Page - 70 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

70 | Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 65–71 was a “medium”:14 it was a specific communication technique as well as a demon- stration of identity. it was important to set signs for the inner religious community as well as in the inter-religious context of the pluralist metropolis. The signs could be read as public statements of powerful women who wanted to demonstrate their agency within their families and left traces thereof outside their homes, sometimes even without being clearly identified by their names. Moreover, the signs must be read as signs of piety and praise to allah. Charity work was well established in all three religions, and the donors were male and female. finally, patronage of religious institutions was by no means a way to draw lines between religions, within one religion or between the sexes. On the contrary, it was important for the communities to remember all these donations in their official histo- riographies, Muslim or Coptic,15 shaping commemorative processes by means of cul- tural techniques of writing. in this sense, architecture and written texts both worked as media. This focus on the complex collective processes corresponds with the de- bate on practices of media as mediation.16 Reflections on materialisation as describing communication processes and collective imaginaries within material cultures can be found pointing in the same direction.17 apart from these analogies, it is still useful to separate media and materials in one aspect, namely that of mere materiality. The medieval egyptian manuscripts cited above are available today in modern editions. This is a modern form of representation that is different from the original one. This shift has to be kept in mind, as the literary scholars hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Uwe Wirth have argued.18 Gumbrecht reflects on the presence of texts in a physical haptic sense with impressions of immediacy in the process of reading. It makes an enormous difference whether one reads a line on a computer screen or a thousand-year-old paper manuscript. Wirth discusses the outer appearance of a text in columns with pre- and paratexts that influence the perception of readers and thus the understanding of the text. David Morgan and others have discussed visual cultures in the field of the study of religions. The most interesting conclusion is that many cultures do not distinguish between subject and object as modern science does.19 This is similar to Gumbrecht’s argument about the possible immediacy of perceiving a text. The manuscripts mentioned here all had a small readerships, mainly within a class of state officials and politicians. Being handwritten, they possessed a certain value to their readers, who probably studied them very carefully. To a great extent, they 14 lövheim 2013, 154–155. 15 The Jews seem to have had a different historiography, storing legal documents not to remember their actors but as religious texts to praise God. 16 lövheim 2013, 156. 17 Meyer/Morgan/Paine/Plate 2014, 105–110. 18 Gumbrecht 2004. Wirth 2012, 7–34, 19–30. 19 Morgan 2005, 33.