3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Classicists, medievalists, and early modernists have always been interested in the history of the books (and the papyri and the rolls) in which the texts they study survive, and this course will survey these traditional modes of bibliography and their importance. We will also look at the social contexts of reading in all periods as a more theoretically sophisticated account of book history has urged us to do in recent decades. Particular attention will be given to modes of transmission of texts between written media, including the digital, but with an emphasis on the synchronic and diachronic importance of orality and aurality, dictation and transcription.