Séminaire – Histoire des sciences, histoire du texte

Colors
Org. K. Chemla

Introduction, by Matthieu Husson and Divna Manolova

• Divna Manolova ( SYRTE, PSL-Observatoire de Paris, CNRS)
  

Colour Equates Light, Colour Equates Knowledge
Résumé :
I study the use of polychromy in the corpus of Byzantine manuscripts preserving Cleomedes’ The Heavens (80+ manuscripts) and related texts, that is medieval Greek exegetical texts which tend to accompany the Stoic treatise, especially in codices produced from the thirteenth century onwards. I focus on those diagrams that involve one or more of the luminaries, or the stars more generally, and are concerned with the representation of light or its absence. While some parts of The Heavens explicitly refer readers to a visual representation (diagrammatic or otherwise), more often than not when diagrams are featured on the folio, what prompts their inclusion is less clear. Further, what motivates the use of differently coloured lines is rarely reflected on by the scribes, scholars and draftsmen and therefore it requires an interpretation.
My approach relies on the assumption that (in Byzantine manuscripts) colour, or rather polychromy, equates light. While monochromy in diagrams (using a single-coloured line to draft the image) is sufficient to make a figure visible as opposed to the use of a hard point, the use of multiple colours adds information and complicates further the meaning of the diagram design. In the case of lunisolar diagrams the use of polychromy is less concerned with questions of hue and more with expressing brightness and the presence or absence of light (light is emitted or reflected, it is directional, it is present or absent). Polychromy in diagrams allows for the synchronic operation of multiple layers of meaning related to knowledge about the cosmos acquired through the medium of sight. In terms of expertise and practice, it also indicates access to pigments, knowledge of the preparation of inks and of their application, as well as of graphic and symbolic grammars related but not limited to representations of textures, materiality, and dimensionality. Thus, the use of polychromy points out to the culturally-defined encoding of information and allows us to ask questions concerning its ownership, control, access to and lack thereof, the expertise in, as well as the exchange, communication, and trade of this knowledge.

• Matthieu Husson (SYRTE PSL-Observatoire de Paris, CNRS)

The colors of numbers : astronomers and scribes uses of colors in late medieval astronomical tables in Latin Europe
Résumé :
Late medieval astronomical manuscripts produced in Latin Europe regularly make use of inks and pigments of different colors, in their textual part, but also in numerical tables, diagrams and various illustrations. In this communication I want to explore this phenomenon in connection with numerical tables and reflect about the type of historical evidence these uses of colors in numerical tables may offer to the historian of astronomy.
Relying on a corpus mainly taken from the manuscript tradition of John of Lignères Tabule Magne, of which I’m preparing a critical edition with Eleonora Andriani, I’m going to consider three aspects in the sources. First a codicological aspect : how colors present themselves in the document, what can we reconstruct of the production processes of the colored tables ? Second a readability aspect : How colors orient and assist the users in navigating the often complex layout of astronomical tables ? Third, an astronomical aspect : how certain uses of colors can also be embedded with an astronomical and mathematical meaning ? Overall I wish to argue that in the corpus I examine, different agencies intervene each with its own set of conventions and aims in relation to the uses of colors. These visual conventions are in some cases complementary but might also be conflicting with each other resulting in a rather diversified set of situations which uniquely document certain aspects of astronomical cultures.

• Florence Bretelle

The social life of Qiu Xi邱熺’s smallpox vaccination book Extracting Smallpox in a Nutshell (Yindou lüe引痘略, 1817) : reprint or recycling ?
Résumé :
Just a few years after the famous publication of Edward Jenner’s research on the protective effects of cow pox inoculation against human smallpox, and after Dr. Alexander Pearson (1780-1874) had introduced vaccination against smallpox in Macau and Canton, Chinese-language texts on the new technique were circulating in Guangdong province. A first text, written in a few pages in 1805, recounts the discovery of the technique in England and explains the method. As the paratext emphasizes, this is a Chinese translation of a text prepared by Alexander Pearson. Some ten years later, in 1817, the Chinese author Qiu Xi邱熺published Extracting Smallpox in a Nutshell (Yindou lüe引痘略). This text, which in turn presented the method of smallpox vaccination, was a huge success, as evidenced by the impressive number of reprints in the 19th century. In this talk, after recalling some general information on the history of smallpox and variolation in China, I’ll look at a number of editions of this text, examining the changes that occur from one edition to the next and what these changes say about the status of this text and, ultimately, about the very status of the technique introduced from Europe in the early 19th century.

Lieu : Salle Malevitch 483A bâtiment Condorcet