Histories of the Holograph from Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond

Venue: University of Oxford (Jesus College),

Dates: 17-19 September 2020. 17-19 March 2021

Call for papers

Deadline: 14 February 2020

A holograph can be defined as a manuscript that is written by the person named as, or presumed to be, its author. Usually, the notion of ‘modern manuscripts’ is used in genetic criticism to distinguish these private documents from earlier (e.g. ancient, medieval) manuscripts, which are often scribal copies, i.e. meant for public dissemination. But even though holographs are rarer in the pre-modern period, they do exist. Similarly, the era of the ‘modern manuscript’ needs to be confronted on the other end of its temporal spectrum with the era of the ‘digital manuscript’ – the born-digital holograph, so to speak. By making ‘histories of the holograph’ the theme of the 2020 ESTS conference, we would like to encourage the dialogue between colleagues working on texts from all periods and invite them to investigate habits of revision throughout the ages, alongside more general ESTS-related topics and questions on textual scholarship and scholarly editing. These may include: the theories and practices of scholarly, critical and textual editing; digital scholarly editing and tool development; philology; manuscript studies; codicology and palaeography; genetic criticism; historical bibliography and the history of the book; authorship studies, etc.

Please send your abstract (300 words) to ESTS.OXFORD2020@jesus.ox.ac.uk by 14 February 2020.

This conference is co-organised by the University of Oxford (Jesus College) and the University of Antwerp (Centre for Manuscript Genetics).

Academic Committee: Mateusz Antoniuk, Olga Beloborodova, Nicholas Cronk, Paolo D’Iorio, Sakari Katajamäki, Seamus Perry, Adam Smyth, Kathryn Sutherland, Dirk Van Hulle, Wim Van Mierlo, Daniel Wakelin.

Organising Committee: Olga Beloborodova, Wout Dillen, Dirk Van Hulle

The conference will be preceded by the GENESIS OXFORD 2020 conference, 15-17 March 2021, and by a pre-conference colloquium on authors’ libraries, 15 March 2021.