Photo by Robert Gill, Dartmouth College
‘Parchment-Packages’ in The Jewish Jesus Class:
Pedagogical Practices in the Digital Age
JWST 74.01/REL 57.02/MES 17.08
By Deborah Forger
Dartmouth College
Before the pandemic struck, I had planned to engage my students in a parchment-making exercise, bringing in, to my knowledge, the one and only parchment making company in all of North America, Pergamena, to my course on the Jewish Jesus. As a recent hire at the institution where I now work, several persons had warned me that undergraduates here are notoriously skittish about taking classes with new faculty. As a result, I designed this out-of-the-box activity to stimulate initial interest in the course. Yet once students enrolled my aim was greater: I not only wanted to introduce them to the complicated nature of our ancient extant witnesses but also to get them thinking about the very physicality—or materiality—of these extant sources themselves.
In fields related to ancient Judaism and Christianity, there has been a proliferation of recent studies that discuss the very ‘material’ nature of our ancient documents and that complicate the very notion of the ‘Bible’ as a ‘book’—at least in Jesus’ own day. When Jesus arrives on the scene in the first century CE, for instance, the technology to create a book did not yet exist. So, the various parts of the Bible as we think of it today were preserved and circulated on individual scrolls, often made from papyrus or parchment sheets, and written on with rudimentary pens and early forms of ink. My parchment-making exercise was intended to expose students to these innovative discussions in scholarship without requiring them to read copious amounts of secondary sources. Instead, I wanted students to experience the physical nature of our sources and to reflect upon the oftentimes painstakingly laborious processes by which they were created, transcribed, copied, transmitted, circulated, preserved, and maintained.
When the unanticipated arrival of the novel coronavirus forced both students and faculty off-campus just two weeks before our spring quarter was about to commence, I brainstormed quickly with Sarah Smith, who directs Dartmouth’s Book Arts Studio, about how to transfer this parchment-making exercise directly to my students’ homes. Since the original activity was designed to engage the totality of my students’ senses, I was eager to preserve the embodied elements of the experience even though the class would now be offered entirely online. After considering several options we decided to send out ‘parchment-packages’ via postal mail directly to my students’ homes. These parchment-packages included the following: two sheets of parchment, two sheets of papyrus, one reed pen, one cured goose feather, one snap-off knife, and one bottle of waterproof ink. Since so much of my own interest in the ancient world has been fostered by encounters with various forms of material culture, I wanted to ensure that even though my students would be taking this class virtually, they would still have tangible materials to see, touch, feel, and even smell. My aim was to concretize our digital classroom, thereby enabling some aspect of the ancient world to touch our own.
To prepare students for this special session, I posted a number of resources onto our Canvas site: brief video clips about the history of papyrus, parchment, ink, and pens; short readings about the various physical materials from which these entities were made; and historical timelines offering a birds’ eye view of when the various technologies related to book-making and its precursors emerged. From these resources, students learned how the stalks of a papyrus plant were grown, harvested, cut into strips, and assembled into a grid-like pattern such that, by combining two layers together, one vertical and one horizontal, persons could create the papyrus sheets that were commonly employed in antiquity as a relatively inexpensive writing medium, at least in comparison to parchment. Similarly, they watched as salt-laced animal skins were first washed, then soaked in lime, then pealed of hair, then stretched and scrapped of their flesh with a large knife, and finally dried, cut, and sanded after an approximately four-week process to create the parchment fragments that we are familiar with today. They also discovered the importance of oak galls for ink-making, especially in medieval manuscripts. Oak galls are hard round balls that emerge from an oak tree instead of the expected acorns when a particular type of wasp lays its eggs on an oak tree. To create ink from them, oak galls are crushed, combined with rainwater, left to sit for days, and then mixed with gum arabic, which functions like an adhesive, enabling the ink to stick to the parchment. They also learned about the history of reed pens, already in use by Egyptian scribes in the fourth century BCE, as well as the later quill pens that gradually started to replace them. After gleaning some insights from this background information, I then invited my students to work with these physical materials themselves.
