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Practices of Commentary

SSHRC Insight Grant, University of Toronto (2020–2025)

Practices of Commentary

The Other Sister: New Research on Non-Cloistered Religious Women (1100-1800).

University of Toronto. May 18–20, 2023

In order to attend the conference via Zoom or in person, please email us at tos2023conference@gmail.com. Check our blog for the final schedule  https://othersisters.hypotheses.org/

Throughout Christian history, there have been groups of women who lived recognizably religious lives but outside of traditional monastic structures. Despite leaving a substantial documentary and (in some cases) visual record, they are conspicuously absent from the dominant scholarly tradition. By defining and contextualizing the experiences of these women, we can begin to understand the ways they fit into the ecclesiastical and lay landscape of the worlds in which they lived. Our conference focuses on new research on non-cloistered women religious including (but not limited to) beguines, bizzoche, tertiaries, pinzochere, canonesses, and house ascetics. By looking beyond the limitations generally imposed by geography or time period, we can begin to think of the connections that existed between these women and society, cloistered nuns, or clerics. 

The conference will take place at the University of Toronto, in person, May 18–20, 2023. Those who cannot be present in Toronto on these days may attend the conference virtually and ask questions through chat. 

Zoroastrian Exegetical Literature

by Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo and Enrico G. Raffaelli, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto

Introduction

Zoroastrian communities have provided interpretations of their sacred corpus, the Avesta, since the early phase of their history. The Avesta itself contains commentaries on some of its passages. After the period when Avestan ceased being a living language, and Avestan texts were not composed anymore (around the 4th century BCE), Zoroastrians produced translations and commentaries of their sacred texts to facilitate their understanding.

This blog illustrates the characteristics of the exegetical passages of the Avesta, and of the main corpus of the Pahlavi literature of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, the most extensive literary corpus of Zoroastrian pre-modern literature.

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Notes on Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period

by Katarina Pejovic, Doctoral Candidate, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Nov. 2022

I was very delighted to be able to share some intriguing readings with the Practices of Commentary discussion group, and to reflect on and learn alongside such a robust community of erudite scholars. I prepared a short presentation on two papers, both from the same anthology:

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The Thrill of the Find: Subkī’s Qur’an commentary in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2052 (Cod. Mixt. 780)*

by Shuaib ALLY

I am fairly certain I found a copy Ibn Ḥajar had come across of Subkī’s Qur’an commentary. I am excited about this lucky discovery because it is tangible evidence for a network of readership, and also because it establishes Subkī as a known Qur’anic exegete. It is these types of discoveries that are the most gratifying and keep the process of scholarship interesting, so I will tell you all about it.

I was working on an article about the reception of a Qur’an commentary by Zamakhsharī in Mamluk Cairo and Damascus, around the thirteenth to sixteenth century. Zamakhsharī was an early twelfth century Persian scholar who wrote a Qur’an commentary called The Unveiler of the Realities of Revelation and Selected Opinions on Aspects of Interpretation (Arabic: al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wujūh al-taʾwīl). This book was met with wide acclaim across the Islamic world because it adapted methods of language interpretation from the fields of Arabic linguistics and literary theory to the study of the Qur’an. This allowed a deeper analysis of the language and style of the Qur’an than the commentary tradition had previously engaged in.

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Commentary as Cultural Technique. Relationality – Mediality – Resonance

Call for papers for Conference of the Wolfenbüttel Arbeitskreis Frühneuzeitforschung in 2023 (July 12–14, 2023)

Proposals (title, potential section reference, 300-word abstract) from all disciplines with a reference to the early modern epoch should be sent by July 31, 2022 to forschung@hab.de.

The symposium intends to address the practice of commenting as a cultural technique in its various thematic, medial and historical aspects. This comprises, but is by no means restricted to, the specific text type of the ‘commentary’. Long before manifesting itself in philological and other types of commentary, the practice of commenting can be seen as a basic anthropological activity. Man/woman seems to be the commenting animal. Man/woman’s relation to the world and the self has always been mediated through language, hence has been dependent on language which, in its arbitrariness and openness to misunderstandings, is characterized by negativity and, consequently, has to be continuously supplemented. When Rilke in his first Duinese elegy speaks of us humans as “groping animals” that “realize that we are not all too reliably at home | in the interpreted world”, he focuses the beginning of a practice of commenting, continuously accompanying mankind in a gesture of compensation for the need of having to rely on the arbitrariness of language to make up for the lack of an immediate understanding. Even language accquisition, a child’s successive introduction to the world as mediated through language, can be seen as taking place through a continuous complementation of what is given by the child’s partners in dialogue, with its reference on the one hand being on the facts of the surrounding world but, on the other hand, even more so on language itself. This dialogical commenting of the world in the process of acquiring language unfolds as an activity of contextualizing facts and expressions, and it establishes norms.

