"Revolutionary Science: Movable Books and the Medieval Universe."
Abstract:
*Movable parts such as tabs, wheels, and flaps were common components of
premodern scientific texts. These features could serve as participatory
pedagogical tools, calculating devices, or inexpensive alternatives to
instruments such as the astrolabe. In this talk, I review a range of
movable devices from the later Middle Ages, including their applications in
cosmography, medicine, and the computation of the date of Easter. Focusing
on astronomical volvelles, I then develop an ecological reading of these
rotating discs, which encouraged readers to relate to the world around them
in several complementary ways. Movable books could facilitate readers?
efforts to conceptualize their positions in the universe, an important
aspect of premodern knowledge practices. Yet volvelles also call attention
to the materiality of the texts in which they appear, and their
susceptibility to damage visually suggests the impact of human actions.
Often compared to modern apps, these devices therefore offer lessons for
engaging with today's media landscapes and their unseen material
infrastructures.*
Aylin Malcolm is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
Pennsylvania and the 2021?22 Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of
Material Texts. Aylin's research interests include poetry and zoology in
medieval England, the history of ecological crisis, and premodern gender
studies. Aylin held a graduate fellowship at the Schoenberg Institute for
Manuscript Studies in 2019, during which they worked on medieval
astronomical diagrams and their afterlives in digital spaces.
