Flowers and Letter-Writing

Peter Stallybrass

A two-part, live Zoom webinar series–with each part consisting of 3 sessions–open to 15 participants.
This series has filled; registration is now closed.

Mondays and Wednesdays, 10–11:30am, 27 May–15 June, 2020.

This two-part webinar series on flowers and on letter-writing, with each part consisting of three sessions, can be taken either separately or as a single seminar. There will be important overlaps between the two parts, but each is also self-contained.

From Classical Antiquity, flowers and texts have been closely associated with each other, and arguably the dominant textual form of the Middle Ages was the florilegia or anthology (literally, a gathering of flowers in Latin and Greek). In English, “posy” and “poesy” were originally the same word. Even more important was the concept of the reader as a bee, most influentially established by Plutarch: disregarding the boundaries of “mine” and “thine,” the reader goes from garden to garden, flower to flower, text to text, selecting only the best pollen, before returning to the hive to sort out what has been promiscuously gathered into the discrete cells of the honeycomb. For a reader, this meant that her or his reading should be indexed under findable headings, for reuse in the making of a prayer or a speech or a sermon or a poem.

In this series, however, we will be mainly taking a more literal-minded approach to flowers. How did poets and painters and herbalists from Albrecht Dürer to Emily Dickinson collect flowers, materially as well as textually, to record them in herbaria, in paint, and in ink and to send them in letters to each other as descriptions and drawings and dried specimens? In the second part on letter-writing, we will also focus on the transformation of paper into a variety of material forms by folding them into diamonds and hearts and, in the case of Dickinson’s envelope poems, by tearing or cutting the paper into an extraordinary variety of haphazard shapes. At the same time, we will explore the materiality of letter-writing conventions from the choice of paper to how one addressed and signed off letters.

Sessions will be devoted to discussion, rather than to lecture; registrants should expect to participate in the conversation throughout each. Registrants are expected to participate in all sessions. The webinar meetings may be recorded for teaching purposes, but recordings will not be shared publicly; this series otherwise is a live-only event.

Sessions will be devoted to discussion, rather than to lecture; registrants should expect to participate in the conversation throughout each. Registrants are expected to participate in all sessions. The webinar meetings may be recorded for teaching purposes, but recordings will not be shared publicly; this series otherwise is a live-only event.

Registrants will receive readings for each part in advance. Readings will be brief and focused (never more than 60 pages), but there will be additional suggested exit readings. There will be a short exercise for each session, sometimes practical (like finding and examining a dandelion, if necessary digitally, but ideally on the street or in the field), sometimes literary (transcribing and “ordering” the lines of one of Dickinson’s envelope poems), sometimes manual (learning different folding patterns for letters). And each participant will be expected to give one five-minute presentation during the course.

For more information about the image featured above, please visit The Digital Beehive. Or, to see the complete digitized manuscript, please visit Penn in Hand.