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Studying and Teaching the Georgics in Medieval Northern France: Evidence from the Twelfth-Century Cathedral Schools

by Anthony FREDETTE and Simon WHEDBEE

Many surviving twelfth-century Latin commentaries associated with the influential cathedral schools of northern France have in common the focus, treatment, and scope of the ars grammatica: the philological exegesis of texts for grammatical, logical, and rhetorical instruction. One medieval commentary on the Georgics of Virgil demonstrates the wide application of philological exegesis in medieval scholastic thought, branching out from studies of the poem’s language along the lines of the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) into the natural sciences. An Aeneid commentary appearing to have the same provenance as this Georgics commentary recalls the teaching of Anselm of Laon (1050-1117). Modern scholars attribute its authorship to a slightly later figure who may have learned from Anselm or his disciples: Hilary of Orleans (first half of the twelfth century). Based on numerous similarities between the commentaries, we may tentatively attribute the Georgics commentary to Hilary as well, though only future studies can confirm this.

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New Publication: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe *Online now*

Edited by
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock

Congratulations to Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock on the newly published special issue of Glossator, titled Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The papers in this special issue reflect how various social, literary, and religious practices involving the act of commenting intersect the genre of commentary as a stable phenomenon in select European cultures of the Middle Ages and the early modern era. The print volume is also available.

Read the text in full on the Glossator website.

Introduction: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock
The Pro-Active Scribe: Preparing the Margins of Annotated Manuscripts,
by Erik Kwakkel
Thinking from the Margins: Opening and Closing Illuminations and their Commentary Functions around 1000,
by Kristin Böse
Reading Texts within Texts: The Special Case of Lemmata,
by Andrew Hicks
The In-/Coherences of Narrative Commentary: Commentarial Forms in the Anegenge,
by Christina Lechtermann
Dante’s Self-Commentary and the Call for Interpretation
by Elisa Brilli
Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries,
by Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger
The Power of Glosses: Francesco Fulvio Frugoni’s Self-Commentary and Literary Criticism in the Tribunal della Critica,
by Andrea Baldan
Commenting on a Purged Model: The M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri omnes novis commentariis illustrati of the Jesuit Matthäus Rader (1602),
by Magnus Ulrich Ferber

Upcoming and Past Lectures

For information about upcoming and past lectures, please email Project Manager Jonathan Brent (jonathan.brent “at” mail.utoronto.ca).

28. April 2023: Langton’s Biblical Commentaries and the Formation of Preachers

A talk by Dr. Alessia Berardi, assistant professor of medieval history at Christendom College

Abstract: Stephen Langton was one of the most renowned professors of theology in Paris at the end of the twelfth century before becoming archbishop of Canterbury in 1207 and being one of the main protagonists of the ‘Magna Charta’ affair. He taught on the entire Bible, and we possess multiple versions of his lectures under the form of commentaries. By looking at some examples from his lectures on the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, I argue that Langton not only aimed at interpreting and explaining the theological meaning of the Scriptures to his students, but that his teaching activity should be understood in a wider effort of reform promoted by the Church, which culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). In particular, I argue that Langton, similarly to some of his contemporaries in Paris and England, was interested in forming moral preachers and prelates, and in teaching them how and what to preach about. In this way, his lectures can also be seen as – and were used as – tools for the aid of preachers.

Readings:

  • Phyllis B. Roberts. “Master Stephen Langton Preaches to the People and Clergy: Sermon Texts from Twelfth-Century Paris.” Traditio 36 (1980): 237-268.
  • Goering, Joseph. “Literal and Spiritual Morality in the Scholastic Sermon: an old distinction recovered.” In Preaching and Society in the Middle Ages: ethics, values, and social behaviour, 119-128. Padova Centro Studi Antoniani, 2002.

31. March 2023: Sanskrit Commentaries as Early Modern Archives

 A talk by Dr. Kashi Gomez, lecturer in Sanskrit in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract: In the 1730s, a court minister named Ghanaśyāma wrote a set of literary commentaries alongside his two wives, Sundarī and Kamalā. This scholastic household operated under the patronage of the Maratha rulers of Tanjavur in South India. The Marathas were one among several newly established royal families in the Karnatak and Coromandel Coast region. In this talk, I examine the methodological possibilities for reading early modern Sanskrit commentaries as productive historical archives. I argue that Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā record Brahminical social anxieties about gender, sexuality, and local politics in the trappings of grammatical minutiae. In an unusual interpretive move, this commentarial family turns a non-event into an event. They concoct a charged reference to an incident of adopted heirship in a literary text that obliquely recalls the anxieties that preceded their Maratha patron’s rise to power.

Readings:

  • Stoler, Ann Laura. “The Pulse of the Archive.” In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common, 2009.
  • Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmaniyam. “Introduction: A Palette of Histories.” In Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800, 2003.

17. February 2023: Stories Unfold: How Cree Laws, Values, and Language Inform Lifelong Learning and Practices of Commentary

 A talk by Dr. Angela Van Essen, assistant lecturer in English and specialist in Indigenous Literature at the University of Alberta

Abstract: How do nehiyaw (Plains Cree) laws, values, language, and worldview inform Cree practices of commentary? Drawing on the work of maskwacîs scholar Walter Lightning, Dutch Canadian scholar Angela Van Essen explores how in nehiyaw (Plains Cree) culture stories function as bundles that unfold over time, and that this unfolding takes place over a lifetime. Applying this knowledge and approach to nehiyaw poet Louise Halfe’s epic poem The Crooked Good, we can see how this text functions as a kind of commentary on a very old nehiyaw sacred story: cihcipistikwân âtayôhkêwin (the sacred story of The Rolling Head).

Readings:

  • McLeod, Ida. “Cihcipistikwân âtayôhkêwin.” In Nehiyaw A-Tayōkā-We-Na: Stories of Wesakechak, 1977.
  • Lightning, Walter. “Compassionate Mind: Implications of a Text Written by Elder Louis Sunchild.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 19, no.2 (1992): 215-253.

27. January 2023: Illusions of Novelty in Early Modern India: Raghunātha Śiromaṇi on Time, Existence and Distinctness

A talk by Dr. Nilanjan Das, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto-Mississauga

Abstract: This talk will be about a Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher, Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, active in Bengal in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Traditionally, Raghunātha has been regarded as an unorthodox and (to some extent) iconoclastic figure in the history of Nyāya-Vaiśeika. But, more recently, a number of authors—such as Jonardon Ganeri (2011) and Samuel Wright (2021)—have argued that his bold theoretical innovations inaugurated a new era in Sanskrit philosophy, an era where Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers explicitly represented themselves as questioning and breaking away from the received doctrines of their text-tradition. Ganeri uses this observation to argue that Raghunātha’s work—along with that of others who were influenced by him—should be treated as a “moment of rupture”: the origin of a distinctive kind of philosophical modernity in South Asia. This, according to Ganeri, undermines the view that modernity is indigenous to Europe, and clears room for the view that it is a polycentric phenomenon, i.e., a phenomenon with many centres across the globe.

In this talk, I won’t be able to address the entirety of this argument. Rather, I will present some reasons to be sceptical of the interpretation of Raghunātha that Ganeri and Wright put forward. While interpreting Raghunātha, these authors focus exclusively on his monograph, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Ontological Categories (Padārthatattvanirūpaṇa), largely ignoring his commentarial works, especially his extensive commentary Splendour (Dīdhitī) on Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s The Wish-Granting Jewel of Truth (Tattvacintāmaṇi). Reading the Inquiry and the Splendour together, I will show that many of Raghunātha’s central theses in the Inquiry about existence, time, and distinctness—which Ganeri and Wright regard as theoretical innovations—are in fact concessions to earlier criticisms of Nyāya epistemology and Vaiśeṣika ontology and metaphysics presented by the 12th century philosopher and poet, Śrīharṣa. This, in turn, explains why Raghunātha’s theses often met with resistance from his own Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika commentators. Presumably, these commentators saw what Ganeri and Wright take to be novelty merely as an admission of defeat. This, I shall argue, should motivate us to rethink Ganeri’s claim that Raghunātha’s work inaugurated an era of philosophical modernity in South Asia.

Readings:

  • Preisendanz, Karin. “The Production of Philosophical Literature in South Asia During the Pre-Colonial Period (15th to 18th centuries): the case of the NyāYasūtra commentarial tradition.” Journal of Indian Philosophy33 (2015): 55-94.
  • Ganeri, Jonardon. “Raghunātha Śiromani and the Origins of Modernity in India.” Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Saṃbhāśā30 (2013): 55-78.

16. December 2022: The First Philosophical Impulses in the Medieval West

A talk by Professor John Magee, University of Toronto, Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of Classics

Abstract: The texts comprising the “Old Logic” – Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione – disappear from view in the Latin West ca. 560-80 and resurface at about the turn of the 9th c. Aristotle, who was to be the driving force behind so much of medieval philosophy, initially appears only in a body of commentary lemmata which form an incomplete text of his De interpretatione. A standard account of his reappearance intersects with a traditional narrative about the Carolingian “Renaissance,” the philosophical portion of which in turn revolves around a particular manuscript now housed at the Vatican Library (Pagès 1). A redating of that manuscript and revised assessment of its origins undercut the traditional narrative and suggest that the first philosophical movement in the medieval West originated with an anonymous body of scholars working earlier and further East than has been imagined rather than in Lyon or at the court of Charlemagne. The focus of this study is the textual tradition of Boethius’ elementary De interpretatione commentary and its implications for our understanding of how Aristotle’s thought resurfaced in the later 8th c.

Readings:

  • Magee, John. “Chapter 1: The Codex Pagesianus and the Early Textual Tradition of Boethius’ First De Interpretatione Commentary.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 11-20. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022.
  • Magee, John. “Chapter 2: The Extant Tradition.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 21-38. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022.
  • Magee, John. “Chapter 3: Edited Passage.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 39-48. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022

25. November 2022: Byzantine Commentary between Past and Present

Dr. Baukje van den Berg, Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University.

