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READING THE PRE-MODERN TEXT

a hands-on doctoral workshop for the semester of spring 2010. the workshop meets mondays & wednesdays.

^This workshop-class for graduate students will meet for one hour and a half, twice a week. We will be studying the techniques, theoretical problems, and real practices related to the direct work with manuscripts and printed books, mainly (but not exclusively) during the period encompassing 1250 through 1700. Most of our observations and work are, however, methodologically and theoretically useful for other periods and fields -even for some contemporary challenging issues about the materialities of communication.

The workshop is composed of four chapters and four practical exercises:

1. Introduction to the history of the language, and linguistic techniques for reading pre-modern texts. This introduction will help us to familiarize with pre-modern uses of grammar, ortography, punctuation marks, and other issues regarding pre-modern textuality. We will also learn how to use important lexical and linguistic resources (corpora, lexicons, online resources, etc.)

2. Palæography and Textual Editing. Palæography is the study of writing. We will work on manuscripts and printed texts from the aforementioned period, in order to learn the basics that will allow us to identify, date, read, and transcribe those texts. This will not be a merely descriptive study, and we will also be reading and discussing theorists like Armando Petrucci or Paul Saenger. Likewise, we will be learning and discussing the theoretical issues regarding textual editing (Lachmannian, Bédierist, Nuova Filologia, New Philology, geneticism, online editing, etc.). The first exercise will be a critical edition of a short text. For this exercise, the student will have to choose a text, transcribe the available witnesses of such text, and choose the kind of textual editing theories and practices (experimental and innovative editing is perfectly welcome).

3. Codicology, Bibliography, History of the Book. This will be a discussion on the description and history of books, that will deal with some of the current theories on the history of the book, and how they rely on older techniques such as codicology and bibliography. We will discuss, first, the idea of a bibliography as sociology of texts, and will read critically theorists like McKenzie, Bourdieu, Chartier, Taylor, Price, and others. This chapter will include second and third exercises. The second exercise will consist on the research and choice of a manuscript, a document, and a printed book, and the creation of codicological-bibliographical observations and descriptions, along with the raising of critical questions around them. The third exercise will be a discussion of one or more of those marterials in the light of the concepts and methods of the history of the book.

4. History of Reading. We will move from the sphere of the production and dissemination, to the sphere of use, and will discuss theories and concepts regarding contemporary trends on the history of reading. We will read texts by Sherman, Chartier, Saenger, Stock, Cátedra, Bouza and others. The fourth and last exercise is a library research on used books, and an exploration of the meaning of such use.

The final goal of this seminar is to provide the student with the tools and the theoretical concepts necessary to engage in any kind of textual, archival, and bibliographical research (most of our research is bibliographical), while practicing all that in real-life situations.