2. A Study of Shapes

The first point of contact between palaeography and aesthetics is the obvious fact that palaeographers make aesthetic judgements that then constitute their evidence. Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse acknowledge this reality when they describe palaeography as the ‘historical study of shapes’, a construal of the field that connects it closely with visual forms of interpretation.Footnote ¹⁷ Although scholars now tend to avoid the value-laden language of previous generations, earlier formulations that describe instances of writing as ‘extremely ugly’, ‘broken’, ‘coarse’, or ‘handsome’ are aesthetic judgements.Footnote ¹⁸ Even recently, in their Hellenistic Bookhands, Guglielmo Cavallo and Herwig Maehler describe hands as ‘unskilled, primitive-looking’, ‘archaic’, ‘careful’, ‘formal’, ‘careless’, and ‘conservative’, although without the implied moral judgement.Footnote ¹⁹ The basic terms of palaeographical description represent aesthetic, descriptive judgements: scripts are uniform or irregular, plain or ornamented, cursive or composed of multiple strokes, uni- or multi-linear, sloped or upright, square or oblong, broad or long, rapid or slow, square or angular. Description and comparison of scripts is, at its foundation, an aesthetic practice.

We still need to decide what the consequences of these descriptions are for dating and other questions, but, in the absence of dated material, it is these adjudications that set the boundaries for further analysis of the text and that configure a manuscript copy within the larger constructed narrative of a work’s transmission. The aesthetics of handwriting creates the foundation for understanding the history of a text in its material context, for conceiving the quality of scribal performance and for popular ideas about the inherent value of a given manuscript. In short, palaeography is innately intertwined with aesthetics because it reduces complex written communication to shapes, forms and styles, before rebuilding historical narratives based on these observations. Conceptions of what palaeography is, what it can do and what it is for, as Roberta Mazza has recently explained, are in a state of flux,Footnote ²⁰ and as we continue to reconceive how to evaluate palaeographical information, one way to gain new insight into the practice, instead of looking for new objective measures, is to look to disciplines like aesthetics, which are closer to palaeography than we might have at first realised.

3. Aesthetic Cognitivism and Palaeography

While most readers of this journal are intimately familiar with palaeography, aesthetic cognitivism and its epistemological underpinnings require some explanation. Aesthetic cognitivism is a shorthand label for a spectrum of normative theories of art that emphasise the ability of artworks to instil knowledge (non-trivial propositions) and inculcate understanding (networks of propositions in complex relationships that constitute a more significant cognitive achievement). In its most analytic form, articulated by Christoph Baumberger, aesthetic cognitivism is comprised of two claims: an epistemic claim – ‘that artworks have cognitive functions’ – and an aesthetic claim – ‘cognitive functions of artworks partially determine their artistic value’.Footnote ²¹ In other words, some (but not all) artworks have the capacity to convey information or to reorganise our existing propositions, and a piece’s ability to do this is one reason (among other possibilities) why we value some artworks over others.

Instead of valuing artworks only for their beauty, affective power, skill, or the pleasure they instil, a main reason that we appreciate art is as a knowledge producing activity.Footnote ²² Art has the capacity to alter our perceptions of the world, attuning our senses to particular features of a landscape, a piece of fruit, a body and so on. In cognitivist discourse, art does not imitate life. Art changes how we see the quotidian aspects of the world around us. Although artworks may enable us to learn new propositions as Stacie Friend has pointed out,Footnote ²³ their more substantial cognitive value lies in their ability to inculcate understanding, a more holistic epistemic category comprised of many propositions arranged in various relations to one another in network or structure.Footnote ²⁴ As Baumberger and others point out, not all knowledge is a cognitive achievement (e.g. trivial factoid), not all cognitive achievements constitute knowledge (e.g. encountering new emotions), and many cognitive achievements go beyond knowledge into the realm of understanding. There is internal debate, but some epistemologists view understanding as a category that better captures the complexity of how artworks signify, in part because understanding need not be underpinned by true beliefs or historic-al facts.Footnote ²⁵ Understanding is holistic, gradually acquired, connection-making and admits to multiple epistemic goals. Palaeography nurtures our understanding of early Christianity and ancient literature by affording ways to assess the value of manuscripts for our historical and textual questions, and by functioning as the raw material for crafting useful hypotheticals that aid in our construction of the complexities of literary history and textual transmission.