Abstract: In my talk, I intend to address broader issues in the study of Medieval Greek commentary through the case studies of two prolific twelfth-century scholars, Eustathios of Thessalonike and John Tzetzes. Both were active as teachers in Constantinople in the time of the Komnenian emperors, when commentary production flourished and took new forms. Both composed various commentaries on ancient authorities in dialogue and competition with ancient predecessors and contemporary colleagues. The talk will explore how Eustathios and Tzetzes carve out a space for themselves within centuries-long traditions, how they redefine canonical texts to suit twelfth-century needs, and how they use their commentaries to build their own identities as intellectuals and literati.

Readings:

  •  B. van den Berg and D. Manolova (2022) “Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts: Introduction,” in Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th-15th Centuries, ed. B. van den Berg, D. Manolova, P. Marciniak, 1-40. Cambridge.
  • A. Kaldellis (2009) “Classical Scholarship in Twelfth-Century Byzantium,” in Medieval Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. C. Barber and D. Jenkins, 1–43. Leiden–Boston.

29. April 2022: The Ancient Quarrel between Text and Commentary

A talk by Dr. Christina Kraus, Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale University

Abstract: Commentary in Greco-Roman antiquity seems to have begun with criticism, with objections to how Homer portrayed the gods. Not all commentaries were critical of their source texts but some ancient critics apparently made enough of a business of criticism that they got the nickname “mastix” – whip or scourge; so in the 4th century BCE Zoilos was the “Homeromastix”. And in response to the whipping came the defending, a commentarial process now known as “charity”. Moreover, ancient commentators were as aggressive toward other scholars as modern ones are—an aggression that on the surface operates in search of the “truth” but works primarily to enhance a commentator’s prestige. Commentary, whether critical or charitable, became part not only of the exegesis but also of the transmission of ancient texts. Roman poets read their precursors through commentaries and responded not only to the Greek authors but also to the commentaries on them. In this talk, I will explore some interpretative modes that this dynamic took – allegorical reading, surface reading, etymology and textual criticism, and historical contextualization—focusing on the death of Priam in the Aeneid and the prologue to Lucan’s Bellum civile, in an effort to further elucidate the ancient quarrel between text and commentary.

Readings:
  • Christina, Shuttleworth Kraus. ‘Introduction: Reading commentaries/Commentaries as reading.’ In The Classical Commentary, 1-27. BRILL, 2002.
  • Glenn W. Most. ‘Allegoriesis and etymology.’ In Canonical texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 52-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Ineke, Slutier. “Obscurity.” In Canonical texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 34-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

25. March 2022: The first commentaries on Dante’s Commedia: myths, conflicts, heritages

To celebrate the (belated) 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, Dr. Luca Fiorentini from Sapienza University of Rome delivered a talk about commentaries on Dante’s Commedia.

Abstract: The seminar focused on the main challenging issues concerning the early tradition of commentaries on Dante. Firstly, we have addressed the ancient ‘origin myth’ transmitted by the Epistle of friar Ilaro, relevant in that it contains a legend concerning the very first commentator of Dante’s Inferno. Secondly, on the basis of the interpretation of this legend, we analyzed the cultural and ideological context in which the Commedia knew its first diffusion. During the Fourteenth Century, the early humanists developed an idea of poetry conflicting with Dante’s poem; indeed, they embraced the devaluation of vernacular language promoted by Petrarch – highly influential over the main intellectuals of his time –, which implied a negative judgment on Dante’s linguistic choice, thus on his main literary work. The statements in support of Dante’s poem elaborated by the early interpreters of the Commedia followed different paths, with different consequences. We, therefore, considered the – at times conflicting – goals of Dante’s commentators in the Fourteenth Century – defending Dante’s language and poetic work, deeply understanding its meanings, celebrating it as a classic, in order to evaluate their impact on the following and more recent exegetical tradition

Readings:
  • Fiorentini, Luca. Petrarch and Boccaccio in the First Commentatries on Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ London: Routledge, 2020.
  • Fiorentini, Luca. “Commentary (Both by Dante and on Dante).” In Oxford Handbook of Dante, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, 79-95. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

25. February 2022: Lines of Thought: A Conversation with Prof. Ayelet Even-Ezra

A special conversation between Prof. Kara Gaston (University of Toronto) and Prof. Ayelet Even-Ezra (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) about Prof. Even-Ezra’s new book, Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind.

Abstract: We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.

Readings:
  • Even-Ezra, Ayelet. “Introduction.” In Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind, 3-12. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021
  • Even-Ezra, Ayelet. “The Habit: on What, Where, Who, When and How Often.” In Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind, 50-83. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

28. January 2022:
Commentaries and the Questions We Didn’t Want Answered

A talk by Dr. Adam Talib, Durham University.

