| 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 Workshop began in January, 1993. (Information about talks from 1993–1995, before email records, is more thin, often limited only to speaker and date. We are very grateful to Carolyn Jacobson, who provided that information from her contemporary paper notes. If you have further information about titles or abstracts for these talks, 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. (If you are outside the US, please email us to get on the list, as this link only works for those within the US.) Please see our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years. Thank you for your support and attendance!
March 30. Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College), “Expelling European Jews? The Printing and Reprinting of a Renaissance Costume Book.” "In general, Renaissance costume books were surprisingly egalitarian in their depictions of the clothing of “almost” (poene) the entire world, as one such book puts it. Some few were organized alphabetically, as in the Latin-French version of François Desprez’s French costume book, published in a Latin translation in Antwerp in 1572, where the “Aegyptius,” “Aegyptius Mulier” and the black “Aethiops” precede the representation of any European. And although compilers introduced a variety of hierarchical sequences, for instance beginning with the Holy Roman Emperor or a Venetian doge, they often followed the organization of map-makers, who moved from the Northwest (e.g. England or the Low Countries) to the East (the Ottoman Empire). The first edition of Abraham de Bruyn’s Habiti starts with Antwerp commoners and the encyclopedic impulse worked powerfully against any hierarchy of nations and sometimes even of their inhabitants’ social status. The central principle of costume books was place: belongingness (the heimlich) was the crucial defining feature of who could be represented. A man or woman came from Florence or Mainz or Brittany or Catalonia or Hadrianapolis. But where did Jews belong? They were repeatedly depicted in the cosmopolitan world of the Ottoman Empire. But their presence in Europe was simply erased from the genre. There were, however, two exceptions to this general rule: Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus, first printed in Padua in 1589, and Abraham de Bruyn’s Omnium poene gentium imagines, first printed in Cologne in 1577. Our talk will be concerned with the appearance, erasure and reappearance of European Jews in multiple copies (and three “editions”) of de Bruyn’s costume book." Ann Rosalind Jones is Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Smith College. Her scholarship focuses on early modern European literature, with particular attention to women’s writing, translation, and the intersections of text and material culture. She is the author of The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 and translator and editor (with Margaret F. Rosenthal) of The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, America): Cesare Vecellio's 'Habiti Antichi et Moderni,' among other works. Her scholarship has been widely recognized for its contributions to feminist criticism and early modern studies, and she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. On March 28 at 2 PM EST, Prof. Jones will be delivering the Eda G. Diskant Memorial Lecture at the Philadelphia Art Museum on "Style and Status in Four Tudor Portraits." More information and a registration link can be found here: Information and Registration here Peter Stallybrass is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts, and scholarly collaborator nonpareil. His work explores the material history of books, clothing, and everyday objects, as well as the relationships between text, memory, and social life. He is the author (with Allon White) of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and (with James Green) of Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Writer, and co-editor (with Margreta de Grazia and Maureen Quilligan) of Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. His research has had a major impact on the fields of book history, early modern studies, and material culture, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Jones and Stallybrass are coauthors of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, which was awarded the Modern Language Association's 2001 James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding literary or linguistic study.
The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts is 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. And 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. Further information about the seminar, and a link to sign up for our listserv, can be found throughout this website. All are welcome to attend. 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 below. In order to be considered, submissions must be received by April 6, 2026, through this form.
Eligibility:
1) For undergraduates: essays must have been written in Spring 2025, Fall 2025, or Spring 2026 semesters; entrants must be currently enrolled at Penn.
2) For graduate students: essays must be unpublished work.
Co-Directors: Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English; John Pollack, Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center; Jerome Singerman, Senior Humanities Editor Emeritus, Penn Press
Advisory Board: Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies; Julie Nelson Davis, Professor, History of Art; Jim Duffin, Assistant University Archivist; Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor, English
Congratulations to our Spring 2025 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Norah Rami (English), “Theory of the Gothic Author”
Graduate Category:
Co-Winner: Koyna Tomar (History and Sociology of Science), “Visualizing Leprosy: Materiality and Expertise in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography”
Co-Winner: Hallie Nell Swanson (Religious Studies), “Manuscript as Picture-Pavilion: Workshop Production and Dakhni Romance”See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
