Webinar “Epigraphic Transmissions”

The SEMPER seminar on writing outside the manuscript world resumes this year as a transversal webinar, bringing together all the epigraphy research projects linked to the CESCM (the CIFM/Titulus, CARMECA, IGAMA, the ERC GRAPH-EAST), in partnership with the CRFJ Jerusalem. Nine sessions will take place between October 2021 and June 2022, one per month, around the theme “Epigraphic Transmissions”.

“Transmitting a message to the widest possible audience” is one of the functions of inscription. But what does this transmission consist of? What is it about and what does it involve? To speak of “epigraphic transmissions” makes it possible to question the idea not of permanence, which erases the relationship to time, but of continuity, which integrates the upheavals of history, the variations of interpretations, the transformations of the support. The continuous use of writing forms such as the capital (understood in the sense of a large letter placed in a bilinear system), the recurrence of certain funerary formulas that cross the Middle Ages and are still used in our modern languages, or the intentional material replacement of a stone inscribed in a wall, are three of the most obvious examples of the duration conveyed by the inscription. This continuity takes place through the passing on (trans-); it is inscribed in a temporal and/or spatial chain. It implies a movement, as shown by the cartography of epigraphic formulas in Europe or the transfers between East and West. It also puts forward the intermediaries who participate in this mesh, even this spiral.

Beyond the content and form of a message, the epigraphic text is also a trajectory, an itinerary in time, that of the history of its transmission on other media than its own support. Since the Middle Ages, inscriptions have been copied into manuscripts; in the 16th-17th centuries, printers redoubled their originality in order to faithfully reproduce and display these monumental texts; drawings, stamping, the first photographs in the mid-19th century, up to photogrammetry today, are all part of this transmission work. The work of publishing – because the publisher is a “passer” – must also be questioned.

This webinar will therefore be an opportunity, through this transversal theme, to collectively question the object of “inscription” as much as the history of the discipline of epigraphy itself, the staging of the work of history as a methodology in action, to borrow an expression from Étienne Anheim (Le travail de l’histoire).

The 9 sessions from October 2021 to June 2022 will take place with the same link Zoom below :

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89842541808?pwd=c0hyQ1o4OVR6OXFuZ0hHOU1vQmRKQT09

(ID de réunion : 898 4254 1808 ; Code secret : 013157)

Program until the end of 2021

• Thursday, October 14, 10am-12pm: Elisabetta Scirocco (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome), « Dinamiche di ‘trasmissione epigrafica’ nella badia benedettina di Cava de’ Tirreni (Salerno): tradizione e creazione di una memoria monumentale ». Moderator: Maria Villano.
• Thursday, November 25, 2-4pm: Jean-Baptiste Javel (IRAMAT CRP2A, Université Bordeaux Montaigne) et Thierry Grégor (CESCM, Université de Poitiers), « La basilique Saint-Eutrope de Saintes : Étude technique de deux inscriptions inédites »
• Thursday, December 16, 2-4pm: Michele Bacci (Université de Friburg, Suisse), « Les graffitis de la Nativité de Bethléem, l’édition du manuscrit de Emérico Vicente Juhász, Pinturas y grafitos. Basílica de la Natividad en Belén (Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2021) ». Moderators: Clément Dussart and Estelle Ingrand-Varenne.
• Thursday, January 13, 10am-12pm: Antonino Tranchina (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome), « Ways of Indexicality. Graffiti and the Staging of the Sacred across the Norman South »
• Thursday, February 17, 10am-12pm: Cécile Treffort (CESCM, Université de Poitiers), « La transmission manuscrite de la poésie épigraphique carolingienne »
• Thursday, March 17, 10am-12pm: Vincent Debiais (EHESS, Paris), « Transmettre l’inscription par l’inscription : copier, refaire, augmenter les textes funéraires (Espagne, Empire, XIIIe-XVIe siècle) »
• Thursday, April 7, 10am-12pm: Morgane Uberti (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), « Transmettre le temps : la date inscrite, entre temporalité et figure de l’histoire (Antiquité tardive, Moyen Âge) »
• Thursday, May 19, 10am-12pm: Susanne Thürigen (GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM- Leibniz-Forschungsmuseum für Kulturgeschichte)
  « Objects that talk. Inscriptions on early modern table clocks »
  Moderator: Rachel Carslile (PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Florida State University)
• Thursday, June 9, 10am-12pm: Rafał Quirini-Popławski (Jagiellonian University in Kraków), « Mission impossible between an inscription, a coat of arms and an ornament. The issue of assigning a “cultural identity” to the stone slabs in the late medieval Crimea »
  Moderator: Sercan Saglam (Post-doc member of Graph-East)

For more information: estelle.ingrand.varenne@univ-poitiers.fr 

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