The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age

This year's symposium takes the notion of circulation as a starting point to consider not only how manuscripts produced in various scribal cultures circulated knowledge, ideas, values, and information throughout the premodern world but also what the mechanisms were that generated, shifted, and complicated the movement and circulation of the books themselves from the time of production to the present day.

This year's symposium examines the means by which the premodern book, and in particular the manuscript, is described across a wide variety of media, from painting and sculpture to digital media and film.

This year's symposium considers the networks of exchange, transmission, and translation of natural knowledge evident in manuscript culture in the pre- and early modern periods.

This symposium will interrogate the notions of loss, survival, and recuperation in manuscript studies, so often in the background but rarely acknowledged as defining features of the field.

This symposium will focus on the opportunities and limitations offered by digitization and lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic.

This year’s symposium explores the connections between historic and current approaches to data linkage in regard to manuscripts and manuscript research.

This year’s symposium examines cases of intermedial exchange through manuscript illumination, while also posing broader questions about the deep connections between the craft of illumination and other arts more widely.

This symposium will highlight the confluence of expressions of belief, ritual, and social engagement emerging in technologies and traditions of the world's manuscript cultures, often beyond a single religious context.

This year's theme, "Picking up the Pieces," considers the notions and consequences of fragmentation and reconstitution.

This year's symposium highlights the work of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts by bringing together scholars and digital humanists whose work concerns the study of provenance and the history of collecting pre-modern manuscripts.