Approaching diplomatic and courtly gift-giving in Europe and Mughal India. Shared practices and cultural diversity

This article deals with courtly gift-giving practices in Europe and Mughal India from a comparative and interwoven perspective. Given the historiographical lacunae on Mughal gift-giving, the article presents preliminary observations for further research. Unlike most contributions to this volume, this article understands the notion of diversity in terms of an intercultural diversity that came to the fore in courtly contexts and in diplomatic encounters. My arguments are bifold. On the one hand, European and Mughal rulers and their envoys shared a common ground of diplomatic gift-giving practices that were shaped by an understanding of what was worthy of giving and of the symbolic power of the given objects. On the other hand, courtly gift-giving practices were embedded in different social and cultural environments in Europe and India. By looking at the notion of the ‘gift’ and the social organisation of the Mughal elite, it becomes clear that pīshkash was an idiosyncratic concept in South and Central Asian contexts and that offerings of manṣabdārs to the Mughal emperor had a different character than those of European courtiers to their rulers.

Early versions in medieval textual traditions. Wolfram’s Parzival as a test case

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s novel Parzival is a courtly romance composed in German language shortly after 1200. In a project, based at the University of Bern, a new critical edition of the poem is prepared in electronic and printed form. It visualizes parallel textual versions, which, depending on particular circumstances of oral performance, have developed in the early stage of the poem’s transmission. Philological research as well as phylogenetic techniques common in the natural sciences, e.g. in molecular biology, have been used to demonstrate the existence of these early textual versions. The article shows how both methods work and how they are applied to the ongoing edition. Exemplary passages to be presented include the text of some rare fragments written in the first decades of the 13th century, which might even go back to the author’s lifetime and which allow to date the existence of the versions they belong to.

New Philology and the Biogenetics of Texts

The discussion on the New Philology triggered by French and North American scholars in the last decade of the 20th century emphasized the material character of textual transmission inside and outside the written evidences of medieval manuscripts by downgrading the active role of the historical author. However, the reception of the ideas propagated by the New Philology adherents was rather divided. Some researchers considered it to be the result of an academic “crisis” (R.T. Pickens) or questioned its innovative status (K. Stackmann: “Neue Philologie?”); others appreciated the “new attitudes to the page” it had brought to mind (J. Bumke after R.H. and M.A, Rouse) or even saw a new era of the “powers of philology” evoked (H.-U. Gumbrecht). Besides the debates on the New Philology another concept of textual materiality strengthened in the last decade, maintaining that textual alterations somewhat relate to biogenetic mutations. In a matter of fact, phenomena such as genetic and textual variation, gene recombination and ‘contamination’ (the mixing of different exemplars in one manuscript text) share common features. The paper discusses to what extent the biogenetic concepts can be used for evaluating manifestations of textual production (as the approach of ‘critique génétique’ does) and of textual transmission (as the phylogenetic analysis of manuscript variation does). In this context yet the genealogical concept of stemmatology – the treelike representation of textual development abhorred by the New Philology adepts – might prove to be useful for describing the history of texts. The textual material to be analyzed will be drawn from the Parzival Project, which is currently preparing a new electronic edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival novel written shortly after 1200 and transmitted in numerous manuscripts up to the age of printing. Researches of the project have actually resulted in suggesting that the advanced knowledge of the manuscript transmission yields a more precise idea on the author’s own writing process.