News

New Publication: Practices of Commentary: Medieval Traditions and Transmissions

Edited by Amanda Goodman and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Congratulations to Amanda Goodman and Suzanne Conklin Akbari on publishing their volume which serves as a comparative study of localized premodern commentary traditions. This volume is hosted online at the Institute for Advanced Study and can be viewed/downloaded through the following link: https://albert.ias.edu/entities/publication/b797c001-c32d-472a-abfd-ba7028e0f884/details.

The comparative or connected study of localized intellectual traditions poses special challenges to the global turn in medieval studies. How can we enable conversations across language groups and intricate cultural formations, as well as disciplines? Practices of commentary offer a compelling opportunity: their visual layouts reveal assumptions about the relative status of text and gloss, while interpretive interlinear or marginal prompts capture the dynamic relationships among generations of teachers, students, and readers. The material traces of manuscript usage—from hastily scrawled marginal notes to vivid rubrication—illuminate the shared didactic and communicative practices developed within scholarly communities. By bringing together researchers working on specific cultures and discourses across Eurasia, this volume moves toward a global account of premodern commentary traditions.

Medieval Traditions and Transmissions is a special issue of The Medieval Globe, published by Arc Humanities Press.

New Publication: Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change

Edited by
Joel Blecher & Stefanie Brinkmann

Congratulations to Joel Blecher and Stefanie Brinkmann on publishing their volume on hadith commentary with Edinburgh University Press. See the book’s publication page at Edinburgh University Press.

This publication explores key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary:

Represents a milestone for the field: the first-ever edited volume on the important subject of hadith commentary
Presents diverse case studies of hadith commentaries across time, place and sect
Delivers new insights into themes of Islam and politics, Islamic mysticism, Islamic law, Islamic philosophy and the digital humanities
Offers cross-disciplinary models of cutting-edge methods in textual studies from a group of international scholars

Hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, across diverse periods, regions and sects. This is the first volume of scholarly essays ever collected on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary. The book unfolds chronologically from the early centuries of Islam to the modern period, and readers will discover continuities and changes as a group of international experts offer illuminating studies of Sunnis, Shi‘i and Sufis who interpret and debate the meaning of hadith that spans a wide terrain: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, and further. The volume also models a variety of methodological approaches, including social history, intellectual history, the study of religion, and digital history. By highlighting both differences and commonalities as the practice of hadith commentary circulated across distant eras and lands, this volume sheds new light on the way Muslims have historically understood the meaning of Muhammad’s example.

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.

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.

[Read more…]

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

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?

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 xiii^e et xiv^e 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.