Prof. Sabrina Corbellini – Looking for the Medieval Reader. A Spatial Approach to Late Medieval Reading Cultures’

On 23 March Prof. Sabrina Corbellini (University of Groningen) will give a lecture entitled ‘Looking for the Medieval Reader. A Spatial Approach to Late Medieval Reading Cultures’. The lecture is organised by the Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies. Corbellini’s lecture will be followed by a response from Dr Anna Adamska.

A SPATIAL APPROACH
With a focus on fifteenth-century Venice, Corbellini discusses the possibilities of reconstructing reading activities through a spatial approach. By combining research results on books, libraries and readers with their location in the late medieval cityscape, she reveals how and where reading activities were performed, in particular by lay and non-professional readers.

Moving away from the traditional focus on the ‘golden triangle’ of printing press, rediscovery of classical languages and the formation of a learned elite of humanists, the present paper approaches the topic by presenting four case studies: manuscripts owned by the Venetian family; the books mentioned in a painter’s testament; a lending register; a miscellany compiled by a friar. These cases have been selected on the basis of their potential to illustrate crucial aspects of the reconstruction of late medieval ‘spaces of reading’.

RECOMMENDED READING

• M. Hoogvliet , ‘“Pour faire laies personnes entendre les hystoires des escriptures anciennes”: Theoretical Approaches to a Social History of Religious Reading in the French Vernaculars during the Late Middle Ages’, in: Cultures of religious reading in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout 2013), pp. 247-274.
• [source text:] ‘Bartolomea degli Obizzi Alberti discusses theories of reading with a female friend’, ed. L. Kaborycha, A corresponding Renaissance: letters written by Italian women, 1375 – 1650 (New York 2016), pp. 185-8.

If unavailable please contact the organiser, Prof. Marco Mostert at m.mostert@uu.nl

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