Register for a CSMC workshop
Meaning of Proportion
Extravagant Formats and Sizes of Manuscripts in the Tradition of Book Religions
When: Friday, 24 November 2023, 2:30 pm CET – Saturday, 25 November 2023, 1:00 pm CET
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, and online
Proportion and format can be considered as fundamental features of books, especially of manuscripts. Presently, though, this evidence seems to attract less attention: a trend seemingly due to the advancement of digitization. In fact, the increased presence of visually available material online, so beneficial and stimulating to manuscript studies, tends to diminish scholarly awareness of varieties of dimension, as digitized codices are generally assimilated, hence uniformed, to the size of the screen.
Yet, size and format of handwritten books are seminal for their visual organization, being often related to the status of such documents while indicating the socio-economic conditions of their formation as well as their symbolical standing and functional purpose, pointing thus also to customers and users and their practices of reading.
The workshop focuses on manuscripts of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions, being typically based on previous revelations in form of scriptures. This emphasis seems to stand to reason, as these “religions of the book”, as they are often called, offer particularly insightful evidence of extravagant sizes and proportions in the field of scriptural and ritual books. We know small-format formats of biblical manuscripts and likewise of the Koran, but also giant Bibles, oblong books of Christian liturgy or square Korans, not forgetting the Jewish tradition of recording scriptural tradition on scrolls.
The workshop will thus aim at discussing factors that determined the choice of outstanding dimensions or proportions used for books, while also taking into consideration aspects such as coincidences, esthetical biases and semantical messages equally having a share within such formation processes.
Workshop organisers:
Programme: