Monday, November 10, 2025

Apostelgasse 23, 1030, Vienna

Seminarroom

Opening remarks 9:15 – 9:30

Part I: Language and Sound Patterns in Technical Texts

Session 1 09:30 – 10:45

Michele Pulini (PhD, Venice/Passau)
Linguistic Insights into the Anhui University and Shanghai Museum Manuscript Copies of Cáo Mò zhī zhèn 曹沫之陳

Session 2 10:45 – 12:00
Federico Valenti (Postdoc, Tallinn)
Colourful and Meaningful Rhymes: Rhyme, Tone, and Memory in the Jijiupian 急就篇

Lunch Break (1.30 h) 12:00 – 13:30

Part II: Form and Content in Philosophical Manuscripts

Session 3 13:30 – 14:45

Yue Ji (PhD, Vienna) and Flaminia Pischedda (Postdoc, Vienna)
Formal and Palaeographical Analysis of the Zhongxin Zhi Dao 忠信之道

Session 4 14:45 – 16:00

Francesca Puglia (Postdoc, Bern)
Reading the Taiyi Sheng Shui 太一生水Alongside the Chuci 楚辭: A Chu 楚 Contextual Approach

Long break (45 minutes) 16:00 – 16:45

Part III: Early Medieval Buddhist Manuscripts

Session 5 16:45 – 18:00
Nelson Landry (Postdoc, Hamburg)
Looking at Some Chanted Text in a Dunhuang Manuscript, S3728

Final remarks 18:00 – 18:15

Dinner 19:15

My planned research trajectory, as conceptualised under the auspices of the CoE, involves a detailed investigation of the topic of scribal agency and literary forms of arguments in early Chinese technical texts. Throughout my fellowship, I will engage in the comparative analysis of East Asian scribal cultures, in order to identify the specific characteristics of Chinese written culture. This comparison will allow me to explore more thoroughly the crucial issue of the emergence of the Chinese “culture-state,” a phenomenon intrinsically linked to the nature of ancient Chinese writing and the production of bodies of written knowledge. This approach will highlight the significance of early China as an exemplary case study for studying the mechanisms underlying the relationship between writing and cultural identity.

Specifically, my contribution to the CoE would be twofold. First, I will illuminate the scribal practice of pre-Buddhist China, thereby offering a crucial early Chinese perspective. Second, I will undertake comparative work on Eurasian scribal cultures in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. My project revolves around a cluster of manuscripts written on bamboo strips, which are all relatively recent discoveries, dating to the Warring States (453-221 BCE) and Western Han (206-9 BCE) periods.
The sources under consideration include not only the divinatory material on which I am currently working, but also structurally similar astronomical texts, hemerologies, as well as medical treatises – a wider range of genres that can be subsumed under the rubric of “technical texts.”

Within my field, a mix of structural-linguistic, palaeographical, and material analysis has already been applied to argumentative and philosophical texts and to a lesser and partial degree also to poetry and historiographical accounts. However, it has not so far been appreciated that early Chinese technical texts—especially, but not exclusively, divination texts—are also amenable to such an approach. Indeed, they remain seriously underappreciated or even misunderstood inasmuch as their crafted or “literary” nature and its interrelation with the texts’ materiality has not been fully taken into account. My work will offer a corrective to this trend by systematically exploring for the first time the creative interplay among words, visual elements, and material structure found in these texts.

This will lead me to address the following major questions. First, disciplinarily: How do early Chinese divinatory texts in particular and technical texts in general contribute to establishing a shared intellectual discourse in the scribal milieus of early China? What are the main differences and similarities in the scribal strategies used in technical texts compared to contemporary philosophico-argumentative ones? And what are the implications of this novel discovery of the intricately “crafted” nature of early Chinese technical texts for understanding one of the main Chinese foundational texts, the Yijing, and its textual formation and development? Interdisciplinarily, I will ask and explore through a dialogue with scholars working in the CoE (Mirnig; sub-node 2A and Malzahn; sub-node 2C, among others), whether any structural parallels or indeed direct interdependencies can be identified in the construction of meaning through textual means as documented in my technical texts and in other Eurasian scribal cultures.