As an example of how art can foster understanding in literature, consider Noël Carrol’s view that narrative can instil forms of moral understanding by affording readers the opportunity to practise the application of ‘abstract moral principles and concepts’ to concrete scenarios. For Carrol, literature helps us to better understand ourselves and attend to the continually unfolding moral complexities of human experience, giving new impetus to our own social interactions and choices.Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, Elgin argues that narratives are ‘elaborate thought experiments. They afford epistemic access to aspects of the world that are normally inaccessible…[exemplifying] abstract properties that concretized in human agents’.Footnote ²⁷ Others, like Gordon Graham, have argued that many forms of art can function as sustenance for understanding in ways specific to their medium, including visual art, music and dance, among others.Footnote ²⁸

In another article, I have argued along similar lines that aesthetic cognitivism is a useful framework for thinking about manuscripts of the New Testament and the ways their texts are presented in various material contexts, focusing on how paratextual systems like the Eusebian apparatus are pathways for understanding.Footnote ²⁹ But what about handwriting ana-lysis specifically? If literature and the systems we build around it can nurture understanding, what about the letter forms and materiality of particular textual instantiations? If the identification of letter forms is a basic procedure of all reading, what role does this process play in palaeographic analysis? How do palaeographic judgements effect our valuation of a given papyrus for larger critical questions? What can we do with our palaeographic evidence in addition to hypothesising dates? One weakness of cognitivist approaches to literature is that the text is always analysed as something immaterial, as something purely textual, existing in a disembodied state, in an ideal form. Palaeography, at the very least, contributes to aesthetic cognitivism by pointing out that all literature is material, instantiated by human actors working under multifarious conditions.

4. Understanding Through Palaeography

One way that palaeography nurtures understanding is by offering a basic context for a manuscript’s critical value or relevance for our critical questions. Judgements about the skill of the scribe, their ability to accurately represent an antegraph and to produce beautiful, clear graphemes, are some of the palaeographically informed variables that effect our perceptions of value. Sometimes these features are linked to perceptions of the text-ual worth of the manuscript’s presentation of a text. Aesthetic judgements about letter forms and execution shape the ways a piece (in our case, a manuscript) configures our concepts about the literary work it represents and the value of the copy as part of the larger puzzle of literary transmission.

A good example of this phenomenon is the history of research on P46 (Dublin, CBL BP II; Ann Arbor, Inv. Nr. 6238; LDAB 3011), an early copy of Paul’s letters usually dated to the third or fourth centuries ce.Footnote ³⁰ It was first edited by Kenyon in 1936, who describes its hand favourably in comparison to that of the CBL BP I (P45; LDAB 2980), a copy of the Gospels and Acts also acquired by Chester Beatty: ‘the script of the papyrus is in marked contrast with that of the Chester Beatty papyrus of the Gospels and Acts. It is far more calligraphic in character, a rather larger, free, and flowing hand with some pretensions to style and elegance…it may be said that the letters are rather early in style and of good Roman formation’.Footnote ³¹ Kenyon’s high view of the writing goes hand in hand with his high valuation of the text of P46, which, for him, supports the modern reliance of the early uncial manuscripts for edition making as opposed to Byzantine textual traditions.Footnote ³² The beauty and skill associated with the script aligns with his judgement that the manuscript preserves a good copy of an ancient text form.Footnote ³³ The aesthetics of the handwriting contribute substantially to and are indistinguishable from his valuation of the copy.