Once all the parchment packages had arrived at my students’ respective homes, I invited them to begin engaging with their contents in an asynchronous manner. I encouraged them to soak the papyrus in water, to pull it apart, and to reassemble it. Then I asked them to be patient and to wait, allowing it to dry out fully to be used it again. I invited them to handle the parchment, feeling its smooth and fuzzy sides, thereby calling to mind the very flesh and hairy sides of the animal from which it was made. In video clips posted on Canvas, I showed them how to use the snap-off knife to create their own pens, first soaking the end of a reed in water and then slicing it down and hollowing it out to create a tapered end. I also encouraged them to follow a similar process with the end of the quill feather, thereby comparing the early and later dating technologies.
After creating these rudimentary tools, more fun was to be had. I encouraged my students to write, craft, create, and stitch various items together. Every single one of my students chose to experiment with writing on these materials, dipping their reed and quill pens into their ink and comparing how easy or difficult it was to compose a text on parchment versus papyrus. But some went a step further. Many students wrote messages with non-English scripts: Hebrew was a frequent favorite. Others rolled up their parchment and papyrus sheets, bounding them with string or other materials to mimic an ancient scroll. Still others chose to cut up their papyrus and parchment sheets. Some attempted to stitch them together into something akin to an early codex. While others made novel creations of their own.
After everyone had had the time to experience these materials asynchronously, in a follow-up synchronous session conducted over Zoom, my students gathered to discuss what they had learned. It was a bit surreal to talk about the materiality of our ancient extant documents by means of the internet, when by the simple click of a key we could communicate with each other, even seeing each other instantaneously, from our various locations around the world. But perhaps because we were now all so newly operating in this digital environment that this exercise, which emphasized the physical, the concrete, the material, was a success. So many of my students expressed their appreciation for the ability to work with something tangible: it made them feel more grounded, they said, in our digital age.
All too often our academic work emphasizes the cerebral over the corporeal, the mind over the senses, the intellect over the body. But I reject these false dichotomies. By creating a pedagogical experience in which my students’ eyes could see, their ears could hear, their hands could touch, and their noses could smell the pungent odors often associated these materials, I introduced them to the very materiality of our ancient extant sources and the complex and oftentimes laborious processes by which they were made. Our work together thus illustrated what non-Western cultures have long known and which the recent proliferation of scholarship on the senses has made clear. Epistemology is not the exclusive purview of the mind: our bodies also enable us to know.
Deborah Forger is a postdoctoral scholar (2018-2021) in the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College.
Kits for Jewish Jesus — Summer 2020
From Blick— https://www.dickblick.com/
$3.59 each—sheet of papyrus — 8” x 12” light— #:11239-1003 o cut in 2; one for writing on, one for soaking and reassembling https://www.dickblick.com/products/black-ink-egyptian-papyrus-paper/
$3.77 each—bottle of ink—Higgins Black Magic—#:21103-2003 https://www.dickblick.com/products/higgins-waterproof-black-magic-ink/
$3.45 each—small Richeson bamboo reed pen— #:04898-1001 https://www.dickblick.com/products/richeson-bamboo-reed-pens/
$1.44 each—Alvin break-off knife— #:57514-1100 https://www.dickblick.com/products/alvin-break-off-blade-knives/
From John Neal Books
$3.50 each—cured goose quill (for students to cut and make a pen out of) https://www.johnnealbooks.com/product/uncut-cured-goose-quill
From Talas
$3.60-$4.04 per large sheet—Zerkall Book paper—wove and laid o cut up into 6 smaller sheets—one sheet per student
https://www.talasonline.com/Zerkall-Book-Paper
From Pergamena Leathers and Parchment
$30 per ½ pound—parchment piece—scrap so it is irregular or visibly skin https://www.pergamena.net/quick-buy/assorted-parchment-scraps
$15.75 (minus shipping) for each student