- This event has passed.
Post-Classical Libraries Conference
October 17 - October 18
Libraries occupied a central place in the organization and reproduction of pre-modern knowledge cultures.
Texts had been assembled in archives of various kinds from the Bronze Age, but most were of only ephemeral interest. Only when writing was deployed to create works intended to have lasting value – as literature, as contributions to science, or as records of historical investigations or sacred revelations – did it become necessary to actively curate them. In a world before printing, the risk that any given book – on papyrus or parchment, clay tablets or wooden ones, on rolls or in codices –would simply perish was a real one. Libraries became places where textual communities studied, catalogued, repaired, and recopied works of this kind. Recent studies have investigated the libraries of the Bronze Age Near East and of the Classical Mediterranean. These were royal or civic, private or public, based in temples, villas, or educational establishments. A few, like the Library of Alexandria, have been mythologized.
Most of these studies end in the third century CE, yet libraries also played a crucial role in the passages from antiquity to the Middle Ages. This will be the subject of our conference.
| Day 1 | |
|---|---|
| 10:15 | Coffee, fresh fruit, pastries (Royce, 314) |
| 10:30 | Welcome Remarks |
| 11:00 | The “Library of Caesarea” between Gaza and Berytus – Jeremiah Coogan (Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University) |
| 11:50 | Break |
| 12:00 | The Library on the Page: Booklists from Antiquity to the Latin West – Thomas Hendrickson (Stanford) |
| 1:00 | Lunch |
| 2:30 | ‘The Fortress of Writing was Burned…’: Archives and Institutions of Learning in Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Iran – Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina (University of Oxford) |
| 3:20 | Break |
| 3:30 | New Approaches to the Early Arabic Library – Michael Cooperson (NELC, UCLA) |
| 4:30 | Reception |
| 6:00 | Dinner (Plateia – participants only) |
| Day 2 | |
| 10:00 | Coffee, fresh fruit, pastries |
| 10:30 | Irish Libraries in the Early Middle Ages: Home and Abroad – Viktoriia Krivoshchekova (School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) |
| 11:20 | Strategies of Preservation at Monastic Libraries and Archives in Medieval Italy – Maya Maskarinec (USC) |
| 12:10 | Break |
| 12:20 | Books and libraries in Byzantium (8th–10th centuries) – Daniele Bianconi (University of Rome, La Sapienza) |
| 1:15 | Lunch |
| 3:00 | Closing Round Table |
Organizers: Stefania Tutino and Greg Woolf