‘Through a Methodological Glass Darkly: Medieval Literary and Historical Texts’
Whether in print, manuscript or digital form most texts we encounter are veiled by one or more layers of cultural, interpretative and material mechanisms that can even subtly alter the work or event we believe they are designed to convey. It seems inevitable that no form of reproduction of a text or event can be free not just of human error but of the application of norms of reproduction that respond to the editorial style of time and place to interpret and make a text more understandable to the readers of the copyist’s, printer’s or editor’s day. How we edit and understand the preparation of editions, from manuscripts to digital archives, are fundamental operations in our own readings and interpretations of the works with which we work.
After a brief review of methods in the scholarly editing of medieval texts and historical documents, the conversation on May 8 will focus on the methods of material philology and the thorny area of authorial drafts and ‘clean copies’—belle copie—with examples from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Vaticano Latino 3195), a document supervised by the poet with numerous addenda in his own hand but potentially at varying stages of the work’s completion, and the in fieridigital archive devoted to the codex and the Fragmenta: http://petrarchive.org.
Please RSVP to the event using this link by Monday May 1. For those who would like to attend the dinner at the Faculty House following the seminar, the fee is $30 per person (checks only, made payable to "Columbia University" with the memeo "Medieval Seminar 431 Dinner Payment") which will be collected by the rapporteur at the event.
If you will be joining virtually, please find the Zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/98136290789