Not all have maintained the connection, however, between elegance of script and quality of text as equally relevant for determining a manuscript’s critical value. Günther Zuntz, for example, argued that the clear script of P46 is mere window dressing for its textual inadequacies: ‘in spite of its neat appearance (it was written by a professional scribe and corrected – but very imperfectly – by an expert), P46 is by no means a good manuscript’.Footnote ³⁴ He equates quality primarily with textual value, not with its aesthetic features. Many scribal blunders, brought on by ‘fits of exhaustion’ mar the text, as do ‘specious errors’ that are ‘conjectures, and indeed ingenious contextures, witnessing to attentive study of the text and prefect command of the Greek’.Footnote ³⁵ The scribe’s physical endurance and attitude toward his antegraph was not up to Zuntz’s exacting standard. The quality of the script and the overall beauty of the manuscript indicates that the scribe was as a professional in some sense, but his own engagement with the textual tradition (perhaps accounting, in part, for the 639 singular readings catalogued by James R. Royse)Footnote ³⁶ means that the quality of the text he produced was flawed beyond salvaging. For Zuntz, the value of the manuscript lies in its ability to accurately represent an Urtext of some kind – the quality of the script cannot save the manuscript from a specious scribal performance.Footnote ³⁷ Manuscripts are not to be judged by their handwriting alone.

Zuntz is right, I think, to divorce the beauty of script from decisions on textual matters, at least initially, but these interlinking features are difficult to disentangle in our rhetoric and valuations of papyri for whatever critical questions we might bring to them. The fact that, at least for New Testament studies, the papyri have been so deeply enmeshed and overshadowed by text-critical concerns has limited our perceptions of their value to this one critical arena. Indeed, that New Testament scholarship has left manuscripts almost exclusively to the domain of textual criticism means that the tradition remains largely unexplored for other equally legitimate concerns. Nonetheless, whether we value copies primarily for their text or for their aesthetic qualities, palaeographic judgements lie at the foundation of the ways we contextualise manuscripts. Without a date range, textual critics cannot approximate their copy to any earlier hypothetical textual forms, and without a differentiation of scribal hands, philologists could not reconstruct initial production and subsequent layers of use in a manuscript. For example, without palaeographic ana-lysis, it is difficult to examine the many corrections in P46 (202 according to Jacob W. Peterson, executed by at least five distinct hands).Footnote ³⁸ At a basic level, we need to distinguish hands to map the post-production life of the manuscript, and what it says about the early reception of the Pauline corpus and historical practices of reading. Palaeographic analysis has the potential to lead to understanding because it creates historical structures for textual analysis, raises new questions about early Christian textual culture and creates the conditions for phenomenal knowledge, that is, what it would have been like to copy or read the manuscript in antiquity. The close attention to shapes, forms and mater-ial inherent in palaeography creates the conditions whereby scholars can empathetically imagine the quotidian realities that undergirded textual production and instances of use. Palaeography makes clear that historical knowledge is not the simple accumulation of factoids, but instead a more sustained and gradual dawning of larger structures of information into complex organisations.

This capacity to sustain scholarly imagination, ironically informed by disagreements about dating and the subjectivities of palaeographic analysis, is a main vector by which palaeography can foster understanding. A plausible production window allows us to configure the various propositions and small data points a manuscript offers within a larger conceptual framework that is also informed by our broader knowledge of the historical, political, theological and social elements of a given context. Essentially palaeography enables us to produce highly informed (but perhaps fictional) thought experiments, which Baumberger describes as idealised ‘fictions designed to afford epistemic access to matters of fact that are otherwise difficult or impossible to discern…fictions contrived to reveal what would happen if certain conditions were met’.Footnote ³⁹ Fictional play can lead to historical understanding.

Scholars have placed, based on palaeographic evidence (some more convincing than others), P46’s production anywhere between the first and fourth centuries ce.Footnote ⁴⁰ Instead of continuing to argue about the most likely point of production using new tools or approaches as one might be tempted to do, a gesture to aesthetic cognitivism creates space to consider the consequences of these conclusions. What pertains if P46 was composed in the first century as Young Kyu Kim has proposed?Footnote ⁴¹ How and why do we value P46 differently if it was first produced around 200 or in the 320s? When were the copious corrections made, and what do they say about ancient views on this copy, the works it transmits and its actual uses in social situations? Playing out the consequences of these date ranges, even as hypothetical constructs, creates space for us to evaluate our own presuppositions and critical goals, to begin to explore the historical possibilities latent in contexts we assign to manuscripts.

