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Folger Institute Programs
Visit www.folger.edu/institute to access our online application form and guidelines.
Writing and Wonder: Books, Memory, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe
A Spring Semester Folger Institute Seminar directed by Walter Stephens
Application Deadline: 4 January 2008 for admission.
In the age of the Wunderkammer, writing itself appeared miraculous: “What, then, is more wondrous?” asked a scholar in 1617. The assumption that cultural continuity depends entirely on writing was commonplace, yet infinitely stimulating to the literate imagination. As scholars consolidated philological study and systematically formed great libraries for patrons and institutions, they sifted ancient and medieval literature for heroic narratives about the origin of writing, the invention of arts and sciences, semi-divine authors, magical books, vast libraries, titanic struggles between writing and erasure, memory and oblivion, civilization and savagery. The appeal of this lore was greatest between 1200 and the “Age of Wonder” and had declined steeply by 1800, after scholarly triage redefined many literary wonders as either counterfeits or nonexistent “imaginary” books. Modern and postmodern disciplines of the book and writing—paleography, library science, the material history of the book—emerged as this process discredited antiquarian fantasies. But works like the Attempt at an Introduction to Historia Litteraria Antediluviana, that is, A History of Scholars and Scholarship Before the Flood (1709) are significant for interpreting scholarship, historical counterfeit, fiction, parody, and visual arts in the early modern period. Case studies may include late medieval encyclopedists, Quattrocento humanists, Renaissance compilers (Polydore Vergil, Ravisius Textor, et al.), canonical authors such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Tasso, Cervantes, Milton, Vico, and Voltaire, and other topics that arise from participants’ research.
Director: Walter Stephens is the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (2002) and co-editor of Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1989) among other publications. He is currently working on early modern counterfeit and the mythology of books and writing.
Schedule: Fridays, 1 – 4:30 p.m., 1 February through 18 April 2008, except 14 March and 4 April.
Observation in Early Modern Europe
A Late-Spring Faculty Weekend Seminar directed by Lorraine Daston
Application Deadline: 4 January 2008 for admission.
How to look (and hear, smell, taste, and touch), how to record and recall, and how to describe were new challenges that confronted European naturalists from circa 1490 to 1785. New lands, new objects (often in the form of market commodities), new inventions and discoveries, and, above all, new forms of empirical inquiry exploded older frameworks for ordering knowledge. Knowledge itself was redefined to include the close study of particulars as well as the formulation of universal generalizations. Scholars trained to read books attempted to transfer some of these skills to the reading of nature; artisans who had once protected their empirical knowledge about materials and techniques as trade secrets published their observations in handbooks and treatises in the hopes of attracting princely patronage and customers. A narrow medical genre, the observationes, expanded and ultimately transformed writing about nature, society, and the arts. Twelve faculty participants will describe their own research projects as they relate to the growth of observation as an epistemic and publishing genre in early modern Europe. Special topics may include: the history of cognitive practices associated with observation (especially economies of attention and memory), the transfer of literary techniques such as excerpting and note-taking to observation, the refinement of the senses, the role of drawing and literary description in the cultivation of observational acuity, and the persona and ethos of the observer.
Director: Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Visiting Professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Her publications include Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (with Katharine Park, 1998), Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000), Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (2001), and Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004).
Schedule: All day, Friday and Saturday, 30 – 31 May 2008.
Please contact institute@folger.edu with any questions.
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