No.190 Seminar ： Investigations in the Archives: Digital Approaches to the Study of Buddhist Manuscripts from Medieval Japan
- Associate Professor Gaétan RAPPO (Hakubi 10th batch, Institute for Research in Humanities)
- 2020/12/22 4:30pm
- ZOOM (Closed)
- Japanese
Summary
Over the past few years, “archive” has become an important keyword in historical studies. This new focus on the material side of historical sources, combined with the development of digital history―and especially manuscripts―has allowed us to move beyond tendencies to reduce such documents to their contents, and to embrace their value not only as containers, but also as cultural objects with their own history.
In this presentation, I will show how I applied this approach to my studies on medieval Japanese religions. I will first detail the process of making digital editions of manuscripts, highlighting the specific challenges of Japanese religious texts. As a whole, this presentation will try to demonstrate how digital tools, combined with the traditional methods of historical research, have the potential to dispel well-diffused misconceptions or over-simplifications of history. This will be highlighted in the last part, where I will how digital editions can be help with authorship attribution, and in turn allow us to actually see how ideas circulated between texts, without the shackles of sectarian boundaries.