Bible Craft Symposium to Explore Making of Medieval, Early American, Texts

Photo Submitted

John Winthrop Sermon, collection of the New-York Historical Society

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia will join with several University of Arkansas departments and colleges to host Bible Craft: Making and Remaking Scripture in Early Britain and America on April 6-7, 2017.

Frans van Liere, director of the Medieval Studies Program at Calvin College and author of the 2014 book An Introduction to the Medieval Bible, will present the opening lecture, "The Bible as Book - The Bible as Text," at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, April 6 in the J.B. Hunt Auditorium (JBHT 144). The symposium will take place from 9:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. Friday, April 7 in the Honors College Study Hall, located on the second floor of Gearhart Hall (GEAR 258). All on campus and in the community are invited to attend. View the schedule online.

The symposium will focus on the materiality of the written text and how that affects the reading experience, said Joshua Byron Smith, assistant professor of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and coordinator of the event.

Guest speakers will explore various dimensions of medieval and early American Bibles, not as translations or editions but as material objects.

"Literature doesn't exist off in some Platonic space. It's always embodied in some sort of material context," Smith said. "Hopefully, this symposium will get students, and some faculty, thinking about the Bible as a dynamic text that gets used in different physical forms, over and over again - and how encountering the Bible as an object shapes their experience of the text."

The daylong event will feature a series of lectures by some of the world's leading authorities on medieval and early American manuscripts. The symposium is geared for undergraduates and the general public, with specialty material presented in layman's terms.

Cambridge scholar David Woodman will speak about the use of Bibles as record books in the Middle Ages. Many historical charters were bound with a gospel, for example, lending symbolic weight to the transactions. A similar tradition continues in family Bibles, with their records of births, deaths and marriages inscribed within.

Other topics include "Psalms, Charms, and Exorcisms: Verbal Recipes for Healing in Medieval English Manuscripts," "The Poster Bible and the Wars of the Roses," "America's First Bible: The Scriptures in Algonquian," and "We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill: John Winthrop's Bible and the Making of American Exceptionalism."

A display table will feature historical Bibles from University of Arkansas Special Collections, along with folio pages and facsimiles of ancient Bibles, psalters, missals and Books of Hours. Historical texts include an 1860 edition of a Cherokee-language Bible, a German-language Bible from an immigrant family and a settler's travel Bible from 1806.

Smith received a prestigious, three-year Scholars of Critical Bibliography Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in 2015, which provided seed money for the symposium and a related event last year. Some 325 people attended the 2016 Mellon Symposium on Manuscripts and Rare Books, which focused on new ways of approaching medieval manuscripts.

Other sponsors for this year's event include Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Indigenous Studies, the Department of English, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the Honors College.