Stanford’s Text
Technologies’ major new project bringing together scholars who work on the
Eastern and Western textual traditions kicked off with a three-day conference
at the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing, principally organized
by Professor Ronald Egan. From September 11-14 2014, colleagues gathered to hear papers
in both Chinese and English (with simultaneous interpretation) that focused
almost exclusively on significant trends in manuscript technologies from the
beginning of the first millennium CE to the thirteenth century. The
China scholars learned about texts and methodologies in the study of European
manuscripts of which they had little idea and the Western scholars, similarly,
learned a very great deal about China and its early textual heritage.
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| Some of the participants at 'Medieval Text Technologies in China and Europe' |
Western scholars
were introduced to fundamentally important elements of Chinese manuscript
production: the use of colophons and seals inscribed or stamped onto hand-scrolls
containing calligraphic art; the variance illustrated by early Lao-Tzu
manuscripts; the uses and interpretation of writing Chinese characters in the
air; new models of textual production in early Chinese poetry; the amazing new
find of 21,000 Tang poems (to add to the 43,000 already known); what makes
Chinese manuscripts significant in and of themselves; the form and function of
very early Chinese epistolary literature; how Chinese manuscripts were
disseminated and adapted in Japan; and the importance of information retrieval
tools in medieval Chinese encyclopedic texts.
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| The Stanford Center at Peking University: a text in its own right! |
Numerous themes
emerged that are common to both traditions: in the West, textual mouvance in Carolingian manuscripts was discussed, and it was made apparent
why minutiae matter in tracing adaptability. The ways in which medieval
manuscripts are fragmented, reconstituted, and then ‘restored’ was a central concern; the absolute
necessity of paying attention to calligraphic effect and how we describe graphs and assign value to
particular scripts; the manipulability of text in apotropaic and ritualistic
contexts; the representation of exoticised culture and objects in art,
sculpture and literature; and the untapped evidence for the uses of paper in
the medieval period were all significant areas of investigation. ‘Big’ themes of authority, ownership, permanence, editorial
intervention, and social contexts of textual production emerged persistently
throughout the conference and seem like useful organizational categories for future exploration.
Attendance was
boosted by a great audience of local students and scholars; question and answer
sessions generated exciting and challenging discussion; round-the-edges dynamic
intellectual exchange happened in coffee-breaks and lunches. For those of us
travelling to China for the first time, we all agreed this conference was a
life-changing experience. The country’s textual legacy is only partially
well-known: the very early use of print is acknowledged, but not as much as it
should be; the invention of paper is fleetingly discussed in traditional Book
History accounts. But there is much more to be learned: the astonishing degree
of literacy and the cultural embeddedness of writing; the prolific survival of
early poetry, and administrative texts; the evidence for multimedia textual
production from monumental mountain inscription to bamboo books, silk scrolls,
and traced inscriptions. This is exciting stuff and will be the subject of
other conferences to come, that will deal with script to print, as well as the
emergence of the digital environment.
Participants:
Lothar
Ledderhose, University of Heidelberg; Siân Echard, University of British
Columbia; Elaine Treharne, Stanford University; Matthias Richter, University of
Colorado at Boulder; Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford; Jeanie Abbott,
Stanford University; Ronald Egan, Stanford University; Aidan Conti, University
of Bergen; Rebecca Shuang Fu, University of Pennsylvania; Chen Shangjun, Fudan University; Antje Richter, University
of Colorado at Boulder; Fu Gang, Peking University; Liu Yucai, Peking
University; Marisa Galvez, Stanford
University; Orietta Da Rold, University of Cambridge; Christopher Nugent,
Willliams College.
The conference
organizers gratefully acknowledge funding support from the following Stanford
University sponsors: Confucius Institute; Dean of Research; China Fund,
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Department of East Asian
Languages and Cultures; Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
