On 17th May 2024, Teaching the Codex hosted its fourth in-person event, a workshop on the theme of Hybridity, kindly sponsored by AMARC and hosted by Merton College, Oxford. Roughly half of the attendees presented, and half were there to contribute to the discussion. The rationale for the workshop was as follows:
What constitutes hybridity in manuscript material, and how do we teach it? In teaching contexts which are often highly categorised, how can we find pedagogical value in such hybridity? Topics for discussion include how we teach texts transmitted in both manuscript and print; how we can help students to get to grips with instances of hybrid materiality in manuscript text; and the challenges and opportunities of teaching multilingual manuscripts.
The workshop consisted of a panel of four presentations and a round table, with opening remarks given by Teaching the Codex founders Mary Boyle and Tristan Franklinos. The first presentation was given by Mulaika Hijjas, who joined us from the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at SOAS, where she is Senior Lecturer in South East Asian Studies. Dr Hijjas spoke on ‘Community-sourcing as hybrid philology’. The next speaker was Sebastian Dows-Miller, who is studying for a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages (Old French) at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He is also a member of the Teaching the Codex committee, and his presentation was entitled ‘Don’t mention the punctuation! Introducing materiality to text-based teaching contexts’. Our third presentation, ‘Teaching hybridity with blog posts’ was given by Sian Witherden who works in the rare books trade. Dr Witherden’s presentation was based on work completed while she was working on a digitisation project at St John’s College, Oxford. The final speaker on this panel was Laure Miolo, who is the Lyell Career Development Fellow in Latin Palaeography at Lincoln College, Oxford. Dr Miolo spoke on the topic of ‘Teaching with manuscripts and instruments’, and brought a replica astrolabe with her for the workshop participants to handle. This panel was chaired by Jessica Rahardjo, who is a DPhil candidate at Wolfson College, Oxford working on vernacular Islamic funerary material culture in the early modern Indian Ocean world. She is also a member of the Teaching the Codex committee.
After a break, we moved to the round table portion of the workshop. Again, we had four speakers: Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics; Cosima Gillhammer, Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library; and Andrew Honey, who is a book conservator at the Bodleian Libraries. Each speaker gave a five-minute introduction on the topic of hybridity, and then the floor was opened for discussion. The workshop finished with concluding remarks from Julia Walworth, Fellow Librarian of Merton College, Oxford.
The workshop was live-tweeted from the Teaching the Codex Twitter account (@TeachingCodex). Tweets are catalogued under #teachingcodex and the Wakelet collection is available here. Thread Reader archives of each thread are linked on the 2024 Timetable page and do not require a Twitter account to read. All presentations were live-tweeted, but spontaneous discussions were not.
We are very grateful to AMARC, Merton College, and all our speakers and workshop participants for making possible an afternoon of rich discussions.
Teaching the Codex 