all inscribed objects
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