Geniza Documents after the Material Turn

What some have called the “material turn” in textual studies is a move to consider manuscripts and printed works not merely as vehicles for textual information but as artifacts in their own right. Goitein anticipated the material turn in a limited way: by paying attention to diplomatics, the study of the textual structures and non-textual patterns shared by corpora of documents. But he did so only in his unpublished work, and even there, he did so sporadically. In the 1960s and 1970s, one might have omitted diplomatics from writings on an arcane cache of texts in three no less arcane languages for reasons sound and less sound. The less sound reasons were Anglophone scholarship’s habitual relegation of the Hilfswissenschaften (“ancillary disciplines” of history, such as codicology, paleography, and diplomatics) to second-class status — the stuff of notes and appendices, not of historical narrative.

Material culture studies have, to some extent, brought the Hilfswissenschaften out of scholarly apparatuses and into historical narrative, and the endemic problems of premodern history — lack of information and desperation for it — have made this approach particularly promising for medieval documents. As well, a prior and prerequisite turn — the linguistic — has inspired medievalists to pay attention to scribal practices and to read texts as opaque ciphers rather than transparent messages.

What, then, would a geniza-based diplomatic turn look like? Thanks to the advent of digital imaging, this is no longer an abstract question. This paper will survey some recent developments in the study of the scribal habits, documentary lifecycles and archival practices Geniza sources reflect. It will also survey some unexplored areas such as the diffusion, manufacture, exchange and recycling of the medieval Middle East’s most important technological adaptation, without which Goitein’s documents would not have come to exist: paper.