Research projects

Materiality of the ancient book

Although scholars of antiquity are increasingly interested in the materiality of the written word, data on the physical and graphic aspects of ancient manuscripts has never before been collected, systematized and presented in a coherent and easily consultable manner by the scientific community. With more than a century of experience in the storage, cataloguing and study of papyrological documentation, especially literary, CEDOPAL proposes to develop a new digital module, which, linked to the Mertens-Pack3 database, will not only gather codicological (quality and form of the support, type of ink, dimensions, layout elements, etc.) and paleographic information (type of writing, number of hands, presence of titles, annotations, signs, illustrations, etc.) of each papyrus, but will also provide information on the books in their original state, as the ancients elaborated and used them (reconstituted dimensions, bookstore typology, context of production and use, etc.). The digital processing of these data and the virtual modeling of the artifacts applied to the entire Mertens-Pack³ catalog will give access to a more concrete and systematic vision of the materiality of the ancient book, which will benefit any researcher, whether he is a papyrologist, philologist, historian, or other, in his effort to decipher, date, edit, restore or study papyrological fragments.

The digital module "Materiality of the ancient book" is composed of two sections. In the first one, all the information related to the physical form of the manuscript will be recorded: its shape, its material, its dimensions, the presence of margins and their dimensions, the size of the text column and of the intercolumn, the number of columns on the scroll or the number of pages in the codex, the length of the lines, the number of lines per column/page, the colometry for texts in verse, the presence of rulers and/or numbering (foliation, pagination, etc.it will be possible to record both data relating to the papyri as they are preserved, i.e. in a fragmentary state, and data relating to the book in its original state, when it will be possible, thanks to the expertise of CEDOPAL researchers, to reconstitute them and, in the most favorable cases, to model them virtually.

The second section of the encoding module will include information about the writing: type of ink, number of hands, quality of writing, presence of annotations, presence of initial, final, current or external titles, presence of signs (critical, diacritical, reading, punctuation), presence of abbreviations, stichometry and ornamentation. Among the data mentioned here, those that already exist in the current catalog ("material" and "presence of titles", for example) will be transferred to the new module.

The development of this new structure within the CEDOPAL catalog entails a thorough research work on the approximately 8000 Greek and Latin literary papyri. Firstly, it will be necessary to gather data on the materiality of the fragments, to classify them, to evaluate them and, if necessary, to complete them by an autoptic examination of the manuscript, or, failing that, on the basis of high definition photographs. This work will be partly based on the research (completed or in progress) of the CEDOPAL researchers. Afterwards, it will be possible to reflect on the original anatomy of the book to which each papyrological fragment belonged and to propose reconstructions.

Edition of the treatise On the exile of Favorinos of Arles

In collaboration with E. Amato (University of Nantes) and J. Schamp (University of Fribourg), the CEDOPAL team is preparing an edition of the P.Vat. gr. 11v, containing the philosophical treatise Peri phugès by Favorinos of Arles. The volume will be published in the Greek collection of "Les Belles Lettres".

Gabriel Nocchi Macedo - Aristophanes in Antiquity: Books and texts in context

The project is devoted to the materiality and reception of ancient comedy in antiquity. Using the study of papyri, I will investigate how the plays of Aristophanes were copied, read, transmitted, studied and performed in the Greek world. The research begins with a detailed study of Aristophanes' papyri (the physical aspects of which have been neglected until now). Then, I will carry out a contextual analysis, in which papyrological data will be confronted with literary and iconographic sources, in order to understand the place of Aristophanes in the literary culture of the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods.

Nathan Carlig - Research on the Coptic book production in Panopolis (Upper Egypt) in the 4th and 5th centuries: typology, contexts and functions

Recent studies on the Coptic book of the late period, as well as those on the literary culture of Panopolis (Upper Egypt) in late antiquity, have neglected the contribution of the Coptic book production of the 4th and 5th centuries, which is nevertheless documented by a batch of six manuscripts preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The project Recherches sur la production libraire copte à Panopolis (Haute-Égypte) aux IVe et Ve siècles : typology, contexts and functions aims to fill this gap by providing an additional milestone in the history of the book, particularly the Coptic one, by clarifying the cultural landscape of the city of Panopolis, which was not exclusively Greek, although it was intimately linked to Hellenic culture, and by shedding light on the relationship of Christian communities, whether linked to a monastery or not, with books and the written word, at a time when Christianity was becoming the majority religion in Egypt and Coptic was becoming a literary language alongside Greek. Thanks to the description of the manuscripts of the National Library of France from an innovative and detailed analysis protocol, we will establish a set of clues likely to identify other manuscripts of similar production. The manuscripts thus identified will be the subject of a description based on the same analysis protocol, with a view to specifying their context of production and use, whether or not linked to a monastic environment. To this end, a comparison will also be made with the Nag Hammadi codices and the "Bodmer Papyri", of close provenance from Panopolis, with contemporary Greek literary papyri, and with the data that can be drawn from the works of Shenute on the books he had at his disposal.