Abstract: The commentary has become a litmus test for historians of thought, culture, and society. Sophisticates know that commentaries are generally of greater empirical and analytical interest than the texts that instantiated them, even if the so-called originals provide a more engaging, meaningful, and edifying reading experience. We understand that this is largely because we learned to read by reading texts like those originals, but there are other affective reasons for our feelings of immediacy and comfort when encountering them. After all many scholars of our grandparents’ generation would have encountered commentaries in their formative schooling, but that didn’t lead them to think about these texts with more nuance or enthusiasm than most people today. Why is an individual’s original easier to relate to than a network’s commentary on it? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but I want to reflect on just one of these from the perspective of a historian of the pre-modern Islamicate episteme. The commentary concretizes the cultural exclusion of women that we recognize, but do not yet know.

Readings:
  • Johan Östling, “Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge: Historiographical Currents and Analytical Frameworks.” History and Theory58 (2020): 111–126.

26. November 2021:
Multilingualism and the Role of ‘Classical’ Languages in Indic and Chinese Commentarial Traditions

A panel discussion, featuring grad students Anusha Rao and Tony Scott, and professors Amanda Goodman and Alessandro Graheli, all from U of T

Readings:
  • Trent Walker, “Indic-Vernacular Bitexts from Thailand: Bilingual Modes of Philology, Exegetics, Homiletics, and Poetry, 1450–1850.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 140, no.3 (2020): 675-699.

29. October 2021:
The Value of Obscurantism: Reading an Indecipherable Text in Medieval and Early Modern China

A talk by Dr. Nathan Vedal, University of Toronto

Abstract: This talk examines the reception history of Fan Zongshi (fl. 793–824), a prolific Tang dynasty prose stylist famed for the impossibly difficult and obscure nature of his writing. Very little of Fan’s work remains extant; yet given its impenetrability, the fact that any of his writing was preserved at all is remarkable. New commentaries on one short text in particular continued to be produced through the eighteenth century. While most admitted that Fan’s writing was ultimately unreadable, commentators and readers continued to propose new interpretations. This talk considers what value they saw in attempting to decipher the obscure.

Readings:
  • Sluiter, Ineke. “Obscurity.” In Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

1–2. October 2021:
Practices of Commentary October Symposium

October Symposium ProgramDownload

29-30. September 2021:
Forms of Commentary in Literature Virtual Workshop

Hybrid Commentary in Paul Claudel: Au milieu des vitraux de l’Apocalypse between Tradition and Ekphrasis
A presentation by Philip Stockbrugger.

Sie varn durch ein Wolken: Frauenlob and Integumentum
A presentation by Walker Horsfall.

Maeren Prologues and Epilogues
A presentation by Florian Müller & Jennifer Gerber.

Examining Prefaces – The Commentators’ Voices
A presentation by Stefanie Brinkmann & Nadine Löhr.

A Late Medieval German Magnificat Commentary and the Question of Commentarial Authorship
A presentation by Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock.

Moshe da Rieti’s Little Temple – A “Hebrew Dante” and its Reception
A presentation by Elisabeth Hollender & Saskia Dönitz.

Anecdote, Poetry, Commentary: Adab and the Commentarial Gesture
A presentation by Jeannie Miller.

29. April 2021:
Translation and Glossing in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls

A talk by André Babyn, University of Toronto.

Readings:
  • Minnis, J. Alastair. “Absent Glosses: the Trouble with Middle English Hermeneutics.” In Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular, 35-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

26. March 2021:
What’s In a Genre Defining hadīth Commentary

A talk by Dr. Stefanie Brinkmann, Bibliotheca Arabica.

Readings:
  • L.W.C. (Eric) Van Lit.  “Commentary and Commentary Tradition. The Basic terms for Understanding Islamic Intellectual History.” In Mélanges de l’Institut dominicain d‘études orientales (MIDÉO) 32 (2017): 3-26.

26. February 2021:
Religious Dimensions of the Homeric Scholia

A talk by Dr. Kenneth Yu, University of Toronto.

29. January 2021:
Veda-viplāvanam, or the Limits of Exegesis in Early Modern India.

A talk by Jonathan Peterson, University of Toronto.

Abstract: The chapter is titled “Veda-viplāvanam, or the Limits of Exegesis in Early Modern India.” It may be technical in some places, but the gist of the paper is exploring how the fourteenth century progenitor of Mādhva Vedānta used the Ṛg Veda to establish his writings as divine revelation; how Madhva’s reference to the Ṛg Veda was explained by his early commentators; and how those explanations were viciously attacked by critics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Floating around these technical debates is a larger question of scholarly practice and community formation––a problem that my dissertation tries to get at through a number of different angles in other chapters. Ultimately the stakes of recovering these internecine debates is that assertions like the kind Andrew Nicholson and others make about an emergent unified Brahmanism in the late medieval and early modern periods predicated on a shared sense of the Veda’s authority is demonstrably untenable.

27. November 2020:
Cairo as a New Center of Qur’an Commentary: Is there a social history for commentary?

A talk by Dr. Walid Saleh, University of Toronto.

