{"title":"Woven Words, Embroidered Stories: Inscriptions On Textiles","authors":"Ludger Lieb","doi":"10.1515/9783110645446-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-011","url":null,"abstract":"Textiles are of great importance both for the aristocratic courtly culture as well as for the clerical culture of the Middle Ages because they are usually used to mark and shape a visual border between the inside and outside.1 Stone, metal, glass and wood are also used for the purpose of marking and shaping a visual border. Compared to these materials, however, textiles excel in this capacity because they are flexible and can be produced and designed in a variety of ways. What they do less well is protect the interior from external violence or unwanted access.2 There are three specific properties and functions of textiles, which are also relevant for inscriptions on the textiles: 1. Flexibility: On the one hand, textiles are locomobile, i. e. a cloth, a dress, a tent can easily be moved from one place to another as a whole. On the other hand, they are also elastic, i. e. they adapt to the interior they create or encase. Therefore, textiles are typically used to cover movable objects such as human or animal bodies (clothing, horse blankets, etc.) or to create ephemeral interiors (tents). 2. Drawing a line: Textiles do not create limits that are insurmountable, but primarily borders that restrict a person’s vision. In most cases (tents, clothes, curtains, wrapping), this creates an interior protected from the eyes of those standing outside. In reverse, a special interior space can also be conceived and imagined when the border to the outside is highlighted by textile boundaries (tapestries). 3. Symbolicity: The textiles that draw these boundaries have surfaces that are particularly suitable for making symbolic statements, either by the material design of the surfaces (colours, use of special threads made of wool, silk, gold, etc.) or by the application of signs of any kind (images, texts).3 The semantics of colours and precious fabrics (silk, brocade, velvet, etc.) and ornamentation through woven or dyed patterns or fabric combinations are particularly popular in chasubles and clothes worn by the nobility.","PeriodicalId":118391,"journal":{"name":"Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment","volume":"162 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116373650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tablets And The Poetics Of The Premodern Post-It","authors":"R. Wagner","doi":"10.1515/9783110645446-013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores one of the most familiar text-bearing objects of the Middle Ages. Tablets, sized to be hand-held, initiated writers into the world of literacy. Forbearing and compliant, their waxen surfaces offered themselves to both a student’s first attempts at lettering and the confident compositions of a more practised hand. Portable and adaptable to a variety of uses, tablets served as personal companions carried on the body, ready at hand to receive a fleeting thought, an inventory, a calculation, a legal agreement or the first draft of a poem.1 While hand-held formats and girdle-books suspended from belts were the most common, tablets of varying size could be attached to the writer’s person in any number of ways. Charlemagne, for example, was said to have worn a tablet around his neck while learning the alphabet. Tablets, then, lend themselves to everyday writing, but luxury specimens also survive, made of ivory rather than wood and exquisitely decorated to be given as love gifts.2 Locomobile and handy, tablets form close associations with their writers and bearers. In this chapter, I will examine such tablet-assemblages in medieval English, German and French literature that associate wax, wood, ivory, brass, clay and stone with lovers, poets and parents. As we shall see, the material vitality of inscribed tablets intersects with desire and doubt, sin and penitence, ancestry and origins. As personal writing companions, tablets provide an interface to express private matters and communicate intimacy. Fashioned for the single purpose of bearing text, they recycle easily and, in case their material is soft enough to yield to even gentle pressure, particularly lend themselves to ephemeral writing that is traced as quickly as it is erased. But the private, hand-held version is not the only form of the medieval tablet. Literary sources also apply the term to plaques, sheet-like pieces of writing affixed to a surface where they may be read by anyone who passes by. In contrast to books, mounted tablets reveal texts that cannot be closed, and exhibit writing that faces us at all times. I shall argue that such inscribed plaques function as “premodern post-its” which supplement the exterior of a different object with material text. Being merely add-ons, these post-its must permanently confront the threat of being removed again,","PeriodicalId":118391,"journal":{"name":"Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131842163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Tattoo To Stigma: Writing On Body And Skin","authors":"Michael R. Ott, Stephanie Béreiziat-Lang","doi":"10.1515/9783110645446-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-010","url":null,"abstract":"Human skin has always been an immediately evident and readily available medium