Making (and remaking) texts past, present, and future
Manuscripts come to us across hundreds of years, and many undergo myriad mediations as they traverse deep time.
The workshop Making (and remaking) texts past, present, and future, held 3–5pm February 9th 2024, brought together people from across Philadelphia to actively, creatively grapple with how books’ layers of material manipulation can shape the ways they have been understood, described, engaged with, and associated with other texts.
We began with a display of works held at Penn that have been cut up, remixed, rewritten, and rebound, as early as an 8th-/9th-century folium repurposed into an envelope.
Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a talk and slideshow exploring common modifications made to texts across time, from papyrus inserts to nineteenth-century girls’ self-made dollshouse backgrounds collaged from mixed media.
The array of texts were then taken from the room, and Michael Carroll, Assistant Director at the Fisher Fine Arts Library, handed around items from Penn’s Materials Library as he delved into questions of textual creation, histories of book production, and material considerations of making and remaking.
The second hour of the workshop bridged the distance between reader/viewer and creator. We continued our learning—but we did this by enacting, in line with Professor Pamela H. Smith’s theories around making and knowing, our knowledge about how mss. were made and then remade, rebound, re-assembled, re-illustrated, and wildly remixed across time by human beings.
Participants took a pair of scissors and crafted their own collages, codices, and cut-outs from paper facsimiles drawn from the OPenn repository, a digital resource developed and hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
OPenn contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of cultural heritage material from the collections of its contributing institutions. All materials are in the public domain or released under Creative Commons licenses as Free Cultural Works, allowing users to digitally remix manuscripts whenever they like.
Along with these paper facsimiles of manuscript folia, participants were provided with coloured pencils, greylead pencils, string, paper, scissors, glue, watercolours, pencil sharpeners, and staples, and leapt straight into the act of making/remaking.
Workshop and digital exhibition created by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe as part of her 2023–2024 fellowship with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
This event, a collaborative effort, would not have been possible without Lynn Ransom, Dot Porter, Nick Herman, Amey Hutchins, Eri Mizukane, Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Mitch Fraas, Lourdes Contreras, John Pollack, and all twenty workshop participants, as well as the time and expertise of speakers Whitney Trettien and Michael Carroll.