Department of English

• Monday, April 28, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are delighted that Roger Chartier (Collège de France/University of Pennsylvania) will close our year by giving a talk called “Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-Century French Incas.”

Professor Chartier writes:

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 Aza were supposedly composed in the threads of Peruvian quipus, 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 cords and knots? Were quipus actually Inca letters? This seminar will examine the contradictory answers to these questions and will also make an inventory of the actual or possible information about the quipus available in eighteenth-century France—and Europe. My analysis will focus on the different interpretations of the quipus (as accounting tools, as memorial devices, or as narrative “writing”) that are still debated today by anthropologists. 

This seminar is a tribute to Joan Dejean, who bequeathed several copies of Graffigny’s novel to Penn’s library, and it follows upon the Material Texts seminar I devoted in 2023 to Garcilaso de la Vega’s Commentarios Reales, a book which was the main source of knowledge on the Incas read by eighteenth-century readers (and among them Graffigny). It is also a contribution to the series of seminars and research projects devoted to nonalphabetic writings and non-phonetic scripts: wooden tallies, notched calendar sticks, birchbarks, wampum, and quipus. 

Roger Chartier is Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania (and Emeritus Professor of the Collège de France). His most recent books are Editer et traduire: Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Gallimard and Seuil, 2021); Cartes et fictions (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Editions du Collège de France, 2022); and L’histoire en mutation: Lectures (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2024). In 2022, The University of Pennsylvania Press published his book Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe, translated by John H. Pollack, in the series “Material Texts.”