Over the last decades, manuscript fragments have received increased scholarly attention and international collaboration. Much of this work has concentrated on reconstructing now fragmented codices, highlighting rare survivals, or cataloguing.
While such efforts are crucially important, there is great research potential in the capacity of collections of fragments to expand our vision of medieval history more broadly. This session welcomes papers exploring how large or small fragment corpora (manuscript or incunabula) – and the meta-data about their provenance and early-modern recycling history – can be used as historical sources informing medieval book culture and other historical phenomena more broadly.
We welcome papers using digital, big data/quantitative, as well as more traditional methodologies. We also encourage the exploration of methodological questions, such as:
- How to approach fragments as corpora?
- What can such corpora be thought to be representative of?
- How have they been shaped by the recycling processes that ensured their survival?
- What is the role of studying these processes in the wider context of fragment studies?
Paper proposals need to be submitted to the ICMS Confex portal (see https://icms.confex.com/icms/2024/cfp.cgi) by 15 September 2023. Feel free to contact us with any questions at jaakko.tahkokallio@helsinki.fi or emilia.henderson@helsinki.fi. Hope to see you in Kalamazoo!