Handmade: Scribal Work, Kabbalistic Textuality, and Knowledge Practices in East-Central Europe (1500-1750)

Handmade aims at providing the first comprehensive study on the material circulation of Jewish mystical and magical texts that were handwritten in the early modern East-Central Europe, combining methodological perspectives of the history of knowledge, material textuality, and historical network analysis.

This project intends to yield an in-depth study of the relations between practical and speculative types of knowledge as represented in kabbalistic manuscripts. It shifts emphasis from seeking fixed intellectual origins of traditions toward processes and materialities through which bodies of religious knowledge became authorised and culturally meaningful in their historical contexts. The book project focuses on the strategies of kabbalistic information management and textual production within a context of contemporary scribal practices in Eastern and Central Europe. This approach allows also for a nuanced picture of gender construction of kabbalistic and practical discourses. It enables a critical recognition of those texts that have been rejected or marginalised against the textual canon but legitimised by traditional philological practices and built largely on heteronormative structures of power of literary authority.