Readings:
  • Saleh, Walid. “Medieval Exegesis: The Golden Age of Tafsīr.” In The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studie, edited by Mustafa Shah and Muhammad Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • O’Keefe, John. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Francis M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 7, no. 2 (1999): 310-12.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Frances M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 2 (2001): 247–48. doi:10.1017/S0036930600051395.
  • Kelly, Joseph F. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Frances M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.” Church History 68, no. 2 (1999): 418–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3170865.
  • Jordan, William Chester. “L’ambiguïté du livre: Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au moyen âge. By Philippe Buc. Paris: Beauchesne, 1994. Paper.  Pp. xvi, 427. F 270.” Speculum 71, no. 3 (1996): 704–5. https://doi.org/10.2307/2865812.

30. October 2020:
Visual Forms of Ritual Commentary in Chinese Buddhist Traditions

A talk by Dr. Amanda Goodman, University of Toronto.

25. September 2020:
Facets of Chinese Commentary: Form, Function, Style, and Intent

A talk by Dr. Lo Yuet Keung, National University of Singapore.

Readings:
  • Lo, Yuet-Keung, “To use or not to use: the idea of ming in the Zhuangzi,” Monumenta Serica, 47 (1999), 149-168.
  • Lo, Yuet-Keung, “Persuasion and entertainment at once: Kumārajīva’s Buddhist storytelling in his commentary on the Vimalakīrti-sūtra,” Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (Academia Sinica) 21 (2002), 89-116.
  • Hon, Tze-Ki. 2012. “Wennei Wenwai: Zhongguo Sixiang Shi Zhong de Jingdian Quanshi (Intratextual and Extratextual: Interpretations of Chinese Classics in Chinese Intellectual History).By Lo Yuet-Keung . (Taipei:Taida Chuban Zhongxin, 2010. Vii, 427 Pp. Paperback, ISBN 978-986-02-3705-4.).” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 1 (2012): 160–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/15406253-03901013.

News from Outside the Project: WHAT IS COMMENTARY? Ethical Reading Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Hilary Term 2022

Wednesdays 5:00-6.30 PM (GMT)

Convenors: Constanze Güthenke & Hindy Najman (Oxford)

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/223170989437

For inquiries, please contact Stefania Beitia (stefania.beitia@oriel.ox.ac.uk)

Week 1 (19 January)

Chris Kraus (Yale) — The Ancient Quarrel Between Text and Commentary

Week 2 (26 January)

Tobias Reinhardt (Oxford) — Commenting on What is There and What is Not: The Case of Cicero’s Academica

Week 3 (2 February)

Glenn Most (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, External Scientific Member; Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, Visiting Professor) and André Lake (Sorbonne/Universidad Panamericana) — Applying the Principle of Charity: I. Charity and Allegoresis, II. Charity and Plato’s Laws

Week 4 (9 February)

Judith Schlanger (Oxford) — What Do Jewish Commentaries Look Like? Page Layouts in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Week 5 (16 February)

Chris Minkowski (Oxford) — Outlandishness in Sanskrit Commentary

Week 6 (23 February)

Olivia Lester-Stewart (Loyola University, Chicago) — “I, write this greeting with my own hand”: Pseudepigraphy as Commentary in 2 Thessalonians and the Task of the New Testament Commentator

Week 7 (2 March)

Jeremiah Coogan (Oxford) — Doubled Recycling in Late Ancient Gospel Commentary

Week 8 (9 March)

Il-Kweon Sir (Cambridge) — Commenting on the Lesbian Poets: What’s It All For?

Practices of Commentary October Symposium

October 1st-2nd, 2021

At the beginning of next month the Institute for Advanced Study will host a two-day symposium on commentarial practices from across the globe. During the symposium, members of the Global Commentaries working group, along with others, will present papers. They will be joined by a special guest, Dr. Jesús Velasco, who will give the symposium’s keynote lecture.

Please see the programme and abstract book here or visit our Contact Us page for further details.

Forms of Commentary in Literature Virtual Workshop

The Commentarial Forms in Literature working group is delighted to announce that they will host a virtual workshop from Wednesday September 29th to Thursday September 30th 2021. The theme of the workshop is centred on forms of commentary in literature from a range of literary traditions—German, French, Arabic, and Hebrew. For more information, please see the schedule events below and register to participate through Zoom at the registration link here. Any questions regarding general information and accessibility can be directed to Sloane Geddes at kathryn.geddes@mail.utoronto.ca.

