Séminaire – Histoire des sciences, histoire du texte

Textual transmissions
Org. K. Chemla

Mau Chuanhui (Ts’ing-hua national university and SPHERE, Professeure invitée)
From practice to writing: the case of wild silk making
Résumé :
China is the cradle of silk industry, and the term “silk” refers to the silk produced by Bombyx mori, named popularly domestic silkworm. There exist several species of insects producing raw silk. In 1999-2000, archeologists discovered in Indus Valley “the first evidence for silk anywhere out of China” (Good 2009), but that silk, commonly called “wild silk,” was produced by the silkworms Antheraea mylitta and Antheraea assamensis.
In Chinese historical documents one can find, since the Antiquity, records about cocoons harvesting in nature. The descriptions found in them correspond to the wild Bombyx and the so-called wild silkworms of Antheraea family. During a very long time, those harvests were considered a good omen, and reports about them were presented to emperors by high ranking officials. In reality, one can read in the Erya 爾雅, considered the first Chinese dictionary, terms referring to a series of insects which were able to produce silk, including xiangjian 橡繭 (oak cocoon), youchujian 由樗繭 (ailanthus cocoon), etc. But one has to wait till the middle of the 17th century to read the first description of production of wild silk in an essay by Sun Tingquan 孫廷銓 (1613-1674) titled Shancan shuo 山蠶說 (Mau 2018). Before this date, wild silk had already become an important merchandise both for Chinese domestic market and for maritime trade. During the Qing rule, the cultivation of wild silk was paid special attention within the governmental policy for encouraging agriculture and sericulture. In 1744, the first handbook devoted to wild silk culture, titled Shandong yangcan chengfa 山東養蠶成法, was compiled and published following the imperial edict by Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795). From then on, several treatises were published.
The present study aims to deal with the “transcription” of knowledge obtained through working experience with wild silk culture. Through a systemic analysis of documents, compared with, and completed by, archeological evidence and field survey, the author tries to understand how practical knowledge was accumulated and transmitted, in particular, how the relevant manuals were written. Compared to the example of the culture of silk produced by Bombyx mori, this study will be helpful for clarifying the processes of its domestication.

Carole Hofstetter (SPHERE, ANR Access ERC),
Reading circles of the Introduction to Arithmetic in Byzantium (Part 2)
Résumé :
This presentation is the second part of the paper presented at the ’HSHT’ seminar in 2022-2023 under the title ‘Reading circles of the Introduction to Arithmetic in Byzantium (XIIIth-XIVth c.)’.
The treatise, composed by Nicomachus of Gerasa (1st-2nd c. AD), is known to us from nearly fifty manuscript copies produced in medieval Byzantium.
The frequent use of the text in this period for the study of arithmetic meant that this part of the manuscript tradition was heavily contaminated. By identifying circles of reading and study of the text, the aim is to propose an approach, complementary to that of philology, to account for the relationships between witnesses that are both philologically and chronologically close, where the classic tools of philology do not always provide a reliable answer.

Costantino Moretti (École française d’Extrême-Orient)
Random Notes on Standards, Textual and Formal Variants in Dunhuang Buddhist Manuscripts (Second Part)
Résumé :
The notion of “mistake” and that of “textual variant” share, at times, some ambiguities. By comparing several manuscripts containing the same Chinese Buddhist scripture, for example, it becomes apparent that a number of presumed variants in modern edited texts are in fact simple scribal copying errors. In most cases, these mistakes are produced due to a chain of factors whose combination leads to accidental textual corruption, or due to a misunderstanding of the source-manuscript layout.
In the second part of my talk, I will point out additional considerations regarding variants/alterations that involve a modification of the text layout, i.e. “formal variants”, which can determine a misconstruction of the manuscript that served as the basis for producing a given copy.

Lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet

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