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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 April 28, 2025 at 5:15, Roger Chartier will present: “Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-Century French Incas.”
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.”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 4, 2025, through this form.
Eligibility:
1) For undergraduates: essays must have been written in Spring 2024, Fall 2024, or Spring 2025 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: Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor, History of Art; Julie Nelson Davis, Professor, History of Art; Deven M. Patel, Associate Professor, South Asia Studies; Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor, English
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.
