University Of California Humanities Research Institute Conference
University of California Irvine
June 1-3, 1990
The Colloquium explored the cultural implications of the passage from
script to print by focusing on the question of commentary, annotation,
marginalia, and marginality during the period from the late Middle Ages
through the seventeenth century. The colloquium theorized the
manuscript, book, and writing/printing to reexamine the basic textual
vehicles of Western culture during this vital transitional period. As the
heterogeneity of the medieval codex gave way to the printed text and then
to the prototype of the modern critical edition, the concepts of
annotation, commentary, and marginality underwent profound changes. These
changes raise key questions concerning canonicity, linked to new notions
of authorship and to the printing press as the new means of textual
production.