Surprises from the Past?
Medieval Symposium 2013, SDU Odense, 11-12 November
The impact of modern discoveries of ancient and medieval texts
Surprise presents a fundamental problem for any historical hermeneutics. The reading of past
texts, both documentary and literary, adds unexpected features to the landscape we already know
and, ideally, pushes us to look in entirely new directions. At the same time, our scholarly
understanding of – and investment in – certain fields very often works to the opposite effect: we
tend to make the apparently surprising features conform to the view we already know and want
to have confirmed. In historical, philological and literary studies of Antiquity and the Middle
Ages, moreover, texts hold a significance often disproportionate to their contemporary impact
and are mostly contained within well-studied corpora; therefore our preconceived notions and
tools of navigation are already formed by a field that has defined which texts are important and has
often taken almost all of them into consideration. Thus, we are caught in a circle which tends to
diminish the returns of our hermeneutical surprises, and we find it difficult to bring in criteria
from outside the circle of established texts and textbooks. As a result, we too often gloss over or
marginalize new discoveries rather than allow the resilience of these texts to shake the
ground/foundations of our disciplines and canons, very often formed to meet the needs of the
19th century.
In the field of ancient and medieval text-dependent(-based?) scholarship, the unexpected
surfacing of unknown texts in the middle of established scholarly fields provides an interesting test
cases for the issue of the resistence of disciplinary canons to the challenges posed by new
discoveries.The interaction between a sudden new voice from the distant past and a field of study
can be observed here in a pristine state as the recent find had played no role in defining the canon
or canonical questions in the field.
In the Symposium Surprises from the Past? we will primarily focus on single new texts
(Menander, Philip of Novara's Memoirs) or new parts or versions of texts (William of Tyre's
autobiographical chapter etc) rather than finds of whole libraries which created entirely new (and
very surprising!) scholarly fields (such as the Hittite archives in Boghazköy, the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and the Cairo Genizah). Contributions which focus on marginalized or practically forgotten texts
will also be welcome. All papers should address some of these common questions:
• What were the finding circumstances and the initial reactions?
• Which field(s) of study was the text relevant for?
• What were the prevailing conditions in the field(s) for this to count as a find (or not)
• In the longer term, was the text canonized or dismissed as uninteresting?
• Can we assess the role of chance vs more meaningful historical processes in the forgetting and
reappearing of this text?
• Was there a discrepancy between the finder's enthusiasm and the reaction of the mainstream in
the field?
• Were there different receptions of the text by historians, philologists and other fields (historians
of literature / religion / philosophy etc)?
• Did the find lead to any disciplinary soul-searching about the representativity of the old set of
canonized texts / sources?
• Are there examples of canonical texts that only just survived and which could prompt useful
counterfactual refelctions? What would the field have looked like without them?
• Does it make sense to talk of textual 'resilience' in a given case? No matter what we want the
text to say, does it stay strange, uncooperative or contradictory?
• Why does it always seem to make a big difference if a discovered text is anonymous or written
by a known author?
By having a series of papers across ancient and medieval studies and across disciplines we aim not
only to gather exciting find stories, but also to ask ourselves some recurring hard questions about
surprises, conformity, representativity, and canonicity in our text-based disciplines.
The Symposium forms part of the theme of the Canonisation at the Centre for Medieval
Literature (SDU Odense and York)