Tradition, innovation and migration: Digital palaeography in search of wandering scribes and books

In the Middle Ages, Hebrew Manuscripts were produced across the vast Jewish diaspora from France and Portugal in the west to the China borders in the East, from England in the north to Yemen in the south. Each culture had its own book making traditions and models of the script. However, these different, often remote centres were not isolated. Texts, books and ideas travelled along the commercial routes or the roads of exile. The conference “Tradition, innovation and migration: Digital palaeography in search of wandering scribes and books” explores the impact of geographical mobility on the transmission and development of the Hebrew scripts. ‘Mobility’ or ‘migration’ is defined broadly. Papers to be submitted  can concern the impact of travel for learning or trade on the circulation of the models of the Hebrew script, present a case-study of an individual scribe who for whatever reason abandoned his place of origin and exercised his scribal craft in a new environment, papers can deal with networks of scribes across space or study ‘mobility’ and ‘migration’ as a methodological framework to understand the change of the Hebrew script in a longue durée perspective. The papers will focus exclusively on palaeography in the narrow sense of the study of the script. Papers dealing with methodology of palaeographical research on migration are welcome. The conference’s main objective is to study the phenomenon of the mobility of scribes, models and scripts applying the most recent traditional, digital and AI methodologies of Hebrew palaeography research.