Douglas Pfeiffer will discuss “How Erasmus Invented Historical Context”
Who invented reading for historical context? One tradition credits the Renaissance philologists such as Erasmus who sought to edit ancient texts for contemporary readers. But this explanatory tradition has also encouraged a disciplinary divide between such pioneering positivism and what in practice went side-by-side with it: the more imaginative dimensions of reading and writing about literature. To challenge this origins story and its remarkably persistent notion of a fundamental segregation of textual editing from literary criticism, this talk looks at Erasmus of Rotterdam’s learned yet playfully inventive 1516 edition of Saint Jerome. Erasmus’ editing reveals just how central non-rational, even fictionalizing methods were to early modern philology – the field often understood as a progenitor of modern fact-based, critical historiography.
Douglas Pfeiffer is Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of Stony Brook’s English Honors Program. He is author of The Force of Character: Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His teaching and research focus on early modern poetry, humanism, and history of the book.
Joshua Teplitsky will discuss “A Social Life of Jewish Books: Archiving Jewish Life in Eighteenth-Century Prague”
David Oppenheim of Prague (1664-1736), collected one of the most important Jewish libraries the world has ever known. Assembled over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries his library contains works of Jewish law and liturgy, Yiddish folklore, mathematical textbooks, and mystical treatises. Remarkable as a collection in its own right, the individual books tell a larger story about the flows of politics, power, and influence in early modern Jewish culture. This talk “unpacks the library” of David Oppenheim and points to the ways that the movement of books can reveal more than just intellectual horizons—following their ephemeral traces provides for an expanded archive of social and political life in premodern Europe.
Joshua Teplitsky is an assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University. Prior to coming to Stony Brook he held the Albert and Rachel Lehmann Junior Research Fellowship in Jewish History and Culture at Oxford University. He has published articles in Jewish Social Studies and Jewish History and is currently working on a monograph about the library and life of David Oppenheim of Prague (1664-1736) as a window into premodern Jewish political culture in Central Europe.
ALL are welcome to attend!