| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
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Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)
We meet each Monday on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also live-stream our events via Zoom. For updates and Zoom links, please sign up for our listserv; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On November 25, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Thomas Rainer (University of Basel, Switzerland) will present “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts.”
Since antiquity, polished writing has been linked to polished fingernails. The poetic metaphor “ad unguem politus”—polished to the nail—was also visually expressed in late antique author portraits. Ancient nail art took on a new life in the early Middle Ages, when the knives that were used for cutting fingernails were also used for sharpening quills and removing flaws and errors on parchment by scratching and polishing. My talk will reconstruct this material and metaphoric link by looking at the polished nails of medieval evangelists in Insular and Carolingian Gospel books. To envision the perfect harmony of the sacred text, sharpened nails glide over the smoothly polished writing support without stumbling over the gap of the gutter. They sparkle with silver polish imitating the claws of the evangelist’s beasts. From the Mac Durnan Gospels to the Cutbercht Gospels and the Codex Millenarius, nail art, polish, poetry, and ornament are explored. Thomas Rainer studied art history and ancient history at the University of Innsbruck and Freiburg im Breisgau and received his PhD from the University of Innsbruck in 2008. From 2008 to 2018 he was a curator at the Bavarian Administration of Palaces, Gardens and Lakes in Munich and from 2020 to 2024, he was a research fellow at the SNSF research project Textures of Sacred Scripture at the University of Zurich, in which capacity he coordinated the material analytical studies on dyes, pigments, and metal inks in Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Austrian National Library, the St. Gallen Abbey Library, the Bamberg State Library and the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel. Since 2024, he has been Managing Director and Program Coordinator of the Center for the Theory and History of the Image, eikones, at the University of Basel. He is currently completing a monograph on Carolingian and Ottonian purple manuscripts and is working on a new book project on the image of the codex and the scroll in Christian and Jewish art.The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.
The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.
Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
