Organisers: Dr Sinead O'Sullivan (AHRC Leadership Fellow) - s.osullivan@qub.ac.uk

Dr Ciaran Arthur (NUI Postdoctoral Fellow) - ciaran.arthur@nuigalway.ie

Colloquium: 

The colloquium seeks to explore how knowledge was crafted in the early medieval book. It has two main interrelated areas of interest: the practices of collectio and of concealment. 

Collectio in the early medieval West underpinned scholarly productions from bilingual manuals to vademecums. It was at the heart of major enterprises such as the creation of glosses, glossaries, encyclopaedic works, commentaries, and compendia. The significance of collectio is well known from the writings of Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, who have demonstrated that the practice was de facto part of ancient and medieval invention, which was integral to the art of memory, that depended on the construction of inventories of inherited materials. 

Concealment and obscurity played another key role in early medieval textual culture. Building on the work of Michael Lapidge on hermeneutic Latin and Jan Ziolkowski on obscurity, the colloquium seeks to examine how layering of signification, polysemy of meaning, archaisms, neologisms, exotic languages, puzzles, word play, ambiguity and obscurity were important aspects of early medieval book culture. The colloquium aims to explore the practices of rending obscure that predate this twelfth-century predilection for integumental reading and the new types of scholarship associated with the beginnings of the universities. 

Proceedings:

The papers will be published in a book provisionally entitled: Crafting knowledge in the early medieval book: practices of collecting and concealing, ed. Sinéad O’Sullivan and Ciaran Arthur, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin (Brepols).

For full details visit the website https://craftingknowledge.wordpress.com/colloquium/