Dynamic Epigraphy

New Approaches to Inscriptions

Eleri H. Cousins

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781789257908
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume, with origins in a panel at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, presents creative new approaches to epigraphic material, in an attempt to 'shake up' how we deal with inscriptions. Broad themes include the embodied experience of epigraphy, the unique capacities of epigraphic language as a genre, the visuality of inscriptions and the interplay of inscriptions with literary texts. Although each chapter focuses on specific objects and epigraphic landscapes, ranging from Republican Rome to early modern Scotland, the emphasis here is on using these case studies not as an end in themselves, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence, both for the Greco-Roman world and for other time periods. Drawing on conversations from fields such as archaeology and anthropology, philology, art history, linguistics and history, contributors also seek to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscribed material. Methodologies such as phenomenology, translingualism, intertextuality and critical fabulation are deployed to offer new perspectives on the social functions of inscriptions as texts and objects and to open up new horizons for the use of inscriptions as evidence for past societies.

Chapter 1

Introduction: thoughts on the nature of inscriptions

Eleri H. Cousins

In the cobbled pavement in front of the university chapel of St Salvator’s in St Andrews sits a monogrammed PH (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). An observer stationed for a day within sight of it would see passersby engaging with it in a variety of different ways. Some people might walk by, on, or over it without any seeming awareness. Others would seem to avoid it deliberately – leaping over it, veering round it, walking at a distance but with a careful glance. Others still might seem to stop and gaze at it deliberately, in groups or by themselves, pointing or not, accompanied by human guides or book ones.

The reason for this range of behaviours lies in the monogram’s role in the mythos of St Andrews student life. It marks the spot where, supposedly, the sixteenth-century Protestant martyr Patrick Hamilton was burnt at the stake. As such, undergraduates are told that the monogram bears a curse: anyone who steps on Hamilton’s initials while still a student will undoubtedly fail their degree. Hence the way the monogram shapes the flow of human bodies in front of St Salvator’s: the contortions to avoid it by students, the spotlighting of it by tourists, the complete indifference from academic staff. For the latter, the monogram may exist more as concept than as physical text; as a lecturer at the University in the 2010s, I knew from my students that the initials existed somewhere, but must have walked over them countless times before I finally realized where that somewhere was. Hardly surprising: the monogram’s design and organic integration into the cobbles mean that the letters can serve as background visual noise if one is not already alert to their presence and meaning.

Fig. 1.1: PH monogram, St Andrews (view towards St Salvator’s Chapel). Photo © Myles Lavan.

Fig. 1.2: PH monogram, St Andrews (view towards North Street). Photo © Myles Lavan.

The papers collected in this volume are deliberately diverse in their approaches to epigraphic material, together seeking to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscriptions. The nature of the material they explore is equally diverse, though perhaps particularly focused on the Roman world; however, the emphasis throughout is on using their various case studies not as an end in themselves, or to illuminate any one period or place, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence. Together, they offer a vision of a more dynamic epigraphy: both in the sense of inscriptions themselves, and how we study them. I have started this introduction with the St Salvator’s PH in part as a nod to the origins of this volume in a panel¹ at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, held in St Andrews. But the monogram also serves as an excellent opening gambit for exploring the dynamics of text in the material world, and for the intertwined themes and questions concerning the nature of epigraphy and our study of it that are raised by the chapters collected here. What is involved in an embodied experience of epigraphy? How do epigraphic texts merge with their surroundings and blur the lines between word, image, and landscape? How do the capacities of epigraphic language enable or hinder epigraphic communication? And to what extent are inscriptions perceived rather than read, and what roles do storytelling and intertextuality play in the conveyance of an inscription’s meaning(s)? These are all questions that are offered up by individual chapters in this volume, but especially by the interplay between them. This introduction, therefore, seeks to draw out this interplay, highlighting what I believe makes the chapters in this volume not only vibrant and exciting individually, but also how they come together as more than the sum of their parts to illustrate the ongoing potential of inscriptions and the way in which we think about them.

Epigraphy as an academic genre

Historians have long mined inscriptions as historical sources, of course, but until fairly recently studying inscriptions for themselves was almost entirely the preserve of epigraphers. As similar sub-disciplines – for instance, numismatics or pottery studies – can bear witness, a need for specialist expertise can be a double-edged sword. The scholarship that results is usually extraordinarily rigorous within the bounds of the field and completed to a high technical standard. Yet the results, to outsiders, can often feel dry, perhaps even barren, and their capacity to contribute to wider debates can be opaque. Meanwhile, the high specialist technical barrier means that scholars from outside the sub-discipline rarely engage with the material in more than a passing way – and if they do engage in-depth, often leave themselves far too easily open to the charge of dilettantism. What results, then, is two parallel academic conversations, hyper- and hypo-specialized, neither of which do full justice to the material.

