Seminar on Early Chinese Manuscripts (ECM)
The seminar will provide the basic tools to investigate the nature of ECM. Palaeographic
materials recently unearthed in tombs dating from the 5th to 2nd century B.C. are
changing our perception of early Chinese thought, adding many important pieces of
information about the cultural debate between the late-Zhou period and early Imperial
China. The seminar is divided in five sessions:
1) The impact in the field of early Chinese intellectual history of the discovery of a large
corpus of manuscripts on bamboo, wood and silk;
2) Form and content: the relationships between codicological aspects and hermeneutics;
3) The early Chinese writing system as reflected in manuscripts sources. Methodological
approaches and the basic research tools to decipher and interpret the graphs in ECM;
4) Where philology, codicology, paleography and hermeneutics meet. Manuscript
multiple versions of a transmitted text: the example of the Laozi 老子
5) Reading and interpreting manuscript versions of non transmitted texts: the Xing zi
ming chu 性自命出, theWuxing 五行 and the Lu Mu gong wen Zisi 魯穆公問子思.