The present lecture concentrates on similarities between the character of reading in the Middle Ages and in a digital environment. While the process of reading and the fixed constitution of a text are disparate notions to the traditional modern perception, it has recently been shown in numerous cases that the materiality of a text and its personal perception (that is, reading) are intrinsically intertwined in both medieval and digital environments. Our research focuses on widely diffused late medieval Latin texts pertaining to devotion and meditation. It shows the ways in which the digital presentation of these texts successfully retains most of their crucial aspects: variation/instability/fluidity, openness, visualization, movable focus, shared authorship, or multiple contextualizations. This research-in-progress is carried out within the framework of a Mellon Foundation supported project Innovative Scholarship for Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Delivered in an Interoperable Environment led by Prof. Stephen G. Nichols from Johns Hopkins University.
Lucie Doležalová received a MA. in Latin and English at the Palacky University in Olomouc, a MA and PhD in Medieval Studies at the CEU. She has just defended her habilitation on medieval obscurity at the Charles University in Prague, where she works as Assistant Professor of Medieval Latin. She deals with mnemonics as well as late medieval Latin manuscripts, concentrating on texts that seem strange and suspicious and yet were widely copied and read.
Farkas Gábor Kiss obtained his MA in Classics and Hungarian at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and in Medieval Studies at the CEU. He defended his PhD dissertation at the Eötvös Loránd University where he teaches Renaissance literature in the Hungarian Department as an Assistant Professor. Currently, he is working on a larger study on the culture of rhetoric in Hungary around 1500. He is also preparing a critical edition of Renaissance philological paratexts from Central Europe.