Prof. Andrew M. Riggsby (University of Texas): “The Segmentation of Roman Documents”
This paper examines the ways ancient Romans divided document into segments, how graphic devices interact with textual features, how differently this operated in different contexts, and what kinds of usage were (dis)privileged by these configurations. It begins with a survey of mechanisms (e.g. blank space, sigla, columniation, font, formal page divisions) across a broad range of private and public document types. The most important distinction that emerges from this survey is that between single- and multi-user documents. The former exhibit a minimalist approach, even hostility, to formalisms, seen widely throughout Roman information culture. So they do not, for instance, separate out the unique information in otherwise formulaic documents. The forms of language used depend on ordinary syntax, rather than the more abstract structure of the document. Multi-user documents, by contrast, bring a number of devices to bear, often in combination with one another. (That the exceptional cases here are also distinguished by the presence of social and material scaffolding is itself also a known feature of Roman information culture.) These structures produced are typically “flat” but very granular. They seem normally to be targeted at narrowly defined effects, but the specifics of those effects vary greatly across document types. Some are meant to guarantee the integrity of individual entries. Others allow for searching out particular kinds of information, but only according to very specific search patterns. Perhaps most distinctively—and this ties directly to the notion of a “multi-user document”—segmentation is set up to provide affordances for physical transformation of the document by subsequent users.
Prof. Wendy Scase (University of Birmingham): “Thinking with Visual Devices in a Late Medieval Gentry Household”
Though there are plenty of visual devices in early books, evidence for how readers engaged with them is scarce. However, there are some exciting exceptions. This keynote lecture will identify neglected evidence for modes of engagement with visual devices, including, it will propose, use of them as tools for thinking with. It will focus on the literary collections of Cheshire landowner Humphrey Newton (1466-1536) and later members of his family. The Newton materials include a large range of visual devices, among them a harp diagram, a palmistry diagram, a quadrant diagram, Veronica’s veil, a devotional sacred heart image, faces, human figures, images of hairstyles and clothing, heraldic devices, a heraldic diagram centred on a ‘tun’, planetary charts, genealogical charts, two zodiac diagrams, and a plan showing the size of Christ’s foot. Many of these visual devices are intriguingly sketchy and informal. The family also owned, and engaged with, other material relevant to visual devices including a calligraphic pattern book, a printed, illustrated book about heraldry, and an illustrated urinary, all of which survive. Despite their range and quantity, the visual aspects of the Newton collections have attracted little previous discussion. The lecture will consider where Humphrey and other household members could have obtained models for the devices, what their notes tell us about how they understood and used them, and what these materials might contribute more broadly to our knowledge of the reception, use, and audiences for visual devices in the period.
Dr Carla Suhr (University of Helsinki): “The Lizard and the Rat: Images in Early English Printed Texts for Popular Audiences”
In this paper, I want to look at the uses and functions of images in early English printed texts that were aimed at popular audiences rather than more learned readers. It has been argued that the use of woodcut images was something of a genre convention in some of the early popular printed texts (see e.g. Luborsky 1987, Suhr 2011), much like the use of blackletter typeface was a marker of popular versus learned texts from the late sixteenth century until the mid-seventeenth century (see e.g. Bland 1998). For this paper, I will make use of the Early English Books Online database to test this claim by investigating the illustrations found in three types of popular texts: romances, sensationalist news pamphlets and lay texts dealing with medical topics. How are images used in these texts? Are they found on the title-pages and/or embedded in the body text? Are the images generic or specific to the texts? Are they referred to in the text? Are there differences in the uses and functions of images in the different types of texts? These are some of the questions I want to discuss in my paper.
Bland, Mark. 1998. The appearance of the text in Early Modern England. Text 11: 91-154.
Luborsky, Ruth Samson. 1987. Connections and disconnections between images and texts: The case of secular Tudor book illustrations. Word & Image 3 (1): 74-85.
Suhr, Carla. 2011. Publishing for the Masses: Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.