The conference on Manuscript and Medium will explore manifold aspects of medieval manuscripts in all their physicality and in an interdisciplinary context

This conference is devoted to current concern with manuscripts in all their physicality. Across the disciplines, investigators delight in the sometimes untidy, often beautiful, pages of manuscripts—bound as apparently heterogenous miscellanies, glossed and amended over the centuries, enhanced with illuminations or with printed illustrations latterly pasted in. We will be presenting papers on the topics of technical investigations of production; manuscripts and monastic communities; image and text on the manuscript page; Jewish-Christian relations and sacred books; Islam, the west, and manuscripts; manuscripts as stand-ins for sacred or political figures; the hybrid manuscript-print codex in the age of incunabula; accessibility and immateriality of the manuscript in the digital age.

Email: medievals@fordham.edu

Manuscript as Medium

The Conference will be held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus:
Leon Lowenstein Center
113 W. 60th St.
New York, NY 10023
05.03.2016 -06.03.2016

PROGRAMME:

Plenary: Jessica Brantley (Dept. of English, Yale University)
Chair: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Medieval Mediations

Concurrent Sessions

2.A Manuscripts in the Digital Age
Chair: Laura Morreale, Fordham University

Hannah Busch (Universitat Trier)
Quanticod Revisited: New Opportunities in Medieval Manuscript Research
Matthew Davis (Independent Scholar)
Recapturing the Margins: Questions of Presentation in the Development and Display of Virtual Facsimiles
Jessica Savage (Index of Christian Art, Princeton University)
The Princeton Index’s ‘Medium’ and the Immaterial Nature of Digital Work: Manuscripts Reassessed
Martha Easton (Seton Hall University)
‘If Everyone is Special, Then No One Is:’ Manuscripts for the Masses

2.B Materiality: Beyond Parchment
Chair: Joshua O’Driscoll, The Morgan Library and Museum

Nino Zchomelidse (Johns Hopkins University)
Vellum and Silk: The Medieval Conception of the Marriage Charter of Theophanu
Megan McNamee (University of Michigan)
The Geometry of the Gospels
Thomas White (University of London, Birbeck)
Systems of Fabric

2.C Organizing Knowledge
Chair: Nicholas Paul

Jonathan Wilcox (University of Iowa)
“Twice-Written Tales: Scribal Intentionality Captured through Scribal Inattention in Old English Manuscripts”
Geoffrey Clement, O.S.F. (St. Francis College)
Codex Casanatensis Ms. 1730
Sarah Noonan (Saint Mary’s College)
Navigating Unfoliated Manuscripts

Plenary: Kate Rudy (Dept. of Art History, University of St. Andrews)
Dirty Books: Approaches to Measuring Reader Response in the Late Middle Ages

Concurrent Sessions

4.A Manuscript as Agent
Chair: Roger Wieck, The Morgan Library and Museum

Michael Curschmann (Princeton University)
The Vernacularisation of Speech in Thomasin of Zerclaere’s Didactic Imagery
Maura Nolan (University of California, Berkeley)
Expressivity: Faces and Verses in Medieval Manuscripts
Andrew Albin (Fordham University)
The Manuscript is an Instrument and We Must Play

4.B Transmitting the Rule
Chair: Giorgio Pini

Scott Bruce (University of Colorado at Boulder)“Benedict’s Bedfellows: Reading the Rule in its Manuscript Context (10th-13th Centuries)”
James Clark (University of Exeter)
Huius libri… sum possessor: Monks and Books of their own in Late Medieval and Pre-Reformation England
Anna Love (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Secondo la nostra antica observantia: the Commentary to a 15th-Century Feminized Rule of St. Benedict

4.C Authors and Scribes: Making Meaning
Chair: Alex Novikoff

Marilynn Desmond (Binghamton University)
The Wax Tablet as Medium: Translation and the Composition of the Roman de Troie
Francesco Aresu (Wesleyan University)
The Marriage of Philology and Autography: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Autograph of the Teseida
Andrea Tarnowski (Dartmouth College)
Under the Rubric of Persuasion: Christine de Pizan and her Patrons

4.D Format and Meaning
Chair: Pamela Patton, The Index of Christian Art

Irene O’Daly (University of Manchester)
‘Rooted in Humility:’ Form and Function of the Arbor Caritatis et Misericordiae (Rylands Lat. 18)
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Late Medieval Posters and the Practicalities of Political Display
Marlene Hennessy (Hunter College, CUNY)
Maria in Sole in Late Medieval Scotland and the Arbuthnott Hours

Plenary: Flash Session
Chair: Nina Rowe, Fordham University

Anthony Bale (University of London, Birbeck)
The Itinerary in the Codex
Molly Bronstein (University of California, Berkeley)
Rien ne m’est plus: Widowhood Illuminated in the Roman de Troyle
Yin Liu (University of Saskatchewan)
Reading with Spaces in Early Medieval England
Judith Potter (Independent Scholar)
‘Stad Bok’ as Witness in Medieval Lubeck
Emily Runde (Les Enluminures)
Richard Hill’s Reproductions: Personalizing Reading in the Age of Print
Sarah Zeiser (Harvard University)
Selecting Script: Welsh Responses to Conquest in Cotton Faustina C.I., Part II.

Plenary: Andrew Taylor (Department of English, University of Ottawa)
Chair: Richard Gyug
Freedom and the Portable Reader: 1992 and 1281

Concurrent Sessions:

7.A The Body in the Manuscript
Chair: Suzanne Yeager