In letter 32 addressed to Sulpicius Severus, Paulinus of Nola offers his friend several tituli to be inscribed into the religious complex of Primuliacum – “immaterial” inscriptions almost contradictions in their own terms. Each titulus has both a specific location and use: commentaries concerning the portraits of Martin of Tours and Paulinus were to be painted (or engraved) in the main basilica, one inscription was composed for the baptistery, three funerary epitaphs in memory of Saint Clair, one of them to be placed close to the saint’s grave. The display of Primuliacum has never been archaeologically confirmed and there is no evidence, in the letters between the Aquitanian aristocrat and the bishop of Nola, that these inscriptions actually took shape and place anywhere but in the leaf of the letter and its copies. Nevertheless, Paulinus genuinely composed and created “inscriptions” there. That is, they undeniably exist as inscriptions whatever their degree of material accomplishment. In other words, one can consider texts being inscriptions thanks to its project and intention; that means as a potentiality. In this regard, epigraphical materiality is not limited to its physical qualities (i.e.: material and setting); materiality is also a matter of evocations or/and references, for instance thanks to the use of deitic markers in a literary composition transmitted in manuscripts. Moreover, the ekphrasis process within poetic discourses brings the inscription to life insofar as it is textually displayed, no matter if this description responds to an archaeological reality or to the poet’s imagination. The very notion of materiality leads to further extend the “life-cycle of the inscription” – from its abstract inception to its physically evidence and its long ongoing – and to consider its divers ways of existence (i.e. inscriptions found in a medieval sylloge). Materiality thus reveals that inscriptions could be complex and dynamic phenomena rather than a petrified thing.

What can an inscription be? From writing will to written matter

The process of textual creation clearly counts as a crucial phase in the existence of the inscription. This genetic approach invites to consider the intention of the message, its composition, its authorship as part of the writing act, even before the making process (i.e. sequences of technical actions onto the material). Thus, the dedicator and the author of the text may be a same person: Sidonius Apollinaris for example, who worried about the possible mistakes the lapicide could make in the engraving of the text he composed for his grandfather’s tomb.¹ But the textual composition may also be the result of a request to an artisan of verses whose authorship could be overshadowed by the dedicators or dedicatee’s fame, as it happened with some of Venantius Fortunat’s carmina epigraphica commissioned by the Merovingian aristocracy. Regarding less elite practices, it is also worth considering the possibility of “formulae books” used by the carvers themselves; in such a context, process of textual creation appears more streamlined and brought back to the place of the artefacts production. This is at least what epigraphic series showing recurrent formulae and graphic and monumental homogeneity reveal. The analysis of these archaeological evidences is the only path toward a better understanding of the organization of epigraphic work, tasks and workshops for Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, where literary sources remain silent. Considering Late Antique Gaul only, epigraphic workshops are identified for the cities of Vienna, Trier, and Arles. This creation process can be more and less mediated, and involves diverse actors, sometimes difficult to identify (author, dedicator, craftsman), and diverse writing actions (handwritten drafts and minutes, painted inscriptions); but the possibility of a strict autography should be considered as well. This question is often raised about graffities, such as pilgrim graffities traced into the church walls. Even for this practice, a priori more spontaneous, the possibility of a mediating hand has also to be explored. There is consequently nothing obvious or systematic about the genesis of an inscription: the process always depends on the actors’ involvement in written culture, on the nature of the message, on its context, but also on the features of the material and the actions it dictates. There is little to compare between letters shaped by the material itself on a mosaic or on fabric (where tesserae and threads “build” the lettering), and a stone inscription which is often the result of removing material (the engraving gesture shapes the letters in the material, as inscribere etymologically means). The written label on seals obeys an even more complex process involving the lead matrix with its mirror text and its infinite reproducibility on wax. Regardless the techniques involved in the making process, it appears that signs and matter are consubstantial: that is, the life of matter is tied on the life of words, and vice versa. In many aspects, inscriptions can thus be defined as “written matter,” with all the vitality contained in the notion of “matter,” rather than as a finite object. Material lens invites to consider the inscription beyond the conditions of its realization but also for its becoming.

Lives of material: inscription as “palimpsests” The emphasis on writing material led to admit that inscriptions as matter (with its own properties) can be transformed without challenging neither its authenticity nor its epigraphical identity, no matter what survives from its origin: this is nothing less than an archaeological principle which recognizes the evidence from past as a “palimpsest of time”. Connecting the life of written matter to its milieu leads to the identification of its various uses and reuses and so significations over time. In fact, inscriptions might appear as “palimpsests of meanings” with an “ingoing-historicity.” Lastly, by recognizing a wider sense to epigraphical materiality, the trajectory of the inscription is extended, and it multiplies its living environments as parallel dimensions. As a conclusive example, figure 1,2,3 shows the “story” of a late antique inscription seen during the visit in 2018 of the storage of the epigraphical collection of Ludgunum Musem (Lyon). In this sort of purgatory of objects, among coffers gathering epigraphical fragments, the rest of a Christian epitaph – AD 479 – has inspired a contemporary work of art one year later, in 2019, in Madrid (exhibition Sendas Epigraficas, Casa de Velázquez).² This ancient epitaph did not physically move from Lyon. Artist Marie Bonnin relied on the museum photographs in the same way that the historian bases its work on the noticefrom epigraphic corpus to write. Both freed the inscription from its context and put it back in play in an artistic discourse and in a new historical perspective. Clearly, the life of AD 479 did not stand still in a museum and it will be extended in each reproduction of the work of art Pruebas in the catalogue of exhibition, on the artist’s website and so on. This anecdote highlights three important features of inscriptions: a very long and still unfinished life; an existence transcending a unique form of materiality; and its ability to generate experiences and practices in its milieux, that is for its opening affordances.

Primary works

• Sidoine Apollinaire, Lettres, ed. and tr. A. Loyen, Paris, 1970.

References

• Baratte, Fr., 2017: “Les inscriptions dans le décor des églises paléochrétiennes : l’exemple de Paulin de Nole à Cimitile”, in: Corbier, M., Sauron, G., ed., Langages et communications. Écrits, images et sons, Paris, p. 27-33.
• Bailey, G., 2006: “Time perspectives, palimpsests and the archaeology of time”, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2006, p. 198-223.
• Cooley, A., 2000: “The life-cycle of inscriptions”, in: A. Cooley ed. The afterlife of inscriptions. Reusing, rediscovering, reinventing, revitalizing Ancient Inscriptions, BICS Sup. 75, p. 1-10.
• Debiais, V., 2013: “The poem of Baudri for Countess Adele: a starting point for a reading of Medieval latin Ekphrasis”, Viator, 44, p. 95-106.
• Handley, M., 2003: Death, Society and Culture : Inscriptions and Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain, AD 300-750, Oxford, p. 27-28.
• Herbert de La Port-Barré-Viard, G., 2006: Descriptions monumentales et discours sur l’édification chez Paulin de Nole. Le regard et la lumière (epist. 32 et carm. 27 et 28), Leiden-Boston.
• Ingold, T., 2013: Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, New-York.
• Mallon, J. J., 1955: “L’ordinatio des inscriptions”, CRAI, 1955, p. 126-136.
• Pietri, L., 1992: “Venance Fortunat et ses commanditaires : un poète italien dans la société gallo-franque”, Committenti e funzione artistico-letteraria nell’alto medioevo occidentale, Settimane 39, Spolète, p. 729-754.

Notes

1. Letter to Secundus, Epist. III, 12, 469.
2. The book resulting from this project is available in openaccess on this UN@ platform: https://una-editions.fr/traversees/