Come to Bloomington March 27 for Mediaevalia -- meet Erik Kwaekkel! -- Please join the Medieval Studies Institute, the Lilly Library, and the Germanic Studies Department for Mediævalia 2014 The event for all friends of things medieval, of calligraphy, gilded initials, precious manuscripts, early prints, and other highlights of the history of the book! This year, we again combine lectures with hands-on workshops. Our goal is to make abstract ideas concrete, for the IU community and interested public. Our guest this year is Eric Kwakkel, 2014 E.A. Lowe Lecturer in Paleography at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Associate Professor in Medieval Manuscript Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Thursday, March 27, at 5pm in the Slocum Room of the Lilly Library, Professor Kwakkel will present a public lecture, Kissing the Neighbor: How Medieval Letterforms Help to Tell Time, with a reception to follow. Abstract: Age is not important, unless you are a cheese. Historians know this expression not to be true: the age of a piece of writing matters a great deal. The key to determining when a given medieval manuscript was written is to assess the age of its script. The handwriting of scribes developed continuously, meaning that their products can be placed in time if the right reference points are available. This paper deals with such reference points: it shows that developing letterforms provide evidence for dating the book in which they appear; and how we may retrieve this information. The main focus will be on what is arguably the most dramatic development in medieval handwriting: the shift from Caroline to Gothic script. During the century and half of this transformation, in an age known as The Long Twelfth Century, scribes across Europe began to search for new ways of executing letters. Neighboring letters began to kiss and bite each other, while the i became dotted and the t crossed. The lecture ultimately demonstrates it is possible to gauge the date of a manuscript in an objective manner: it shows how letterforms help to tell time. Friday, March 28, from 9am to noon in the Lincoln Room of the Lilly Library, Professor Kwakkel will lead Why Study the Medieval Book, a workshop focusing on the medieval manuscript as a physical object. It aims to show faculty and students how its features matter for studies that are not primarily interested in the material book itself. It queries how someone working in the disciplines of English, History or Religious Studies, etc., may benefit from a manuscript beyond merely the text it holds on its pages. The workshop will present real-world case studies to show how even someone with a basic understanding of the medieval book may benefit from its physical features. At the end of the session participants will be able to answer the query posed in the workshops title. A limited number of spaces are available; preregistration is required with Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts at the Lilly Library ([email protected])
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 12:03:11 +0000
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