Heather Bamford
Heather Bamford studies and teaches the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. She earned her B.A. in Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Heather’s research interests include the history of reading, magic, Alfonso X, the Moriscos, and more broadly, theoretical approaches to the medieval and early modern periods. Her first book, Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), places fragments at the center of reading and non-reading aspects of medieval and 16th-century use of manuscripts. The book challenges the notion that fragments came about accidentally, arguing that most fragments were created on purpose, as a result of a wide range of practical, intellectual and spiritual uses of manuscript material. Cultures of the Fragment received the 2020 La corónica book award for the best monograph published in the field of hispanomedieval studies. Heather’s current project is tentatively titled Unprinted; it writes a history of reading in early modern Iberia by examining not only the meaning of reading, but also the meaning of meaning in a range of manuscript texts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, including personal notebooks, magic texts, forgeries, religious works, and literature that circulated among Christians and religious minorities. Heather has been a member of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, serves on the Advisory Board for the journal Scholarly Editing, and was a GW Humanities Center fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Heather Bamford is currently a GW Faculty Senator for the Columbian College.
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Dejando a un lado por un momento la denominación “perdida” para pasar a la designación “fragmento”, también podría ser difícil de determinar en qué punto un texto debe llamarse fragmento en lugar de incompleto, con incompleto mayoritariamente usado para referirse a un texto que se encuentra incompleto al final, obras acéfalas, y menos frecuentemente, obras con una o varias lagunas internas. Sin duda una obra como el Roncesvalles es un fragmento, pero poca gente consideraría el Cantar de Mio Cid como fragmento porque existan folios perdidos.
En su Poderes de la filología, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht define un fragmento como cualquier objeto que podamos identificar como parte de una totalidad mayor sin implicar, sin embargo, que esta parte de una totalidad mayor se entienda como una metonimia de la totalidad. La apariencia física del fragmento nos comunica que el productor que produjo el fragmento lo hizo sin la intención de crear un texto cohesivo autónomo, aun si el fragmento se podría haber utilizado para otro fin, como en la encuadernación de otros libros.
Mientras que “incompleto” está presente en la definición de la Real Academia Española de “fragmentario,” y mientras que fragmentario e incompleto se usan a veces de manera intercambiable, queda claro que no toda obra incompleta es fragmento según lo define Gumbrecht. Basándome en la definición de Gumbrecht, examinaré la condición fragmentaria del Poema de Almería y el Carmen Campidoctoris, además de si estas obras se pueden considerar fragmentos de acuerdo con la conceptualización de Gumbrecht. En mi análisis, examinaré tres cuestiones sin llegar a ninguna conclusión definitiva: 1) si hay prueba de que estos panegíricos fueron hechos fragmentarios intencionalmente, en lugar de por casualidad 2) si hay elementos de estas obras fragmentarias que les hacen aparentar más o menos cohesivas, y 3) si en el análisis filológico estos poemas funcionan como metonimias de sus respectivas totalidades perdidas o de otras totalidades."
These moments show how early modern and modern owners conveyed that the Qur’an was spiritually and economically valuable. These forms of valuation include the attribution of the copy of the Qur’an to the Caliph or Imam Alī; the refusal to sell the Qur’an to anyone but a dear student and friend; and the identification of physical characteristics and provenance that indicate why the Qur’an should sell for a high price in the present. In addition to addressing the uses of a specific medieval Qur’an in the early modern and modern periods, these three moments reveal “value”–an ambiguous, but meaningful word in the manuscript trade–to be determined by a variety of economic, practical, and spiritual concerns.
The Hotel Lombardy
2019 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington DC
March 2, 2018
Feel
Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University): Doing Medieval Sex Work in the 21st Century: John/Eleanor Rykener and the Last of the Cockettes
Julian Yates (University of Delaware): Sting
Erica Fudge (University of Strathclyde): Leaning Up Against the Flank of a Cow
Moderated by Alexa Alice Joubin
3:00 PM
Coffee
3:30 PM
Grasp
Joe Moshenska (University of Cambridge): Touching the Past, Playing the Past
Anthony Bale (Birkbeck University of London): Being Margery Kempe
Ellen MacKay (University of Chicago): A History of Future Shocks: Jonah, Jamestown, and The Tempest's Preenactments
Moderated by Lowell Duckert
5:00 PM
Cocktail break
6:00 PM
Light dinner and revelry
March 3, 2018
9:30 AM
Breakfast (included for all registrants)
10:30 AM
Press
Dorothy Kim (Vassar College): The Jew, The Ethiopian, and St. Margaret
Steve Mentz (St John's University and the Bookfish) : How to Act Human in the Anthropocene
Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): Cold Stone, Warm Flesh: Pygmalion’s Touch
Moderated by Jonathan Hsy
12:00 PM
Lunch (included for all registrants)
1:30 PM
Hold
Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne): Sense of Touch: Absolutely Similar
Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (Columbia University): The Soul as a Time Machine
Cord Whitaker (Wellesley College): Touching the Past in the Harlem Middle Ages
Moderated by Holly Dugan
3:00 PM
Coffee
3:30 PM
Let Go
Closing discussion and charting of futures, with all panelists, moderators, organizers ... and you.
4:30 PM
Prosecco, chocolate and strawberries to celebrate ten years of GW MEMSI
The author argues that while some manuscript fragments came about by accident, many were actually created on purpose and used in a number of ways, from binding materials, to anthology excerpts, and some fragments were even incorporated into sacred objects as messages of good luck. Examining four main motifs of fragmentation, including intention, physical appearance, metonymy, and performance, this work reveals the centrality of the fragment to manuscript studies, highlighting the significance of the fragment to Iberia's multicultural and multilingual manuscript culture.
we define as the production, dissemination, and use, scholarly or
otherwise, of digital surrogates of medieval manuscripts. Digital-medieval
manuscript culture, which we inhabit and form, is continually in process
and changing, as our tools, like those of the Middle Ages, evolve. Digital
manuscript surrogates—which need not be facsimiles, but rather any
digital text or object intended to represent the contents and/or physical
presence of a manuscript—are hyper-remediations that foreground medieval technologies in new media. We consider five interrelated aspects of digital medieval manuscript culture that are central to theorizing digital manuscript surrogates: likeness, tangibility, presence, time, and intention(s).