Artifice, Latinity, and the Social Lives of Medieval Books
Seamus Dwyer, Smith College & 2024-2025 SIMS Visiting Research Fellow
Friday, September 20, 2024, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

As the default language of textuality in the medieval West, Latin is almost too ubiquitous to be of note.  This premise, however, offers unexpected ways to find meaning in what is everywhere. By focusing particularly on Latin metatexts—broadly defined as textual phrases, words, and snippets that mediate main texts such as colophons, glosses, and marginalia—I aim to illustrate that Latinity in manuscripts offers a powerful connection between bibliographic materiality and human experiences external to that materiality. This involves a deep consideration of the notion of “artifice,” and how it commonly unites medieval ideas of Latinity (as a linguistic and intellectual concept) and of handwriting: both were seen as the products not of organic processes, but of human ingenuity and artisanship. Exploring how Latin as an “artificial” phenomenon materially mediates literature on a metatextual level allows for new ways of seeing how medieval scribes and readers intended for their books to achieve highly social, communicative ends in the wider world.