Schedule of Events:
All events held at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (Humanities 1008)
SBU Faculty Roundtable with with Elyse Graham (English), Sara Lipton (History), Peter Manning (English), and Shobana Shankar (History)
Thursday, October 1, 12-2pm: “How to do the History of Books: A Roundtable Conversation with SBU Faculty”
What is the book? What has it been and what can it be? For the twenty-first century scholar, the book as subject and object can seem frustratingly elusive. Sometimes “the book” is an accumulation of texts; at other times, it is a bundle of pages. Increasingly, “the book” is its own representation: a set of images in Google Books or the Universal Digital Library, searchable yet intangible. This round table brings together a cross-disciplinary group of Stony Brook faculty for a lively discussion about the status and uses of the book for the twenty-first century scholar. With chronological and geographical interests ranging from medieval Europe to postcolonial South Asia, and with objects of study ranging from the image to the New Criticism text, the participants will help chart the methodological, ontological, and epistemological terrain for this year’s series of lectures on “The Study of the Book.”
Adrian Johns (Department of History, Chicago)
Wednesday, October 14, 4-6 pm: “The Universal Library from Gutenberg to Google”
Ambitions to create a library capable of holding all human knowledge have been voiced repeatedly in the history of western civilization, with plans for a massive online collection being only the most recent. Among the dreams of the Enlightenment, that of the universal library seems to be the only one in which everyone still believes. But in fact projects for such an institution have varied widely in their scope, structure, purpose, and impact – and they have often met with opposition. Why? This talk will look at how successive generations have sought to realize the ideal of the universal library, and why their plans have aroused horror as well as enthusiasm.
Thursday, October 15, 12-2 pm: “The Policing of Print in Early Modern London”
The regulation of the press in an early modern city was a complex endeavor, commonly viewed at the time as both impossible and essential. The modern tendency to reduce it to “censorship” is often misleading, because suppression was only one part of the enterprise. Maintaining a stable and honorable place for the crafts of print in a harmonious commonwealth was the larger aim. For that reason, the policing of the book was a multifaceted activity that had much in common with the policing of other vital commodities like foodstuffs and medicines. Here I want to highlight some of the negotiations and compromises that were necessary for such policing not only to succeed, but to operate at all – and thereby for something one might call an early-modern “print culture” to take shape.
Jesus R. Velasco (Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia)
Wednesday, November 4, 12-2 pm: “Collecting Glosses. A workshop with glossed Iberian manuscripts and related methodological issues, from book-hunting to in-depth study”
A workshop with glossed Iberian manuscripts and related methodological issues, from book-hunting to in-depth study. In this workshop we will explore some of the different kinds of glossed manuscripts and tackle the theoretical and material problems they elicit. We will focus in particular on on a manuscript with an early translation of Moshe ben Maimon’s Dalālatul ḥā’irīn or Guide for the Perplexed.
Wednesday, November 4, 4-6 pm: “Synchronizing the Mediterranean: Pedro de Avis and his Experiments with Manuscripts”
This talk will address two manuscripts by Portuguese prince Pedro de Avis, Satira de infelice et felice vida, or Argos, and Coplas del contempto del mundo. The originality of both manuscripts is based on glossing, and we will explore how this glossing is, in fact, an experiment in reading best understood as “serial reading.”
Kate van Orden (Department of Music, Harvard)
Thursday, November 19, 1-3 pm: “Music as a Sonic Record: Sixteenth-Century Vernaculars in Perspective”
As transcripts of vocal performances, secular songs such as French chansons and Italian madrigals record vernacular accents, dialects, and sounds often excluded in literary and scientific texts. This work-in-progress suggests how we might “play back” these records and put these scripts “into play,” and it is intended to open a conversation with all scholars interested in the vocal dimension of literature in early modern Europe.
Thursday, November 19, 5-7 pm: “The French Chanson Abroad: Mapping Multicultural Geographies in Early Modern Europe”
One sea change in the study of European history is the new interest in migration. Whereas nineteenth-century perspectives tended to confine research within the borders of modern nation-states in the belief that early modern society was folk-like, simple, and autochthonous, historians are now exploring travel, migration, pilgrimage, and immigration across early modern Europe. Concentrating on music as a migratory frontrunner, this paper shows how French chansons traveled extensively beyond the linguistic borders of their native lands, their foreign production aptly tracking the movements of displaced musicians both amateur and professional. I suggest that singing French chansons helped non-French speakers learn this foreign vernacular, and show how the French texts woven into poly-lingual songs underscore the multiculturalism of some European cities.