Date/Time
Date(s) - 10 Nov 2014
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Monday, 10 November will be the next meeting of thePenn Workshop in the History of Material Texts, which will welcome A.E.B. Coldiron (Florida State University), whose talk is entitled “The Printer, the Translator, the Scribe, and the Slave-Girl (Or, the Strange Textual History of England’s First Doxography).”
It will convene 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.
Anne writes:
“One of the first books William Caxton printed at Westminster, the Dictes or seyinges of the philosophres, has its ultimate origin in the 11th-century Arabic doxography, the Al-Hikam, or ‘Beautiful sayings’ by Al-Mubashshir ibn-Fâtik (see attached image: Ahmed III MS 3206, Topkapı-saray, fol. 48). The work’s curious manuscript transmission history spans four centuries and crosses six languages, with rich variations undercutting its own claims to stable authority. Caxton’s remediation of it into print in early 1477, too, bears the scars of remediation-anxiety—or are they also the marks of a witty, savvy, entrepreneurial remediator? The case illuminates not only how very far our canons are from what was actually being read, written, copied and reprinted in early modern England, but how our most accepted paradigms of literary history can be challenged by specific histories of translation and material textuality.”
A. E. B. Coldiron (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Professor of English and affiliated faculty in French at Florida State University, where she serves as Director of the History of Text Technologies Program. Her most recent book, Printers Without Borders, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. In 2014-2015 she is also directing the Year-Long Colloquium at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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.
Organizers:
Jerry Singerman
Senior Humanities Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press
Marie Turner
Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts