Department of English
- Monday, February 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
we will welcome Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak (New York University), for a talk titled: “Material Literacies in Action: Documentary Practices in Northwestern Europe, 800–1250.” Professor Bedos-Rezak writes:
Material literacy, when considered through the lens of medieval documentary practices, invites a reconsideration of both “material” and “literacy.” Documents, typically termed charters, were continuously produced through the medieval millennium as single sheets of authoritative transactional texts. Although regional temporalities and cultures modulated the stabilizing effects of this longue durée (my focus will be on documentary practices in northern France, Flanders, and the Rhineland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries), a charter’s primary task was to make the living reality of the recorded event permanently present. Material literacy, in this context, must therefore entail recognition that medieval writing supports were capable of registering a decodable form of participation in documentary production, involving not only scribes but also issuing authors, relatives, entourages, and witnesses. Such material literacy further suggests that literacy encompassed more than the acts of writing, seeing, and reading texts, to include two related dynamics: a mode of graphic communication that integrates linguistic and non-logocentric markers, and a synergy between documentary practices, writing materials (particularly skin and wax), and an imaginaire that extended to these materials a receptive capability as agents of meaning. While the use of formulas and stereotypy in documentary texts and images lent charters a verifiable authority in representing events, documents-as-responsive artifacts directly registered the sensory dimension of transactional activities, bridging the distance between themselves and the living. Their hybrid mediatic modes complicated charters’ medieval archival management and challenged both contemporary and modern assumptions about their status as ‘originals.’
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is Professor of History at New York University. Her most recent research on documentary practices has appeared in When Ego was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2011); Sign and Design: Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, co-edited with Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2016); The Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, co-edited with Martha Dana Rust (Brill, 2018); and Seals: Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World, as editor (Arc Humanities Press, 2019). She is currently preparing a monograph on “The Medieval Culture of Print.”