Date/Time
Date(s) - 5 Nov 2012
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts Presents:
“Toward a History of the Authorial Colophon.”
Daniel Hobbins, University of Notre Dame
Hobbins writes:
“Colophons are among the most carefully studied features of medieval manuscripts. When they give dates, they help us to unravel the complex skein of medieval handwriting by providing a point of comparison for undated manuscripts. A large scholarly literature has arisen in the past fifty years devoted to the study of dated colophons. But scribes were not alone in their use of colophons. Soon after European scribes began to date their copies in colophons, authors themselves began to date the composition of their works in a form clearly derived from the scribal colophon. Yet the authorial colophon has essentially escaped detection as a category of evidence: to my knowledge, we do not have a single study devoted to the practice. For this presentation I wish to share some of my work on the authorial colophon in the Latin West. I’ll attempt to explain why the device is important, and to provide some sense of its development from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. At its most basic level, the authorial colophon helped to authenticate the text. By the fifteenth century, it had become the location for a variety of bibliographic information relating to the author, the book, and the means of its distribution.”
Daniel Hobbins is a historian of high and late medieval Europe, with a particular interest in the cultural and intellectual history of the period from 1300 to 1500. Under this broad heading, his research has focused on late medieval authorship (through the example of Jean Gerson), Joan of Arc, and backgrounds to print. He is currently working on two book-length projects: a history of the authorial colophon from 1100 to 1500, and a study of the origins of print.