Lecture: Eleanor Baker ‘Hoo thys boke stelyth schall have cryst curse and myne’: Middle English Book Curses and Perceptions of the Material Text
On Thursday 9 October at 10 am CET, Eleanor Baker (University of Oxford) will deliver a talk entitled ‘Hoo thys boke stelyth schall have cryst curse and myne’: Middle English Book Curses and Perceptions of the Material Text, as part of The Text and Transmission Research Seminar (TeTra) series.
The Zoom link will be sent out the day before; please find the title and abstract below:
Book curses — short, maledictory inscriptions intended to ward off would-be thieves and unscrupulous or forgetful readers — have a long history tailing back to the ancient Near East. Examples of formulaic Latin curses proliferated in the manuscripts produced in monastic scriptoria in the early medieval and immediate post-Conquest centuries, but as vernacular literacy and book ownership rates increased, so too did the idiosyncrasy of book curses. The book owners of late medieval England, both collective and individual, inscribed their manuscripts with threats reflective of their own identities and the content of the texts contained within the book. This paper will focus on examples of Middle English book curses from 1350-1550 and consider what these curses can tell us about how material texts were perceived, the authority of ownership, and the efficacy of the inscribed curse.
The general program of the TeTra Seminar is available on https://tetra.univie.ac.at/, the Twitter page at https://twitter.com/