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"Grounding the Book: Readers, Writers, and Places in the Pre-Modern World"

The 2012 Marco Symposium, co-organized by Thomas E. Burman (history), Maura Lafferty (Classics), and Anthony Welch (English) will bring together up to ten scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the complex interaction between pre-modern writers and readers, their books, and the places-libraries, museums, monasteries, university classrooms, the courts of patrons-where they wrote and read them. A substantial amount of recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of the history of reading has made clear the countless ways in which understanding the materiality of texts sheds fascinating light how on those texts were read and deployed. The layout of a copied or printed page, the other works with which a text appears in a book, the marginalia that so frequently appears in margins: all these and many other aspects of the 'material text' open valuable windows through which we can catch glimpses of writers and readers interacting with texts.

This symposium will expand the definition of the material to include the broader environments in which writers and readers created and engaged their texts, the institutional topographies that shaped how one experienced the book. Our speakers, therefore, will be addressing such questions as these: How have the physical sites of reading and writing interacted with the material form of books to shape how books are read and written? How have spaces such as the monk's cell, the scholastic's lecture hall, or the humanist's study left their marks on books allowing us to gain insight into the reading practices of those who studied them? What role have books played in giving meaning to the rooms in which they were kept? How have premodern artists and writers imagined the spaces of reading and keeping books? What happens when a book accustomed to being in one kind of space winds up in a very different one? Is it a different book? How did the technologies of book making and the properties of the physical book condition reading practices?

Keynote Address the evening of March 1, 2012; Speaker sessions March 2-3, 2012, all day both days (March 3rd beginning at 10 a.m.).

Keynote Address: Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Reception following lecture.

2012 Symposium Speakers:

Megan Williams, San Francisco State University
Anna Grotans, Ohio State University
Alison Beach, Ohio State University
Christopher Celenza, American Academy in Rome / Johns Hopkins University
Jay Rubenstein, University of Tennessee
Jane Alden, Wesleyan University
Jennifer Summit, Stanford University
Robert Black, University of Leeds
William Sherman, York University (UK)