Most of the chapters in this volume deal with inscriptions on stone, and here the problems have been particularly acute. These are extraordinary objects, with complex social functions and myriad methodological ramifications, but our traditional ways of dealing with them, both in publications and in museums, have rendered their “scope for the imagination” difficult to grasp. The printing requirements of traditional corpora, as Kelsey Jackson Williams (Chapter 2) and others have noted, all but erase the vital material component of inscriptions, reducing them to sanitized texts. Conversations with museum curators, meanwhile, almost uniformly stress the deep and understandable difficulties of displaying inscriptions in a way that catches the eye, let alone the sustained attention, of even the most committed museum-goer. As a result, epigraphic collections are often left to moulder in outdoor spaces, or, as in the case of a recent redisplay in a regional museum near my own university, removed from view almost entirely. Making inscriptions “interesting” can only partly be solved even by displays (the Galleria Lapidaria of the Capitoline Museums is a stand-out example) that go above and beyond in interpreting the language, the text, and the meaning of individual inscriptions to visitors, for inscriptions’ interest lies not only in their content (relatively easy to convey), but in the very idea of them (much more difficult).²

The challenges that render inscriptions difficult to appreciate as objects in their own right, alongside the constraints of traditional corpora, have contributed, then, to an academic environment that has tended to veer away from engagement with that idea of epigraphy. Epigraphic publications have traditionally focused more on the what rather than the why of inscriptions – beginning and ending with the reconstruction of the text, the establishment of linguistic and onomastic parallels, the tracing of individuals’ careers and family lineages, etc. Similarly to the identification and categorization of other forms of material culture, this is necessary preliminary work, but all too often undertaken as an end in itself, or as a prelude to using epigraphic texts solely as documentary evidence, divorced from archaeological or material context.

All this has been changing in recent years, however. Scholarship on epigraphy, from all times and places but perhaps especially from the ancient Mediterranean and Greco-Roman world, has been undergoing a revolution of sorts, driven above all by an increasingly interdisciplinary interest in inscriptions as objects, as texts, and as objects/texts. This volume is therefore part of a growing wave of academic work that searches for new ways of seeing and analysing epigraphic material that move away from the more traditional forms of epigraphy as an academic genre, while still keeping inscriptions themselves centre-stage as the objects of study. Particularly productive areas of discussion in recent years have included the interplay between image and text on inscriptions,³ the materiality of inscriptions as physical objects,⁴ and the role of inscriptions in civic landscapes,⁵ as well as the role of epigram as a genre in ancient literature,⁶ and many of the chapters here draw or build on aspects of these discrete conversations. To date, however, these conversations have largely remained parallel ones, with little cross-fertilization between them. Volumes dedicated to individual threads have given us the chance to deepen each conversation, but at the expense of the dynamism which results from the interactions between threads. This volume, therefore, attempts to break new ground by putting these separate conversations in dialogue with each other, with – as the rest of this introduction will discuss – some constructive and thought-provoking results.

Embodied epigraphy

Many of the chapters here are concerned with the embodied experience of epigraphy, and with considering human interaction with inscribed objects from a more or less explicitly phenomenological perspective. In Chapter 7, “When poetry comes to its senses: Inscribed Roman verse and the human sensorium”, Chiara Cenati, Victoria González Berdús, and Peter Kruschwitz use the evocative language of Latin verse inscriptions to take us step by step through a sensory exploration of epigraphy, moving beyond our accustomed focus on sight alone into considerations of sound, touch, smell, taste, and even synaesthesia. The physicality – indeed the literal handling – of inscribed objects is also brought to the fore by Alex Mullen in Chapter 3, “Materializing epigraphy: archaeological and sociolinguistic approaches to Roman inscribed spindle whorls”. Here, the tactile and the physical are especially important, with Mullen exploring how the playful, possibly amatory messages on the whorls intersect with the way users may have rolled the whorls down their thighs to start them spinning, or worn them around their necks when not in use. Meanwhile, in Chapter 2, “Towards a theoretical model of the epigraphic landscape”, Kelsey Jackson Williams draws explicitly on archaeological and anthropological conversations of phenomenology to explore the varying dimensions of human interaction with an inscription in its landscape setting – a theme that is also echoed in the methodologies of M. Cristina de la Escosura Balbás, Elena Duce Pastor, and David Serrano Lozano in Chapter 4, “Written to be (un)read, written to be seen: Beyond Latin codes in Latin epigraphy”, as well as the perspectives of Fabio Luci in Chapter 5 “Epigraphic strategies of communication: the visual accusative of Roman Republican dedications of spoils”. All three of these chapters speak to the ways in which we “zoom in” and “zoom out” during our engagement with an inscription placed into a wider landscape (physical, for the moment – below I will consider intertextual ones as well).

