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Writing Technologies: an interdisciplinary early modern workshop

The Writing Technologies workshop brings together early modernists from across a wide range of disciplines to engage in collective discussion around texts, images, and objects. Our meetings are structured around a series of themes and metaphors that cut across our shared interests: the interweaving of the various imaginative, authorial, and material practices deployed by writers, philosophers and physicians, inventors, experimenters, artists, and artisans across the early modern world. In each session, a few participants take the lead, briefly and informally presenting a question, problem, or object of study, leading to wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation around the presentations and the theme more broadly.

We aim to meet monthly online during the academic year, and always welcome new participants and suggestions for topics: get in touch at writing.technologies.network@gmail.com

Stone III

Online workshop

Friday, 25th April, 10-11.30am Boston/ 3-4.30pm London/ 4-5.30pm Paris

Register for the zoom meeting here.

Presenters: Beatrice Barbara Anne Bottomley, Research fellow, Department of Philosophy, Università di Bologna; Marie Thebaud-Sorger, Director of the Centre Alexandre-Koyré, CNRS, Paris

Our third stony workshop will take us from an Arabic handbook of recipes for illusions, tricks, remedies, and wonders by the thirteenth-century alchemist al-ʿIrāqī to the tales and uses of the mineral (including the bezoar) in the letters of the eighteenth-century engineer and polymath Jean-Claude Pingeron.

All are welcome to join this session, in which brief and informal presentations will be followed by broad interdisciplinary discussion.

Images: Abū Qāsim al-Irāqī, ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa ʾiḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq (The Wellsprings of Realities and the Illumination of their Ways), Istanbul Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Halet 00738, fol. 105; [Illustrations de Superstitions orientales], Nicolas Ransonnette, 1785

Stone II

Friday, 28th March 3-4.30pm Paris/ 2-3.30pm London/ 10-11.30am Boston/New York

Our convivial and informal online workshop returns to the theme of stone, with short presentations followed by rich interdisciplinary discussion on stony materiality and imaginaries in early modern arts including natural history and natural philosophy.

Presenters: Alexandre Claude, Researcher, European University Institute (Florence) and Jeremy Schneider, Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Image: lower part of the wall cladding in Chapel of the Princes, early 17th century, Florence, Basilica of San Lorenzo. 

Register for the zoom meeting here.

Stone

Friday, 8th November, 10am-12 noon EST/ 3-5pm GMT/ 4-6pm CET

Our second session will explore the mineral realm. Often deployed to figure inertness or lack of feeling, stone can equally prove lively in early modern thinking, making, and writing. Our workshop will consider the cultural and material force of stone from its extraction to its manipulation through various crafts and techniques, and as an object that, through its evocation of more-than-human timescales, provokes new frames of reference for thought.

Register for the Zoom link here.

Writing Technologies TORCH Network (2020-2022)

One of the Network’s past incarnations

From 2020-2022 the Network was hosted at TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities). Visit our page there to find details of past events, documents, participants, and publications.