29. September
9:00-13:30 [EDT] // 15:00-19:30 [CEST]

9:00 – 9:15
Welcome
9:15 – 10:00
Philip Stockbrugger: Hybrid Commentary in Paul Claudel: Au milieu des vitraux de l’Apocalypse between Tradition and Ekphrasis
10:05 – 10:50
Walker Horsfall: sie varn durch ein wolken: Frauenlob and Integumentum
11:00 – 12:00
Florian Müller & Jennifer Gerber: Maeren Prologues and Epilogues
12:30 – 1:30
Stefanie Brinkmann & Nadine Löhr: Examining Prefaces – The Commentators’ Voices

30. September
09:00-11:45 [EDT] // 15:00-17:45 [CEST]

9:00-10:00
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock: A Late Medieval German Magnificat Commentary and the Question of Commentarial Authorship
10:00-10:45
Elisabeth Hollender & Saskia Dönitz: Moshe da Rieti’s Little Temple – A “Hebrew Dante” and its Reception
11:00-11:45
Jeannie Miller: Anecdote, Poetry, Commentary: Adab and the Commentarial Gesture

Featured image: Frauenlob, as depicted in the Codex Manesse.
Source: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Talking to Yourself: Commentary as Fatnotes

by Libbie MILLS, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Introduction

For a paper presented at the 2019 Edinburgh meeting of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), I worked through a range of Sanskrit texts

Aṃśumatkāśyapa chapter 96; Aṃśumadāgama 56; Agnipurāṇa 67 and 103; Ajitāgama 73 and 94; Aparājitapṛcchā 49, 50, 52, 109, 110 and 111; Īśvarasaṃhitā 19; Kāmikāgama P32, P58, U33, U34, U35, and U45; Kāśyapajñānakāṇḍa 104; Kiraṇa 63; Tantrasamuccaya 11; Dīptāgama 59; Devyāmata 64; Piṅgalāmata 12; Pratiṣṭhālakṣaṇasārasamuccaya 21; Prāsādamaṇḍana 8; Bṛhatkālottara jīrṇoddhārapaṭala; Mayamata 5 and 35; Mayasaṃgraha 5, along with the accompanying Bhāvacūḍāmaṇi commentary by Bhaṭṭa Vidyākaṇṭha; Mohacūrottara 5; Rauravāgama 44; Vimānārcanakalpa 62, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, and 77; Viṣṇusaṃhitā 24; Śilparatnākara 5; Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra 44 and 45; Suprabhedāgama 54, 55 and 56 ; Somaśambhpaddhati kriyāpāda 10.

on jīrṇoddhāra,  the removal (uddhāra) [and replacement] of the old (jīrṇa), for temples and icons.

While the term jīrṇoddhāra clearly implies a renovation, I veer away from translating it in that way, in order to respect the meaning held by the compound itself, which is that of a removal of what is old. The emphasis on the removal side of renovation, as opposed to the replacement side, holds sense when one reads accounts of the great harm that comes from an old object if it is not removed and disposed of. Of course, replacement will follow removal, and much attention is paid in jīrṇoddhāra literature to how that is carried out, but it is the removal of the corrupting force of an old item that is given principal importance in the labelling of the procedure.

[Read more…] about Talking to Yourself: Commentary as Fatnotes

Blog Submission Guidelines

We are currently soliciting blog posts from individuals working on any aspect of premodern commentary. The blog’s audience consists of scholars who may not be specialists, but are interested in learning more. We are open to submissions on any topic related to commentary and are also eager to work with you on ideas that are not yet fully formed.

Blog posts should be between 500 and 2,000 words in length, though this is only a guideline. Images are encouraged. Please provide captions with the image source and alt-text for accessibility.  Please include any links that you wish. Footnotes are optional, but if you would like to include them, we request that you follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

For more information or to submit, please email us at practicesofcommentary@utoronto.ca.

Image above: Text of colophon from Sanskrit Manuscript on medicine. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Stanislav of Znojmo’s Commentary on John Wyclif’s Philosophy

by Stephen LAHEY

J ohn Wyclif (d.1384) is remembered primarily as a British forerunner of the Protestant reformation, under whose supervision the Bible was translated into English. His writings so angered the fourteenth-century church that his bones were exhumed and burned in 1428, in part because his words inspired the Czech reform movement associated with Jan Hus. Most of Wyclif’s admirers today associate him with the Bible translation; indeed, the Wycliffe Bible Society continues to translate the work into every known language. When I gave a presentation on Wyclif’s philosophy several years ago, a colleague later told me that he hadn’t even known that Wyclif wrote philosophy.

[Read more…] about Stanislav of Znojmo’s Commentary on John Wyclif’s Philosophy

New Publication: Practices of Commentary Special Volume *Online now*

If we consider commentary as a historical practice and a quotable gesture in this way, not only the operativity of the (very tangible) commentary on the page could come into view, but also the ways in which its operational core is used in a multiplicity of polemic, subversive, or creative ways that extend from a very personal dispute to questions of status and even—in a broad sense—to premodern forms of textual politics.”

Lechtermann and Stock, 2020, pg. 4.

Congratulations to Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock on the publication of their volume, “Practices of Commentary,” published in the Zeitsprünge series. This book arose out of a conference held at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, in December 2018, as part of a working group on Commentarial Practices at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto. At this conference, scholars from both the University of Toronto and the Goethe University convened to consider the boundaries of commentary. The introductory chapter of this volume (by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock) presents a number of questions about the nature of commentary and leads into a series of premodern case studies in the fields of Arabic, English, German, Jewish, Latin, and Romance studies. Read the text in full below.

© Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2020. The print version can be purchased from Vittorio Klostermann or through book stores.

Download the articles from the Practices of Commentary special volume by clicking on the titles below:

Front matter & contents
Introduction,
by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock
Marginal Commentaries in Ḥadīṯ Manuscripts,
by Stephanie Brinkmann
The Place of the Medieval in Qur’an Commentary: A Survey of Recent Editions,
by Walid Saleh
Commentary and Text Organization in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Book of Animals,
by Jeannie Miller
The Pedagogy of Twelfth-Century Cathedral School Biblical Commentaries Peter Comestor’s Lectures on the Gospel of Luke,
by Simon Whedbee
Medieval Commentary on the ‘Thebaid’ and its Reception: Preliminary Observations,
by Anthony J. Fredette
Ekphrasis and Commentary in Walter of Chatillon’s ‘Alexandreis‘,
by Suzanne Conklin Akbari
About Form and Function of German Vernacular Commentaries,
by Jennifer Gerber
Commentary as Literature: The Medieval ‘Glossenlied,’
by Christina Lechtermann
Performing Commentary: Preaching the Apocalyptic Drama in Early Modern England,
by Daniel Dornhofer
Veils and Naked Words: Girolamo Benivieni’s Self-Commentaries,
by Christine Ott
Mirroring Authorization in Torquato Tasso’s ‘Rime Amorose‘,
by Philip Stockbrugger
Letters as Comment on Commentary: The Annotationes in ‘Hymnos Callimachi’ by Nicodemus Frischlin (1577) and Bonaventura Vulcanius (1584),
by Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Supplement 1—
Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Supplement 2—
Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Abstracts
Notes on Contributors

New Publication: Dante, Des Vies Nouvelles

Congratulations to Elisa Brilli (University of Toronto) on the recent publication of her new book, co-authored with Guiliano Milani (Université Gustave Eiffel).

In this book, Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani construct a biography of Dante Alighieri, delving into various documents and literary works to shed light on this famous author’s life. For more information, see the book’s publication page at Fayard.

“Écrire une biographie de Dante est un défi auquel se sont confrontés nombre de chercheurs. Tandis que les archives se taisent le plus souvent sur la vie du Florentin ou sont d’interprétation délicate, son œuvre contient tant de passages personnels qu’elle pourrait aisément se lire comme une autobiographie. Mais naïve serait la démarche qui prendrait Dante pour un témoin fidèle de sa vie. Dans une enquête conduite à quatre mains, où documents et œuvre littéraire se font écho, Elisa Brilli et Giuliano Milani renouent les fils de ce destin singulier. Celui d’un homme aux prises avec les bouleversements politiques de son temps, à la charnière des xiiie et xive siècles, et dont les expériences, horizons et réactions changent en fonction des contextes qu’il traverse (municipal, seigneurial, impérial, courtisan)  ; celui d’un homme qui tenta à plusieurs reprises de façonner sa vie par l’écriture, inventant une forme de récit de soi, aux contenus toujours changeants, entre mémoire individuelle et universelle. Là est sans doute la contribution essentielle de Dante à la culture occidentale.”

Fayard.

Practices of Reading in the Premodern Arabic Tradition at MLA 2021

Featured image: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS arabe 7290, fol 5r. Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, 1214 (detail). Source: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc83329

Panel at the 2021 Modern Language Association Convention

SATURDAY, 9 JANUARY 5:15 PM-6:30 PM EST

Keywords: 
Reception, Genre, Commentaries, Aesthetics, Literariness

Sponsoring Entity: 
LLC Arabic

Presentations:

1. A Philological Frame of Mind, Matthew L. Keegan (Barnard C) [#14416]

2. Commentary on al-Jāḥiẓ Manuscripts, Jeannie Miller (U of Toronto) [#14418]

3. The Problematic ‘One’ in a Thousand and One Nights, Muhsin J. al-Musawi (Columbia U) [#14420]

4. Al-Tawḥīdī’s Perception of the Art of Writing and Aesthetics, Nuha Alshaar (American U of Sharjah) [#14649]

Presiding: Lara Harb (Princeton U)

View details in the MLA Convention program online.

Attending this panel requires registering for the MLA Convention, but please check back for select recordings after the session.

Background image: British Library. Egerton MS 872, fol. 199r. Pentateuch with the Hafṭarot, Five Scrolls, and Rashi’s commentary, 1341. Source: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_872

Walid SALEH

University of Toronto

Walid Ahmad Saleh is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Qur’an, the history of its interpretation, the Arabic manuscript tradition, Islamic apocalyptic literature, and Muslim’s reception of the Bible. His first book The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition was the first monograph study ofal-Thalabi (d. 1035) and his influence. His second monograph, In Defense of the Bible, is a detailed study and an edition of al-Biqa`i’s (d. 1480) Bible treatise.

[Read more…] about Walid SALEH