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English

Twenty-second Colloquium of the CIPL

Encounters in written culture: influence, interchange, transfer, reception?

Prague, 14-16 September 2022

Call for papers

Material objects and ideas often travel together: along commercial routes, through political, religious or literary communication, and in countless random individual meetings. Goods, traditions and innovations cross the boundaries of communities on many scales: lands, creeds, and languages, but also professions, congregations or single institutions, not to mention chronological boundaries (for instance in the imitation of earlier writings). Cultural interaction may consciously follow stable patterns, established networks, or even formal diplomatic ceremonial, but it can also result from unconscious, long-term trends or from unintentional and potentially disruptive events. Imports are not always initially welcome and one person’s tradition is another’s novelty. But over time such movements tend to shift cultural boundaries, and from the perspective of cultural history they are generally assumed to have enriched all parties in many ways.

Generic notions of influence, interchange or transfer and reception, employed in the description of such phenomena, remain to be carefully defined and discussed in specific contexts. Palaeography and codicology offer many instances of books and other written material transmitting not only texts (which are outside the focus of this colloquium) but also the forms of writing and the structure of the book, in a wide variety of historical circumstances.

The twenty-second Colloquium of the CIPL will take place in Prague on 14-16 September 2022, organised and hosted by the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences as well as the Commission for the Cataloguing and Study of Manuscripts.

The CIPL is looking forward to proposals addressing these topics by combining two or more of the following perspectives.

1) the materiality, circumstances and evidence of physical circulation: travelling with one’s books, scholarly communication, gifts, loans, trade, plunder, etc.;

2) interaction of Latin  scripts, techniques, and styles with those ofdifferent manuscript cultures: Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.;

3) form and function: interaction between the visual and material aspects typical of specific categories of books, charters, inscriptions, etc.;

4) technologies and scripts: interaction not only between script and decoration but also interaction between writing with reed pen, writing with quill, , brush, chisel, etc., including the printing press;

5) the scripts and styles of writing communities: interaction of scripts from political or religious institutions, particularly as regards  their house-styles; also, between clerics or professionals and lay people, less-than-fully-literate individuals with occasional, partial or indirect access to writing;

6) individual mobility and encounters: itinerant scribes, universities or chanceries as crossroads of written culture, etc.

Authors of proposals should keep in mind the following questions and distinctions.

1) mutual exchange versus one-way transfer or influence;

2) positive reception / disregard / rejection;

3) passive versus active reception: translation and reinterpretation of imports;

4) initial stimuli and the wider spread of their consequences in time and/or space;

5) assessing the importance of external influences versus independent developments;

6) specific individuals (authors, scribes, artisans) as models or intermediaries.

Proposals should be 2,000-3,000 characters in length, in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, and should include the forename and surname of the author, a title and brief abstract in English or French. Authors who are not members of the CIPL should also supply a short CV. Proposals should be submitted as a Word file in an attachment (not as part of the body of the email text nor as a PDF file) and sent to Outi Merisalo (omerisalo@gmail.com), General Secretary of the CIPL, by 1 April 2021 at the latest.