to which marks and signs can be applied. For instance, 61 tattoos have been identified on the body of “the iceman” Ötzi, the more than five thousand year old mummy found in the Alps in 1991 on a glacier at the Austrian-Italian border.1 Crosses and parallel lines forming patterns on his skin are now distinguishable via new photographic techniques; but their significance is lost to us. With no textual source to help us explain the mysterious meaning of these tattoos, it is hard to decide whether they were made for aesthetic, therapeutic or religious reasons (or some combination thereof, as in the case of magical practices).2 And yet these age-old lines and crosses on Ötzi’s skin may help to challenge our common understanding of script and writing as a system of significant signs identified primarily to encode speech and language. As far as bodies and skin are concerned, we have to develop a broader perspective, taking into account various forms of corporeal marking. Ötzi’s tattoos may be considered as a corporeal “proto-script”, marking the body, making it readable and extending its natural expressive potential. Although these signs may not be alphabetical characters, they are an extraordinary form of writing that transforms the human body into a text demanding to be read. After all, living human bodies and their surfaces provide a very special material, worthy of exceptional practices and discourses. Historically, it is difficult to estimate the cultural significance and scope of tattoos and similar types of corporeal inscriptions. Since archaeological remnants are subject to decay, almost everything we know about marks and writing on skin stems from written records, sources that are also sparse and not always unequivocal. One main difficulty lies in the vocabulary. The word “tattoo” denoting the insertion of pigments into the skin, for example, came into the English language (and to other languages as well) by way of colonialism: James Cook introduced the Polynesian word for “to","PeriodicalId":118391,"journal":{"name":"Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131130153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Old French Narrated Inscriptions","authors":"Sascha A. Schultz, I. Roebling-Grau","doi":"10.1515/9783110645446-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":118391,"journal":{"name":"Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment","volume":"2017 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115316084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Cabinet Of Curiosities","authors":"R. Wagner","doi":"10.1515/9783110645446-017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-017","url":null,"abstract":"Before scholars programmed databases to make visible and accessible the minute details of their research to peers and grant-giving agencies, amassing and exhibiting a wide array of material things in order to show one’s comprehension of the world was a well-established practice in late sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe. Men of letters and science established awe-inspiring personal collections encompassing a bewildering variety of objects that were housed in “cabinets of curiosities” or Wunderkammern. Some of these material things were natural specimens, such as the dinosaur bones in the possession of the Danish polymath Ole Worm. Others were extraordinary artefacts that displayed human ingenuity, like automata, for example, or promised mystical insight, such as the Egyptian obelisks collected by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.1 Others, still, displayed evidence of the preternatural in the form of unicorn horns or the remains of monstrous births. The first major cabinets were born of a happy eclecticism, a wild urge to collect all manner of oddities, which were then displayed haphazardly, leaving it to the onlooker to find connections between an insect enclosed in amber and a Mayan mask. Later collectors, influenced by new developments in taxonomy and the increasing differentiation of knowledge into separate fields, instead preferred a more organised approach that properly classified objects and established relations between standard and eccentric exhibits.2 Rather than following this approach that collects as a way of ordering the world, our literary Wunderkammer reaches back to the early cabinets and their antiquarian inclinations that focussed on the weird, seeking out those objects that inspired curiosity and awe, impulses that shake our sense of mastery over the material world. While the rest of this volume strives to establish a coherence, cataloguing inscribed artefacts according to their geographical provenance, function and material substance, here we offer a small miscellany of singular things that resist our taxonomies. One of a kind, they represent not all the world of medieval literary inscriptions, but some of its most eccentric manifestations: an inscribed horse, a speaking ship that sails across time, etchings on an apple, a diamond dog leash, a crystal altar-as-bed, a magical message-bearing chair, and the legendary Holy Grail. These objects epitomise what Lorraine Daston refers to as “talkative things”:","PeriodicalId":118391,"journal":{"name":"Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129767778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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