Speaker: Dr. Kate Meng Brassel, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
This presentation in the Fall 2025 Workshop in the History of Material Texts will be held on Monday, November 10th at 5:15pm in the 1978 Pavilion on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt – Dietrich Library. This event will be held in-person and via zoom (link here).
Abstract:
“Literary research in the discipline of Classical Studies typically begins (and often ends) with a standard edition—a modern text with critical apparatus formatted and bound according to one of three or four scholarly publishing standards. These standard editions—for instance the Oxford Classical Text, Budé, Teubner, and sometimes the Loeb—are so fundamental to the work of Classical Studies that we often overlook the ways in which their own formats and bindings are not neutral features of the texts themselves but the results of historical decisions of editors, printers, and publishers that continue to frame scholarly interpretation. Prof. Brassel suggests that when such material features become naturalized and are left to masquerade as features of literary evidence, they may obscure the historical contingency of fundamental interpretive categories (such as genre and authorship) as well as of disciplinary norms. This presentation explores print and manuscript books of Latin literature from the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering in particular case studies of some examples of “obscene” and humorous Latin literature. How did Humanist printers’ choices about format and binding influence the place of the ribald and irreverent in what would become the “Classics” and its canon? How might their readers have responded to these decisions? By examining this generative period of book production and experimentation that precipitated the solidifying of modern norms, the talk reflects upon some of these paths not taken and upon the ways in which alternative bindings might conceal and reveal ancient texts.”