H-120. Textual Mobilities: Works, Books & Reading Across Early Modern Europe
Roger Chartier John H. Pollack
“Be prepared for, and excited about, a very inter-disciplinary conversation!” — 2016 student
Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia, PA
Fee: $1,495
This course considers histories of books, texts, and reading using the lens of connected history. The new global history has brought an ever-increasing scholarly focus on exchanges, on trade and colonialism, and on the movements of peoples, ideas, and goods in and across spaces. Here we will investigate what these approaches may mean for book history. Working with, but also against, the national book histories that are so essential to the field of book history itself, we will focus upon topics including textual geographies (geographies of the book and geographies within books); translation, textual migration, and adaptation; and forms of orality in written and printed texts.
We will discuss some essential texts in book history, including works by Petrucci, Febvre and Martin, Eisenstein, Johns, and McKenzie. We will also focus on close studies of texts and books from the early modern period with complex, connected histories. These case studies will bridge the European nation-states and cross from “Old” to “New” Worlds. Authors we will discuss include Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Castiglione, and Las Casas. Here, the resources of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts will be of vital importance: the seminar will leave ample time for examination of works in multiple languages and in multiple editions.
Participants are invited to propose their own research on related topics (not necessarily limited to early modern Europe). Time will be set aside during the week for discussion of individual research projects.
Click here to view the course description for the virtual version of this course, “Textual Connected Histories: Books and Reading in the Early Modern European World.”
Course History
Faculty
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Roger Chartier
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John H. Pollack
Roger Chartier
Roger Chartier is a Professeur in the Collège de France, Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is devoted to the history of written culture, the history of the book and history of reading, and the relationship between literature and history. His books in English are Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Cardenio between Cerventes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play (Polity Press, 2012); and The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind (Polity Press, 2014). His most recent book is Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
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John H. Pollack
John H. Pollack is Library Specialist for Public Services at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he has held since 1995. His responsibilities include working with scholars in the reading room, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He has assisted Roger Chartier for more than a decade in the preparation of seminars and class exhibitions. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Penn and specializes in early American literature and history. He has published on colonial writings from New France and edited a volume of essays on Benjamin Franklin and colonial education. He is currently working on a monograph on the circulation of Native words in early European texts on the Americas.
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