Séminaire HTL-Labex : Marieken Teeuwen (Uni Leiden)
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3 février 2023
Salle 533, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges de 14h à 16h
Glossing Between the Lines
Mariken Teeuwen, Senior researcher at Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam), and Professor by special appointment “Culture of Writing in the Middle Ages”, Institute for History, Leiden University
Different areas of the medieval book were used for adding paratext to the text in the writing area of the page: flyleaves, margins, inserted leaves and, of course, the space between the lines. The practice of making interlinear glosses was one particular technique in a set of tools to annotate the book. If we reflect on this, we can ask a number of questions: what makes a scribe decide to write a gloss in interlinear space, and not in the margin, on a flyleaf or on an inserted leaf? Is it a matter of copying the distribution from one exemplar to the next? Is it simply the distinction between ‘short’ and ‘longer’ glosses? Is there an implicit typology that decides where the material goes, such as grammatical versus explanatory or digressing glosses? Does the distribution of material over different ‘free’ spaces in a manuscript reflect some kind of hierarchy of existing paratext versus new material from a reader, created on the fly?
In order to get a handle on these questions, I will compare four copies of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, all from the ninth century. This is a text with multiple settled commentary traditions, already in the ninth century, which was copied with remarkable frequency precisely in this period. The text seemed to me, therefore, a good yardstick to use: with it we can assess what the distribution of paratext over the ‘empty’ spaces of each manuscript might tell us about the practices of learning and the processes of text transmission.
Un lien zoom peut être demandé aux organisateurs du séminaire (Aimée Lahaussois et Franck Cinato).
Université Paris Cité - Bât. Olympe de Gouges, salle 533
Paris,