Date/Time
Date(s) - 9 Nov 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
On Monday, November 9, the next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts will be held, at the usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Emily Steiner (University of Pennsylvania) will give a talk entitled “Violent Collecting in Richard of Bury’s *Philobiblon*.”
Emily writes:
Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham and Lord Chancellor of England, was ruined by his books, which are said to have bankrupted him and driven him to an early death. Bury’s Latin *Philobiblon* (1345), a treatise on his inordinate love of books, is well-known for its condemnation of readers with runny noses, usurious Jews, and doodling boys who put books in constant jeopardy. It’s also a wonderful guide to medieval book acquisition, copying, and conservation. Less remarked upon is Bury’s account of his uncontrollable desire for books, the unscrupulous lengths to which he will go to obtain them, and the violent scenes that bibliophilia causes him to imagine. Part Thomas Cromwell, part John Leland, Bury describes his quest for books – which includes harassment of schoolmasters and exploitation of the friars – as a self-aggrandizing (he fantasizes about rebuilding the lost library of Alexandria) and self-destructive enterprise.
With the exceptions of Ned Denholm, who in the 1930s compiled Bury’s life records, and the art historian Michael Camille, who wrote a brilliant article on Bury in 1997 (“The Book as Fetish”), modern scholars haven’t given the *Philobiblon* much thought. In this talk, I focus on the violence of collecting in the *Philobiblon*, and the way that that violence opens up new ways of thinking about English nationalism, the medieval/post-medieval divide, and the long history of culture. Together, we might want to talk about the ways that collecting and violence underwrite literary history and shape the way we view modern collections of medieval books.
Emily Steiner is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of the *Yearbook of Langland Studies* and the author of *Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval Literature* (Cambridge, 2003) and *Reading Piers Plowman* (Cambridge, 2013). She is editor of several books of essays: with Candace Barrington *The Letter of the Law: Legal Culture and Literary Production in Medieval England* (2002); with Candace Barrington, *Thinking Historically after Historicism* (2014), and with Lynn Ransom, *Taxonomies of Knowledge* (2015). Currently, Emily is working on a book about fourteenth-century English literature called *John Trevisa and Information Culture*, and with Elizabeth Tyler and Jen Jahner is editing *The Cambridge History of Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500*.
All are welcome. Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.