| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
| HMT | About | Search | Events | Impact |
|---|
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 February 24, 2025 at 5:15 PM, Georgios Boudalis (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Greece) will present: “Books in Late Antiquity: Their Making, Depiction, and Interpretation.”
This presentation will explore the codex book formats used in late antiquity, focusing primarily on wax tablet codices and multi-quire codices, as well as their depiction in the art of the time. Through the analysis of iconographic and archaeological evidence, we will examine the distinct characteristics of these codices and consider how wax tablet codices may have influenced the development of multi-quire codices. Lastly, I will argue that the way books are depicted and how we interpret these representations are influenced by our knowledge of books—both contemporary and historical. A limited understanding of how books were made and used can result in misinterpretations or overinterpretations of these artistic depictions.
Georgios Boudalis is senior book conservator at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki/Greece. He has worked and conducted research in various manuscript collections including those of the monasteries of Mount Athos and Sinai. He completed his PhD in 2005 on the evolution of Byzantine and post-Byzantine bookbinding and has since published on issues of codicology, bookbinding archeology, and manuscript conservation. His main interests are the evolution of bookbinding techniques in the Eastern Mediterranean and how this can be studied using a combination of physical, written, and iconographical evidence. He has been a visiting scholar and professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York and an invited Museum Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and he is currently a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published two books, The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity (Bard Graduate Center, 2018) and On the Edge: Endbands in the Bookbinding Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean (Legacy Press, 2023). He is currently working on his next book dedicated to Byzantine bookbindings.
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.
