Roger Chartier (Collège de France), Strings and Knots: Enlightened Quipus

Date: Tuesday 10 November
Time: 17:00
Venue: Maison Française d'Oxford

Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne printed in 1747 and reprinted with some additions in 1752, was a great success with several sequels, immediate translations, and theatrical adaptations.  The first seventeen letters written by Zilia, daughter of the Sun, to the prince Inca Aza, were supposedly composed with the threads and knots  of Peruvian quiipus, before Zilia learned to write in French.  During a time of an "Inca fever" in France, begun by Rameau and Voltaire, Graffigny's fiction fascinated critics and readers. Could Zilia express ideas and sentiments with threads  and knots? Were quipus actually Inca letters? This seminar will examine the contradictory answers to these questions, from Raimondo de Sangro to the Encyclopédie.  It will also focus on  the information about the quipus available in eighteenth-century France and Europe thanks to the translations and readings of the chronicles of the Conquest and, in particular, Garcilaso de la Vega's Commentarios Reales. It will be  also a contribution to the historical reflection about non-alphabetic writings and non-phonetic scripts.