Hosted by: Kislak Center
In the medieval and early modern world, philosophers and poets often expressed that they stood on the shoulders of antiquity’s giants. The knowledge, erudition, and artistry of the ancients–transmitted and reinterpreted through the medium of the codex and other handwritten formats–profoundly influenced the ways in which the mysteries of the natural and spiritual worlds were understood and experienced. Many also understood their work as continuing beyond and improving upon their predecessors’ achievements. Writing in the 16th century, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, shared in a letter to a friend that he always found himself welcome in the company of ancients, “those classical writers whose books he continuously interrogated,” in a manner of continuous dialogue among peers.” For the premodern period, manuscript books were indeed the vehicles by which ancient knowledge was transmitted, received, studied, and interrogated for generations of scholars and students.
Coinciding with the exhibition Reinventing Aristotle, on view this fall at Penn Libraries' Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, this year's symposium centers on the unceasing conversations with antiquity held across the pages of manuscripts, before and after the age of print. Embracing a transnational perspective, speakers will explore how the material media of transmission influenced the reception of ancient authors and contributed to their reinterpretation, reinvention, and rediscovery over the centuries.
The program will begin Thursday evening, November 20, 5:15 pm, at the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia (view on map), with a keynote conversation between Reinventing Aristotle exhibition curators, Eva Del Soldato, Associate Professor of Italian Studies (FIGS) at the University of Pennsylvania, and Hannah Marcus, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, to be moderated by Lynne Farrington, Senior Curator at the Kislak Center. The symposium will continue November 21-22 at the Kislak Center with an option to join virtually.
Other speakers include:
A full program will be available and registration will open on September 1.
This annual symposium brings together scholars to present research related to the study of manuscript books and documents produced before the age of printing and to discuss the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research.
Featured image: Initial P, beginning Boethius's Periermenias Aristotelis, from a 9thcentury copy with 11th-century additions University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, LJS 101, fol. 1v.