Catherine Brown
I study and think about early medieval Iberian visual and textual cultures, medieval Iberian Romance and Latin literatures, language technologies and thought.
From an initial focus on the Central Middle Ages in Spain and France (explored in my book Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford U. P., 1998 and articles on the Libro de Buen Amor, the Arçipreste de Talavera, Marie de France, and Abelard and Heloise), my interest has shifted to the earlier Middle Ages and to transhistorical theoretical questions of the inter-relationships of language technologies and thought.
My current book project, Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain studies the self-representation of scribal activity in illuminated manuscripts produced in the so-called “Mozarabic” communities of the Iberian peninsula. The manuscripts themselves are stunningly beautiful, alive with intense color and vividly abstracted human, animal, and floral forms. Equally exciting is the explicit protagonism they grant to the people who made them, scribes and painters who often feature prominently—not only in remarkably detailed colophons, but also in numerous textual interventions, subscriptions, and visual representations.
From these scribal interventions and self-representations emerges an embodied theory and practice of reading and writing that has much to offer contemporary debates about the relation between technology and intellectual life.
Address: 2015 Tisch Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
From an initial focus on the Central Middle Ages in Spain and France (explored in my book Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford U. P., 1998 and articles on the Libro de Buen Amor, the Arçipreste de Talavera, Marie de France, and Abelard and Heloise), my interest has shifted to the earlier Middle Ages and to transhistorical theoretical questions of the inter-relationships of language technologies and thought.
My current book project, Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain studies the self-representation of scribal activity in illuminated manuscripts produced in the so-called “Mozarabic” communities of the Iberian peninsula. The manuscripts themselves are stunningly beautiful, alive with intense color and vividly abstracted human, animal, and floral forms. Equally exciting is the explicit protagonism they grant to the people who made them, scribes and painters who often feature prominently—not only in remarkably detailed colophons, but also in numerous textual interventions, subscriptions, and visual representations.
From these scribal interventions and self-representations emerges an embodied theory and practice of reading and writing that has much to offer contemporary debates about the relation between technology and intellectual life.
Address: 2015 Tisch Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
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Papers by Catherine Brown
‘flex-point’ of manuscript space-time has much to teach. And not least of the teaching is the importance of allowing ourselves to be wounded by the aspects of our primary materials that seem at first blush to be non-meaningful, non-intellectual, nonverifiable. This approach to manuscripts might be termed ‘empathic codicology’ –a feeling-into the study of the codex. Why not call this manuscript thinking: writing thought by hand, thinking by written hand?
I propose here to pay attention to some of those things said by one particular group of silent voices of the page: the Iberian scribes of the early Latin Middle Ages. In the books they copied, writers of Latin in both al-Andalus and in the monasteries of the Christian north in the tenth and eleventh centuries offer a great deal of information about themselves and their work. And not, as we shall see, just names and dates: these scribes say a great deal, and they go to great trouble to say it.
One place: Northern Spain, 785 CE. Beatus of Liébana, presbyter and perhaps abbot of San Martín de Turieno, now Santo Toribio, writes: “What is this letter that you read in the Gospels or in the other holy Scriptures, but the body of Christ, the flesh of Christ, which is eaten by all Christians? And it is eaten when it is read and when it is heard.”
Here is a letter that is embodied flesh in both production and consumption. And here, in response and relation to this letter, is a way of reading and writing that is as at home with the body as it is with the breath, with the “exterior” letter as with its “interior” meaning.
Books by Catherine Brown
Talks by Catherine Brown
3 superficialities of manuscript study:
1. Paratext
2. The anecdotal
3. Plowing
Paratext: para, beside. Paratext is what’s beside, next to the text. It’s the prefatory chaff you leaf through to get to the auctorial wheat. It’s the marginal pentrial husk left out of your edition of that auctorial nut.
One reason the paratext is superficial is that it’s full of ephemera: pentrials, doodles, records of something that must have seemed important at the time but now seems meaningless. Everybody’s interested in it, but there’s not much to say about it, scholarship-wise. It’s a guilty scholarly pleasure.
‘flex-point’ of manuscript space-time has much to teach. And not least of the teaching is the importance of allowing ourselves to be wounded by the aspects of our primary materials that seem at first blush to be non-meaningful, non-intellectual, nonverifiable. This approach to manuscripts might be termed ‘empathic codicology’ –a feeling-into the study of the codex. Why not call this manuscript thinking: writing thought by hand, thinking by written hand?
I propose here to pay attention to some of those things said by one particular group of silent voices of the page: the Iberian scribes of the early Latin Middle Ages. In the books they copied, writers of Latin in both al-Andalus and in the monasteries of the Christian north in the tenth and eleventh centuries offer a great deal of information about themselves and their work. And not, as we shall see, just names and dates: these scribes say a great deal, and they go to great trouble to say it.
One place: Northern Spain, 785 CE. Beatus of Liébana, presbyter and perhaps abbot of San Martín de Turieno, now Santo Toribio, writes: “What is this letter that you read in the Gospels or in the other holy Scriptures, but the body of Christ, the flesh of Christ, which is eaten by all Christians? And it is eaten when it is read and when it is heard.”
Here is a letter that is embodied flesh in both production and consumption. And here, in response and relation to this letter, is a way of reading and writing that is as at home with the body as it is with the breath, with the “exterior” letter as with its “interior” meaning.
3 superficialities of manuscript study:
1. Paratext
2. The anecdotal
3. Plowing
Paratext: para, beside. Paratext is what’s beside, next to the text. It’s the prefatory chaff you leaf through to get to the auctorial wheat. It’s the marginal pentrial husk left out of your edition of that auctorial nut.
One reason the paratext is superficial is that it’s full of ephemera: pentrials, doodles, records of something that must have seemed important at the time but now seems meaningless. Everybody’s interested in it, but there’s not much to say about it, scholarship-wise. It’s a guilty scholarly pleasure.