Context of the Codex

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Hagiography Society

Organizer Name

Sara Ritchey

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette

Presider Name

Sara Ritchey

Paper Title 1

(Re-)framing Bede's Historia ecclesiastica as Hagiography in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Codex and Context of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Latin 182

Presenter 1 Name

Benjamin Pohl

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Univ. of Bristol

Paper Title 2

Reading between the Binds: Scottish Legendary Manuscript

Presenter 2 Name

Melissa Coll-Smith

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Aquinas College

Paper Title 3

The Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu saga in Its Manuscript Contexts

Presenter 3 Name

Daniel C. Najork

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Arizona State Univ.

Paper Title 4

Signum, Res et Memoriam: Illustrating the Virtues of Saints in Boulogne MS 107

Presenter 4 Name

David Defries

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Kansas State Univ.

Start Date

12-5-2017 1:30 PM

Session Location

Schneider 1355

Description

When contemporary scholars encounter the Lives of saints and other hagiographic material, it is most often in the form of a bound and printed modern critical edition. To create these editions, scholars have scrutinized several manuscript copies of a Life, removing texts from their manuscript context, assessing and “correcting” their collective aberrations, variations, errors, and fragments, and thereby producing an imagined coherent original that best replicates authorial intention, a pure text. But critical concepts such as mouvance and variance remind us that no such pure text ever really existed to medieval readers. This panel asks scholars to consider hagiographic material from the vantage of manuscript, as opposed to print, culture. How did the other texts with which a Life was bound mediate its meaning? What can successive bindings tell us about the changing reception of hagiographic materials?

Sara Ritchey