Who Makes Holy Writing? Authority, Ritual, and Material Practice in Religious Scribal Cultures
(Free University Berlin / Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz)
International Conference 15-17 February 2027
Deadline for abstracts 15 October 2026
This international conference will take place from 15–17 February 2027 in Berlin. It is organised as part of the research initiative Shaping Holiness at Freie Universität Berlin in cooperation with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and religious traditions, the workshop aims to foster comparative and transdisciplinary perspectives on the production of sacred writings and the people who created them.
Who is entitled to write a holy text? What transforms an ordinary writer into a religious authority? Is it ritual purity, technical expertise, theological learning, artistic mastery, or moral integrity? And how do religious communities define, regulate, and negotiate these expectations?
Across many religious traditions, the production of holy writings has never been understood as a purely technical activity. Whether copying Torah scrolls, Qurʾāns, Buddhist sutras, biblical manuscripts, liturgical books, ritual inscriptions, or other sacred texts, scribes were expected to embody particular forms of knowledge, discipline, and religious commitment. Yet the authority of the scribe was neither fixed nor universal. It was continually shaped through ritual practice, legal norms, material expertise, communal expectations, and individual acts of devotion.
This conference invites scholars to explore the making of the sacred scribe across religious traditions and historical periods. Rather than focusing exclusively on manuscripts as finished objects, we seek to examine the people who produced them and the religious, social, legal, and material worlds in which they worked. How were scribes trained? Who was permitted to write? Which bodies, gestures, emotions, intentions, and forms of knowledge were considered essential? How were mistakes corrected, authority established, and expertise transmitted? And what can marginal notes, glosses, corrections, and colophons tell us about the everyday realities of religious writing?
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
- Who becomes a scribe? Authority, vocation, education, apprenticeship, and the transmission of scribal knowledge.
- The ideal scribe. Ethical virtues, religious authority, discipline, emotions, self-cultivation, and models of exemplary scribes.
- Bodies of writing. Ritual purity, bodily practices, gestures, posture, voice, intention), prayer, and devotion.
- Writing under rules. Legal prescriptions, ritual regulations, permissions, prohibitions, correction, error, censorship, and textual authority.
- Craft and creativity. Calligraphy, artistic expertise, material practices, writing technologies, and the relationship between technical skill and religious legitimacy.
- Communities of scribes. Scriptoria, workshops, networks, patronage, collaboration, and the social organisation of religious writing.
- Margins of sacred writing. Glosses, annotations, corrections, ownership notes, colophons, readers’ interventions, and other traces of scribal practice.
- Gender and religious authority. Women, lay specialists, monastic communities, hereditary scribes, and contested forms of scribal legitimacy.
- Cross-religious encounters and responses. Mutual perceptions, critiques, adaptations, and exchanges between religious traditions and their scribal practices; the ways such encounters shaped concepts of sacred writing, textual authority, and scribal culture.
- Changing scribal worlds. Scribes between manuscript and print, digital technologies.
- Comparative perspectives. New methodological approaches to studying scribes across religious, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
We particularly welcome contributions that move beyond the study of individual traditions and engage with broader comparative, methodological, or theoretical questions. Papers addressing living religious traditions alongside historical case studies are equally encouraged.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words, together with a short academic biography (max. 150 words), to amartini@zedat.fu-berlin.de by 15. October.
Successful applicants will be notified by 31. October.
Travel expenses and accommodation will be provided for all invited speakers.