Palaeography is also predicated upon observations that contribute to thought experi-ments that go beyond assigning dates, including things like our views on ancient text-ual and modern scholarly practices. For example, what does the construction of letter forms say about a scribe’s working environment or social context? What do we make of the relationship between the beautiful script of P46 and its spotty text or the more unremarkable script of P45 and its perceived textual accuracy?Footnote ⁴² What do the copious corrections by later hands in P46 say about its history of use and ancient desires for textual verisimilitude? The manuscripts cannot speak directly to these questions, but, using palaeographic and other forms of analysis usually oriented toward historical questions, we can begin to imagine the possibilities and to find new avenues for answering these higher-level questions. Based on palaeographic observations and our broader knowledge about things like ancient book technology, scribal practices, economies of text-ual production and practices of reading, we could craft thought experiments that involve multiple scribes, readers, patrons, correctors, archaeologists, collectors, editors, curators and modern scholars, each of which have played a part in the story we tell about these manuscripts.

Blossom Stefaniw’s recent narrative history of the Tura Papyri in her book Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things is one such example. She traces the history of the papyri from Didymus the Blind’s grammar lessons in fourth-century Alexandria through to her own grappling with this material in the 2010s, stopping at the Tura monastery and other unexpected places along the way.Footnote ⁴³ Her extended thought experiment, a form of critical fabulation or creative non-fiction, attunes us to the everyday practices of ancient text production, educational realities in late antiquity, the social dynamics of slavery and discipleship, motivations for production, the ethics of acquiring and working with ancient manuscripts and the impacts of our own stories on the work that we do.Footnote ⁴⁴ She plausibly reconstructs the lives, thoughts, actions, and experiences of Didymus, other desert fathers, scribes, librarians, and children at the Tura monastery, British soldiers and Egyptians who discovered the material in an ancient limestone quarry in 1941, the editors who published the material in Cologne in the 1960s and a widow with a few folia tucked into her attic in the 1980s. By telling the story in this way, Stefaniw fosters understanding by highlighting the contingent nature of textual transmission, the complexities of human activity that have led to our papyrological heritage and the many differences between the motivations of those who created and transmitted the papyri and our own concerns for this material. She creates a captious diachronic framework for engaging the Tura Papyri, one that can be further augmented in light of new historical information or our own experiences.

As a preface to her analysis of the interpretive practices present in works transmitted by the papyri, her deeply researched story gives us a new perspective, one that differs from the standard academic exposition, enabling us to see ourselves as actors in the stories we tell. While she concludes her creative narrative with a more terse, expositive account of the history of the papyri, her story suggests that we can no longer treat this material as disembodied text to be edited and then interpreted. Historical-critical analysis of the Tura Papyri feels inadequate, quaint even, in light of her thought experiment. The material now has a larger, embodied story which we must contend with, as story that has ongoing relevance for how we continue to work with papyri now that we see a bigger picture.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her story shows that we must try to contend with the people and circumstances who brought the material down to us, instead of treating the manuscripts as untethered objects. And, more poignantly, to attend to ourselves as scholars, complex people writing about other people from the past that we only glimpse in the material left to us.Footnote ⁴⁶ Historical research, even palaeography, is a pathway to understanding. The stories we tell about the manuscripts we work with, including their handwriting, do both ‘epistemic and ethical work’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Stefaniw’s narrative is not about palaeographic evidence per se. She does incorporate comments on the scribe’s letter forms and performance as a way to reconstruct a bit of his personality, skillset and context of production and to approximate the date that the copy was made, but the evidence she draws up goes beyond just the handwriting. Nonetheless, palaeographic analysis offers at least some of the raw material for stories we tell about the manuscripts, especially when combined with other information we have about a manuscript. Her artistic response, much more labour intensive and skilful than standard expositive scholarly writing, pays off by enabling the papyri to become a vehicle for understanding. Just as literary narrative gives readers opportunities to test the validity of universal ethical precepts in concrete situations, and just as paintings, through the vagaries of representation, alter the way we perceive people, places and situations, so too can palaeographical judgements change our contexts of analysis, the ways we think about the ancient world and the people responsible for the papyri we still happen to have to hand.

