When: Wed, 22.06.2022 2:30 PM until Thu, 23.06.2022 6:15 PM
Where: Digital
The term ‘binding waste’ encompasses any number of written artefacts that were reused (as pastedowns, sewing guards, spine linings, coverings, etc.) to construct a new codex. This practice of reusing documents and book fragments was often a highly meaningful practice that went well beyond mere ‘waste recycling’, allowing us to observe how new users ascribed new meanings to them. Importantly, reuse practices have preserved the texts and objects that illuminate changing reading practices, literary tastes, and documentary cultures. Yet, researchers of such practices and artefacts face unique material and methodological challenges. Most obviously, the reused materials’ original context — e.g., geographical provenance, evidence of users, even text identification — was obfuscated when manuscript producers transformed the remnants of now-lost volumes or document collections into the structural components of new codices. Often, the context is doubly obscured because 19th- and 20th-century users extracted the reused material from codices to access texts that would have otherwise remained hidden, without adequately documenting the deconstruction process. A major challenge for the field is thus to continue developing non-invasive methods to study reuse practices, identify new texts, and reconstruct objects.
This workshop gathers together scholars from the physical sciences and the humanities to generate dialogue on the challenges posed by reused binding material, as well as some of the existing solutions. It comes at a time when the field is experiencing exciting developments. Libraries, for example, are rapidly cataloguing and digitizing the binding fragments in their collections, making it possible to digitally reunite countless disparate fragments. Methods are being developed to discern the original context of disbound fragments from the few remaining clues. Scientists, meanwhile, are repurposing existing technologies — such as CT and micro-CT scanning, infrared thermography (IRT), and macro X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy — to enable scholars to read the fragments’ text non-invasively through the exterior binding. This workshop aims to bring these interdisciplinary approaches together to gauge the state of the field and develop new avenues of research.