| 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 February 10, 2025 at 5:15 PM, Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak (New York University) will present: “Material Literacies in Action: Documentary Practices in Northwestern Europe, 800–1250.”
Material literacy, when considered through the lens of medieval documentary practices, invites a reconsideration of both “material” and “literacy.” Documents, typically termed charters, were continuously produced through the medieval millennium as single sheets of authoritative transactional texts. Although regional temporalities and cultures modulated the stabilizing effects of this longue durée (my focus will be on documentary practices in northern France, Flanders, and the Rhineland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries), a charter’s primary task was to make the living reality of the recorded event permanently present. Material literacy, in this context, must therefore entail recognition that medieval writing supports were capable of registering a decodable form of participation in documentary production, involving not only scribes but also issuing authors, relatives, entourages, and witnesses. Such material literacy further suggests that literacy encompassed more than the acts of writing, seeing, and reading texts, to include two related dynamics: a mode of graphic communication that integrates linguistic and non-logocentric markers, and a synergy between documentary practices, writing materials (particularly skin and wax), and an imaginaire that extended to these materials a receptive capability as agents of meaning. While the use of formulas and stereotypy in documentary texts and images lent charters a verifiable authority in representing events, documents-as-responsive artifacts directly registered the sensory dimension of transactional activities, bridging the distance between themselves and the living. Their hybrid mediatic modes complicated charters’ medieval archival management and challenged both contemporary and modern assumptions about their status as ‘originals.’
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is Professor of History at New York University. Her most recent research on documentary practices has appeared in When Ego was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2011); Sign and Design: Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, co-edited with Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2016); The Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, co-edited with Martha Dana Rust (Brill, 2018); and Seals: Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World (as editor, Arc Humanities Press, 2019). She is currently preparing a monograph on “The Medieval Culture of Print.”
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.
