Events

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

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08. November 2024: Commenting on Commentaries: The History, Development, and Diversity of the Chinese Commentarial Tradition.

A talk by James Robson, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

Scheduled for Friday, November 8, from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET.

Abstract: Jonathan Z. Smith once wrote:  “Where there is a canon we can predict the necessary occurrence of a hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is to continually extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that is.” This focus on meaning and the way the commentarial tradition opens up a text by revealing its hidden aspects or adds new meanings for a new age, is of course one fruitful approach, but it has the potential danger of masking the complex variety and function of commentaries that exist within a tradition. This talk seeks to lay new a foundation for studying Chinese commentaries by providing an account of the full range and diversity of the commentarial tradition in China. Rather than focus on commentaries within a single tradition—as much previous scholarship has tended to do—this talk aims to look across traditions to discuss the variety of commentarial styles and formats in classical Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist commentaries. What different forms (mise en page) did those commentaries take? How were form and content related? How did commentaries solidify the meaning of a classic text and/or how did it breathe new life into it? How might commentaries invite—or even force—a radical reinterpretation of the original text? The history of how commentaries have traditionally be treated as subordinate to the main text is now well known, but there remains much to say about how commentaries were not only significant in the role they played in understanding a text, but also played a variety of different functions. Many Chinese texts, for example, only survive in so far as they were transmitted along with a commentary. These are some of the issues I plan to address in this talk that will approach the Chinese commentarial tradition from a broad perspective that aims to integrate new insights from recent studies on commentaries across different Chinese religious traditions. This remains a necessary step in our understanding of Chinese commentaries since we still have an inadequate grasp of the different genres of commentary and their historical evolution and development. 

27. September 2024: Philodemus’ On the Good King According to Homer and the Homeric Commentary Tradition.

A talk by Jeffrey Fish, Associate Professor of Classics at Baylor University

Scheduled for Friday, September 27, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

Abstract: Odysseus forestalls Eurycleia’s gloating over the slain suitors in Odyssey 22.407-11. According to the usual reading of 22.411, Odysseus tells her that “it is not piety to glory (euchetaasthai) over slain men.” In light of Odysseus’ triumphal behavior in the Iliad, the Homeric scholia instead understand euchetaasthai to mean “to pray.” Accordingly, Odysseus was not making a comment about the immorality of boasting over a defeated foe but rather about ritual purity. The Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara appears to take a different approach in On the Good King According to Homer, a treatise preserved among the Herculaneum papyri. The proper placement of fragments suggests that Philodemus thought that Odysseus learned from his foolish gloating over the Cyclops.

01. March 2024: Hang Time: Thinking about the Future in the Medieval Mediterranean.

A talk by James A. Redfield, Assistant Professor of Biblical and Talmudic Literatures at Saint Louis University.

Scheduled for Friday, March 01, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET.

Abstract: How did rabbis of Roman Palestine (c. 200–400 CE) use their legal tradition to think about culture? This question has been limited by a scholarly preoccupation with the boundaries of Jewish identity. In their Roman environment, following two disastrous revolts, Jews were a weak minority whose ancient law and its interpretive heritage remained a mark of distinction. Their rabbinic elite’s success at preserving that tradition in fundamental works of Jewish law to this day, such as the Mishnah and its commentary, has thus understandably been treated as a defense of Jewish identity against assimilation to Greco-Roman culture. But it might be more than this.

This talk unpacks examples of three more things that it might be. We will do so by examining the chronological and theoretical development of precisely those laws that seem to be about resistance to assimilation: idolatry (avodah zarah). First, in literary form, we will see how rabbis use commentary to subvert Deuteronomy’s unequivocal condemnation of idolatry and rethink the category from a Roman perspective, reflecting not simply knowledge but interpretation of Roman culture. Second, in normative terms, we will see where those interpretations yield new lines of Jewish/Roman difference and new prohibitions, with more or less “wiggle room,” implying a new theory of the relationship between culture and religion in Jewish life. Finally, in wider historical context, we will situate these developments among new research on ancient ethnography and challenge the view that Jews were sui generis in terms of how they represented, inquired about, and theorized cultural difference.

26. January 2024: Hang Time: Thinking about the Future in the Medieval Mediterranean.

A talk by Karla Mallette, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan.

Scheduled for Friday, January 26, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. ET. Attendees are welcome to join us in person (3rd Floor, Lillian Massey, 125 Queen’s Park) or via Zoom – but please note that to attend online you must register (registration link here).

Abstract: How do human beings think about, talk about, and prepare for contingency? How do we think about the future – events to come, good or ill? This talk looks to the late medieval Mediterranean to survey emergent ways of rationalizing risk. Economic historians, sociologists and anthropologists have studied the new financial products that allowed medieval men and women to protect themselves from catastrophe and to share in the risks of investments that might bring profit or loss. At the same time, new vocabulary emerged in late medieval contracts and literary works: words that stared down the future and named contingency with precision. This talk uses philology and literary history to build on the work of social scientists and to describe the strategies that medieval men and women used to bet on the future.

01. December 2023: The Daode Jing (The Scripture of the Way and Its Virtues) and Its Diverse Commentaries

A talk by James Robson, James C. Kralik, and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Harvard University)

Abstract: The Daode jing is traditionally regarded as one of the main sacred books of Daoism, written in the 6th century BCE by the religion’s venerable old founder Laozi (“The Old Master”). Over the past two thousand years, the Daode jing has attracted the attention of a multitude of scholars and exegetes in China and spread throughout the rest of East Asia, where it has had a prodigious influence.

This talk focuses on the diverse afterlives of the Daode jing that become accessible to us through a consideration of its diverse commentaries. This talk will be less concerned with the life of the purported author or the nebulous meanings of the Daode jing and more the lives that the book itself has lived. Through a discussion of a selection of influential early commentaries on the Daode jing we can demonstrate that in ancient China there was not a single way to read, interpret, or put into practice the brief and mysterious work, and through a consideration of later commentaries we can see how those interpretations further shifted over time. It is the surprising diversity found in commentaries on the Daode jing that this talk aims to explore.

27. October 2023: The Bodley Glossaries: The Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730

A talk by Dr. Claudio Cataldi, Adjunct Professor of Germanic Philology at Università Kore di Enna

Abstract: The Bodley Glossaries represent the last outcome of the rich tradition of early medieval English glossography. At the same time, the four glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 730 bear witness to the multi-lingual environment of early thirteenth-century England. On the occasion of the first full edition of the Bodley Glossaries (PIMS, 2023), this talk is devoted to their contents: lexical interpretamenta, long commentary glosses, batches of Biblical entries, animal sounds, and glosses to a Hiberno-Latin poem. This presentation of the Bodley Glossaries will be set in the context of the development of early English lexicography, from its beginnings to the post-Conquest period.

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

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

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.
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