H-220. The Materiality of Jewish and Christian Books
Peter Stallybrass David Stern
Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 14–19 June 2026
Format: in person, Harvard University in Cambridge, MA
Fee: $1,495
**The first-round application deadline for H-220 is Tuesday, 3 March 2026.**
This course will study the material text from its earliest stages in papyrus scrolls and codices through hand-written medieval manuscripts of many types, and printed books from the 1450s to the nineteenth century. Books studied in class will include papyrus fragments of Homer and the Bible; Hebrew Esther scrolls; early Qur’an leaves; Greek and Latin codices; Books of Hours and many other illuminated and decorated medieval manuscripts; the Gutenberg Bible; Luther; herbals; and censored books. The specific focus of the course will be on examining comparatively the different and common ways that materiality figures in defining the identity of Jewish and Christian books.
Drawing on a wide range of material texts from multiple libraries at Harvard University, the class will be addressing four topics, with four sessions devoted to each topic: scroll, roll, and codex; authorship and the naming and representation of God in Genesis and John; Christians and anti-Judaism (including censorship) from the Magna Carta to the Reformation; Genesis, the Song of Songs and the meaning of plants. Four sessions will be devoted to each topic, including a session each afternoon (from Monday to Thursday) in which students in groups of three or four will examine selected books in the Houghton Library Reading Room; that evening each group will prepare a Powerpoint presentation on their books to present the following morning in the first session.
We will be exploring how “the bible” was constituted through a variety of material forms (tablets, phylacteries, scrolls, rolls and codices), a range of material practices (reading aloud, chanting, singing) and in diverse places (yeshivas, synagogues, monasteries, churches, schools and universities, private households). One question will be to what extent “the bible” was a post-Reformation invention that erases the variety of forms in which Jews and Christians had previously studied the Scriptures. The class will focus particularly on Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and St. John from the Middle Ages onwards. No knowledge of any foreign language will be required and all the readings for the course will be in English.
Course History
Faculty
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Peter Stallybrass
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David Stern
Peter Stallybrass
Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and directed the History of Material Texts seminar for 26 years. Peter has been the Samuel Wannamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London, the Moses Aaron Dropsie Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (with Allon White), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (with Ann Rosalind Jones, which won the James Russell Lowell Prize by the MLA for the outstanding book in Modern Languages), and Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Writer (with James Green). His essay with Heather Wolfe on “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England” won the Archival History Article Award from the Society of American Archivists and he is working with Heather and Ray Schrire on “Dots and Slashes in Early Modern Account Books.” He is at present completing a book on the bible as a material text.
Full Bio »David Stern
David Stern is Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he teaches ancient and medieval Jewish literature and the history of the book. His research and publications have spanned the entire length of Jewish literary tradition from the Biblical to the modern periods, but over the last twenty years, it has concentrated on the history of the Jewish book. His publications in that area include The Washington Haggadah by Joel ben Simeon (Harvard University Press, 2011); The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State University Press, 2015); and The Jewish Bible: A Material History (University of Washington Press, 2017). He is currently completing the third volume of his collected essays, Jewish Literary Cultures, and hoping to finish two other books, “An Unsystematic History of the Jewish Book,” and “Unassimilable: The Talmud and Western Culture.”
Full Bio »