Sammelbände and Language: Paris and Versailles, 15-16 June 2023

With the increasing number of books published in the early modern period, a greater variety of books in all types of languages, both vernacular and classical, circulated in print. This inevitably had an impact on how people considered texts and their status with regard to the language in which these were written, but also how they collected and organised them in Sammelbände.

The extent to which language was a discerning criterion for the creation of multi-item volumes is something that by and large needs to be discussed. The Paris-Versailles event will be structured around this idea of the link between Sammelbände and Language.

It is proposed that the following themes could be explored:

• Language as the sole obvious link between different items within a volume
• The diversity of languages within a single volume
• The idea of ‘foreign’ languages as a group (editions in a foreign vernacular language)
• The particularities of classical languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew in particular) and their impact on the formation of a volume
• Volumes consisting of multilingual texts
• The language of annotation, whether or not this language differed from the printed text, and how this was used to organise and create coherence within a volume
• Grammars, lexicons, colloquia and language-learning volumes

While the Sammelband 15-16 network focuses on printed items of the early modern period, previous meetings have shown that the interaction with manuscript text in such volumes should not be neglected. The event therefore welcomes paper proposals dealing with the language dimensions of Sammelbände of printed volumes, whether or not in relation with manuscript items and fragments. Papers may consist of case studies or broader reflections on a textual, thematic and/or geographical area.

This two-day meeting will be organised thanks to the generous support of the universities Paris-Saclay and Versailles-Saint-Quentin, and of the research groupe DYPAC, as well as the hospitality of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

Organisation: Katell Lavéant (invited researcher at UVSQ) and Malcolm Walsby (ENSSIB). The first day will take place in Paris (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal), the second one in Versailles.

The expenses of the participants will be covered within the limits of the event budget.

We invite researchers who would wish to present a 20 mn-paper to send their proposal (with a title and a summary of max. 300 words) to this address: sammelband15.16@gmail.com, no later than March 30.