Book History and Biblical Literatures

Call For Papers: In 2021, we will host one invited panel in collaboration with the scholars participating in the Oslo Centre for Advanced Study year-long project, "Books Known Only By Title." Participants will share the preliminary findings of their research into the postulated books of the first millennium library, exploring questions of literary imagination, transmission, ascription, and gender. Two other panels will focus around the theme of the archaeology of text. One panel will be composed of papers deferred from the 2020 meeting, all of which ask us to consider (or reconsider) the archaeology of Book History. We invite proposals for another panel on similar themes, which may explore such questions as: How do stories about finding texts reflect practices of reading and writing in antiquity--and how do the stories we tell about modern textual discoveries reflect our own practices, as well? How do narratives about the archaeology of texts shape the ways in which texts are categorized, circulated, and interpreted? How does the literal archaeology of ancient textual materials intersect with the archaeology of knowledge? Or where does such figurative use of "archaeology" break down? Finally, this program group and the “Historical Paul” section invite papers on the materiality of and social processes entailed in letter writing for a joint session on Material Philology and Ancient Epistolography. Possible considerations include the authors and recipients or intermediaries (e.g., scribes, companions, co-workers) of letters; the copying and collecting of letters, as well as interventions that often occurred in these stages of transmission (editing, interpolation); the statuses of letters as textual objects, which might range from mundane communication to pedagogical resources to “religious” artifacts in their own right; and the various afterlives of letters and letter collections, among other possibilities.

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