Artistic works, including ancient manuscripts and their texts, can function as the foundations for thought experiments, as imaginative representations of possibilities that can change the way we understand the world and our own actions, as Stefaniw’s interweaving of her own story makes us aware of our own positions as scholars. Art helps us to see the everyday anew, to grasp connections, to empathise, to ask new questions, to recat-egorise what we already know within larger epistemic structures made available to us. These outcomes are more than bits of propositional knowledge; they are ways of understanding larger systems and reservoirs of evidence, gained over time, with much practice. If the propositional knowledge outcomes of palaeography are the date ranges assigned to specific manuscripts (with varying levels of certainty), then the understanding outcomes of the practice are found in the refinement of questions and in our ability to make connections across ancient manuscripts in the context of our larger critical questions. Palaeography is the raw material, made up of our aesthetic judgements, that enables us to craft thought experiments about the ancient world, its people and its literature. Even if entirely fictitious, thought experiments have the capacity to lead to new understanding and to new questions that we had not yet thought to ask.

5. Conclusion

At the level of common sense, the idea that we can gain understanding from works of art is attractive. Artists invest significant time, resources, skill and attention to producing works, which we, the public, then endow with cultural value depending on our evaluations of the piece. Governments and cultural institutions expend resources to commission, conserve and display these pieces, ostensibly for our benefit. The same is true of many of the manuscripts we work with. But questions of how to evaluate or critically analyse the cognitive value of an artwork are complex. For visual art in particular, how do line, colour, shape, representation, texture and other describable features coalesce to reshape our understanding? Do we not lose the essential nature of a piece if we reduce it to its constituent features or summarise it in some way? The same questions pertain to palaeography. How do our determinations of patterns around shape, slope, size, interlineality, quantity of pen strokes, ductus and comparison between copies coalesce into enhanced understanding about ancient writing practices, the currents of history or ourselves, something beyond the propositional knowledge that is the question of date? Analysis of these features is aesthetic insofar as they represent the basic descriptive building blocks, the shapes and orientations that comprise the whole. When we break these features down, we can foster understanding of how we tell the story of their relationships in the context of ancient handwriting more generally.

While recent discourse has rightly called into question the ‘scientific’ nature of palaeographical analysis for dating copies, and even though it is obvious that human judgement relating to handwriting is fallible, palaeography remains an essential task for understanding our papyrological heritage and for creating understanding from it. As Georgi Gardiner argues, it could be said that understanding is the ultimate goal of all disciplines, including the hard sciences, history and even palaeography, moving us beyond the acquisition of stand-alone facts to larger conceptions of the realities of existence and past human experi-ences: ‘when we understand something we grasp how it works, or why it is thus’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead of viewing palaeography as only a ‘scientific’ discipline that yields empirically true propositions, it can be construed as a discipline defined by aesthetic judgements that can achieve new forms of understanding of the social and economic structures that shaped the ways that ancient people made and used literature and about the histories of the works they reproduced.

Far from undermining the traditional importance of palaeography, this one possible reframing illuminates the highly technical skills that the rest of us rely on to make our own interpretive judgements about manuscript texts and ancient works. It also critiques cognitivist approaches to literature that fail to account for the contingencies and materiality of all literary output. Like the empirical sciences, subjective aesthetic judgements too can lead to new understanding, a reality that ensures the ongoing relevance of palaeography beyond its ability to pinpoint the period in which a manuscript was first produced. In addition to developing new forms of analysis and evidence, palaeography advances understanding by looking to other disciplines, connecting discourses to lead to new perspectives on what it is we are doing.