| 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.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On April 29th, 2024 at 5:15 Roger Chartier will present on: "Books as Portfolios"
In the beginning were the stacks or the catalogues of the libraries that listed numerous books called “Porte-feuille.” The catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France mentions 210 publications with this title between 1700 and 1799.
In 1690, Furetière’s Dictionnaire defined “porte-feuille” as “a double cardboard box covered with parchment, basane or sheepskin, calfskin, Morocco leather or brown chagrin, which opens & closes, & in which one can carry sheets, papers, prints without damaging them.” Books and portfolios were very similar: they were bound in the same materials, they gathered sheets and leaves, they held printed and manuscript texts. This is perhaps a reason to take the designation of the book as “porte-feuille” at its face value and to consider the different documents inserted within some books. Hence the three foci of this talk: 1) printed materials within printed texts, 2) scribal texts in printed books, 3) things left or lost in books. Based on recent acquisitions of our Library, associating Shakespeare and Georges Brassens and dealing with material intertextuality, this presentation is a follow-up to three previous Material Text seminars presented during this Spring Term: by Joseph Howley on Roman wax tablets as archives, by Peter Stallybrass, Heather Wolfe and Ray Schrire on erasable writing technologies and their relations to literacy and numeracy in early modern Europe, and by Lila Goldenberg on library catalogs that associated printed text and handwritten additions in seventeenth-century England.
Roger Chartier is Emeritus Professor of the Collège de France and, since 2001, Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The last books he published during and after the plague are Un mundo sem livros e sem livrarias ?(São Paulo, Letraviva, 2020); Editer et traduire. Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, Gallimard et Le Seuil, Collection ”Hautes Etudes”, 2021) [also in Spanish and Portuguese editions), Won in Translation. Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe, tr. John H. Pollack (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) [also in Italian and Portuguese editions], and Cartes et fictions, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Editions du Collège de France, 2022) [also in Spanish, Russian editions and forthcoming in Portuguese and Italian]. All these books are largely based on talks given at the Material Texts Seminar.
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 2023 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Erin Brennan, "Popular Culture: The Cries of London and Elite Exoticism of the Common People"
Honorable Mention: Magnolia Wang, “A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Examining the Intersection of Gender Identity and Racialization in Indigenous Governance and Early American Colonization”
Graduate Category:
Co-winners: Zain Mian, "Through the Lens of Urdu: Reading World Literature in Adabī dunyā" and Anna Lehr Mueser " 'So the memories need not fade': Writing Continuity Across Rupture"
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
