Department of English
- Monday, November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
We look forward to welcoming Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths around the Classics.”
Professor Brassel writes:
“Literary research in the discipline of Classical Studies typically begins (and often ends) with a standard edition—a modern text with critical apparatus formatted and bound according to one of three or four scholarly publishing standards. These standard editions—for instance the Oxford Classical Text, Budé, Teubner, and sometimes the Loeb—are so fundamental to the work of Classical Studies that we often overlook the ways in which their own formats and bindings are not neutral features of the texts themselves but the results of historical decisions of editors, printers, and publishers that continue to frame scholarly interpretation. I suggest that when such material features become naturalized and are left to masquerade as features of literary evidence, they may obscure the historical contingency of fundamental interpretive categories (such as genre and authorship) as well as of disciplinary norms. In this presentation, I explore print and manuscript books of Latin literature from the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering in particular case studies of some examples of “obscene” and humorous Latin literature. How did Humanist printers’ choices about format and binding influence the place of the ribald and irreverent in what would become the “Classics” and its canon? How might their readers have responded to these decisions? By examining this generative period of book production and experimentation that precipitated the solidifying of modern norms, I will reflect upon some of these paths not taken and upon the ways in which alternative bindings might conceal and reveal ancient texts.”
Kate Meng Brassel is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of the early Roman empire. She is currently completing her first monograph, Persius’s Book, which argues for reading these Neronian satires as forming a materially self-conscious Roman poetry book.