Seminar: The Reuse of Books and Book Materials in Medieval and Early Modern Societies

On 7 November, the Utrecht University Centre for Medieval Studies (UUCMS) will organise their yearly seminar. This seminar will be devoted to the recurrent theme of premodern reading cultures, and this year’s focus is ‘The Reuse of Books and Book Materials in Medieval and Early Modern Societies’.

The reuse of books and manuscripts

The aim of this seminar is to discuss circularity and reuse in relation to premodern reading cultures and practices, as well as the ways in which researchers and librarians can now deal with materials that once served other purposes. The seminar will cover topics including the multiple reuse of manuscripts and books, users that transformed the function of a book into another, handling fragments in research and restoration, and the role of restoration in circular thinking.

Shifting to a circular approach

Premodern cultures had great abilities to recycle books and their materials. However, scholarship on the reuse of books tends to focus on the material damage and discarding of the books, thus reflecting a linear perspective. Shifting to a circular approach encourages different kinds of questions about the objects, especially when we realise that the objects and texts probably show only a fraction of their long life. However, interest in circular thinking in the context of medieval reading cultures remains limited.