
RMA students and PhD candidates can obtain 1 ECTS by attending the Yearly Seminar on location, reading the preliminary literature, and writing a reflection. To register for credits, please send an e-mail to both ucms@uu.nl and huizinga@uu.nl before 1 November. More information here.
Yearly Seminar Utrecht University Centre for Medieval Studies (UUCMS), 7 November 2024
This year’s UUCMS Yearly Seminar will be devoted to our recurrent theme ‘Premodern Reading Cultures’. All medievalists and early modernists working at or affiliated to Utrecht University are cordially invited to attend the Seminar.
Now that the concept of circularity has gained momentum in academia, in part due to contemporary environmental concerns, scholars of premodern reading cultures also become more and more aware of the potential past societies hold with regard to ideas about circularity. It has been acknowledged that premodern cultures had great abilities to recycle, reuse, repair and adapt books and especially the materials they were made of. For example, researchers have shown that manuscripts that were no longer needed or wanted for their texts because they were considered outdated, unfashionable, or because the folios were simply dilapidated, were taken apart for their component parts and reused for, for example, new book binding practices in both manuscript and print.
Another example of premodern reuse that has been researched are palimpsests, the phenomenon describing the scraping and washing off a text from a parchment folio in preparation for reuse in the form of another text. Finally, a focus on users of books has offered new insights into the circulation and reuse of books, for example when books deliberately passed on from generation to generation or when users started using their old books and paper for other purposes, for example to keep records or to practice the art of letter writing. However, scholarship on the re-use or recycling of books is still commonly concerned with their material damage and the loss of texts, as well as with their discarding, dispersal, or destruction as fragments, waste or scrap, thus still showing a tendency towards linear thinking. Thinking from the perspective of circularity rather than linearity in relation to past reading cultures can not only provide inspiring ideas for contemporary societies aiming at circular economic systems, but also has scientific implications. Adopting a circular approach to books and materials can force us to ask different kinds of questions about the objects of our studies, especially when we realise that the objects and texts that we study today probably show only a fraction of their long life. In the context of medieval reading cultures in particular, the increased interest in circular thinking is still fragmentary.
The aim of this Yearly Seminar is therefore to further open up the discussion about circularity and reuse in relation to premodern reading cultures and practices, as well as the ways in which researchers and librarians can now deal with materials that once served other purposes than they do today, and/or that now appear in completely different forms and contexts than earlier. In this way, the Seminar gives the opportunity to methodologically rethink the scope of a circular approach of books and their materials, and their implications for research. Attention will be paid to issues such as multiple reuse of manuscripts in the premodern period; books, materials and objects that can inform us about premodern thinking about circularity; users that transformed the function of a book into another; fragments and how to deal with them in research and restoration practices; and the impact and place of restoration in thinking about circularity.
Programme
Lunch will be included for all speakers and attendees of the Yearly Seminar.
Registration
Due to the limited number of places in the Bucheliuszaal, we kindly ask you to register for the Yearly Seminar by sending an e-mail to ucms@uu.nl before 1 November. The Seminar can be followed online by scholars who cannot come to the Utrecht University Library. Please contact us by e-mail to register for the online component of the Seminar.