Date/Time
Date(s) - 7 Apr 2014
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Theodor Dunkelgrün (University of Cambridge and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies), will be speaking on “The Amazing Adventures of a Twelfth-Century Hebrew Manuscript and its Readers Across Ten Centuries.”
The seminar will convene at our usual time and place: 5:15 in the Class of ’78 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Theo writes:
This talk, based on a chapter in my book-in-progress about the editorial history of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-1573), departs from the vehement debates about the integrity of the Hebrew biblical text among Catholic scholars in the wake of the Council of Trent. Early modern Catholic opponents of Christian Hebrew studies are often portrayed as anti-humanists doctrinally blinded to the importance of studying the source-texts of Scripture historically and wired to mistrust their Jewish transmission. This talk will focus on one of the most vocal of these post-Tridentine critics, Wilhelmus Lindanus. I will show that in fact he immersed himself in the close reading of a medieval Hebrew manuscript in an effort to demonstrate, with historical arguments, the corruption of the biblical text in the course of Jewish transmission. To refute the evidence, his main adversaries, the editors of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, saw themselves compelled to subject the same manuscript to careful scrutiny of their own. The manuscript in question turns out to have survived and has been closely studied by 19th and 20th-century scholars unaware of its having been at the heart of fierce early modern strife. Its identification offers a very rare opportunity to reconstruct the ways 16th-century scholars studied the material Hebrew text, thought about its medieval transmission, and devised methods for its textual evaluation and its technical description long before the rise of paleography and codicology as modern disciplines.
Theodor Dunkelgrün is a post-doctoral research associate at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and St John’s College at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the history of biblical scholarship and edition, the history of the Hebrew book, and the history of Jewish-Christian intellectual encounters around the Hebrew Bible from its passage into print in the incunabula period to the emergence of the first critical editions at the turn of the twentieth century. A native of the Netherlands, Theo was educated at the universities of Leiden, Chicago, Princeton and Oxford. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2012 for his thesis, The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Confluence of Textual Traditions in the Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-1573), supervised by Glenn W. Most, James T. Robinson, David Nirenberg and Anthony Grafton. Theo’s work has been supported by fellowships from among others the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include “Like a Blind Man Judging Colors: Joseph Athias and Johannes Leusden Defend Their 1667 Hebrew Bible” in Shlomo Berger, Emile Schrijver and Irene Zwiep (eds.) Mapping Jewish Amsterdam: The Early Modern Perspective. Dedicated to Yosef Kaplan (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2012), 79-115, and “The Hebrew Library of a Renaissance Humanist. Andreas Masius and the bibliography to his Iosuae Imperatoris Historia (1574) with a Latin edition and an annotated English translation”, Studia Rosenthaliana 42-43 (2010-11), 197-252.
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.