Taken together, then, these discussions highlight a range of points that are crucial to the concept of an “embodied” epigraphy – that is, both the ways in which our experience of inscriptions is an embodied one, and how we can integrate that fundamental fact into our academic discourse. Perhaps the most important thread that emerges is how we conceptualise the sensory experience of inscriptions. We are accustomed to speak of “the viewer” when focusing our attention on a (usually theoretical) human interacting with/perceiving/reading an inscription. Indeed, a growing emphasis on the viewer has been at the forefront of some of the most creative work on epigraphy in recent years (riffing on the same turn in art history), and as de la Escosura Balbás et al. point out in Chapter 4, the integration of ideas of the viewer into our discussion of epigraphic monuments marked a key inflection point in thinking about epigraphy as monuments, rather than solely as documentary sources. The concept is powerful. But it is fundamentally focused on sight, and the papers here draw our attention to just how incomplete a framework this is for expressing the totality of human engagement with an inscribed object and its broader context. Indeed, although Jackson Williams, de la Escosura et al., and Luci frame their discussions of epigraphic landscapes in terms of “the viewer”, when their chapters are placed into dialogue with Cenati et al.’s systematic, self-conscious exploration of the role of each human sense in an epigraphic encounter, we can see that they have all in fact transcended the notion of epigraphy mediated through sight alone. Even while their discussions are rooted in what a person sees (and unquestionably sight is the most immediate and obvious sense we use to encounter inscriptions), their phenomenological methodologies, with an emphasis on landscape, perspective, and above all on movement towards, from, and around epigraphic monuments, mean that fundamentally they are not basing their interpretations in the viewpoints of static, disembodied eyes, but rather around human bodies in motion. Perhaps a better term than “viewer” for what is happening here would be “perceiver” – though that still does not do justice to the sorts of active, bodily encounters that are highlighted by Mullen (and which are perhaps easiest for us to grasp when speaking about small, handle-able objects such as spindle whorls as opposed to large-scale stone monuments – but which nonetheless clearly should be placed at the heart of our conceptions for both).

Capacities of epigraphic language

The inscriptions dealt with in this volume vary from poetic texts dozens of lines long to laconic messages composed of a single word or a few letters. The authors of each chapter approach these texts and their language in a variety of different ways, but what becomes clear is that the capacity of an epigraphic text to convey meaning is not dependent on its length, and that the qualities of epigraphic language enable mechanisms of communication unique to the medium of inscriptions. This is particularly true of short inscriptions. Often abbreviated or condensed in their language, either shortening words or indeed skipping them altogether, they have not usually been read by scholars for much beyond the simple extraction of information, and certainly not close read. What the chapters here show, however, is that close reading of shorter texts is not merely possibly, but necessary, and that, rather than being a barrier to communication, the characteristics of their language can be seen as “a feature, not a bug”, in that they open up ways of delivering semantically complex messages that are not possible in other forms of writing.

Let us consider, for example, the phenomenon of epigraphic formulae. Repetitious, conventionalised language is near-ubiquitous in inscriptions – indeed, it is one of the key characteristics of the medium across time and place, from the royal titulatures of Achaemenid monuments to the “Estd.” or “R.I.P.” of the present-day. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes, and formulaic epigraphic language, through its sheer ubiquity, becomes an afterthought for scholarship. We pay heed instead to the elements that stand out to us as individual; we discuss not the votum solvit libens merito (or more commonly VSLM) on a given Roman votive altar, but the name of the deity, the identity of the dedicator. Unless we choose to reproduce the whole text of the inscription, the dedicatory formula may not even be mentioned, elided over in academic analysis even as its presence lurks behind – is indeed fundamentally implicated in – our very identification of the votive as a votive. And this of course is the key point: formulaic language on inscriptions may render any one particular text seemingly “uninteresting”, but in the aggregate, formulae, far from diluting the effectiveness of inscriptions, are in fact what endow them with social potency. Each time a formula is used, its semant...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Editor’s acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: thoughts on the nature of inscriptions
• 2. Towards a theoretical model of the epigraphic landscape
• 3. Materializing epigraphy: archaeological and sociolinguistic approaches to Roman inscribed spindle whorls
• 4. Written to be (un)read, written to be seen: beyond Latin codes in Latin epigraphy
• 5. Epigraphic strategies of communication: the visual accusative of Roman Republican dedications of spoils
• 6. Inscribing the artistic space: blurred boundaries on Romano-British tombstones
• 7. When poetry comes to its senses: inscribed Roman verse and the human sensorium
• 8. Lassi viatores: poetic consumption between Martial’s Epigrams and the Carmina Latina Epigraphica
• 9. Epigraphy and critical fabulation: imagining narratives of Greco-Roman sexual slavery