Public Lecture: Narrated Inscriptions in Medieval Literature

[Janet Vaughan]

Please join us for a talk by Dr. Michael Ott, University of Heidelberg, 
on Friday, March 31, 2017, 9:30 a.m. at St. Jerome's University, room 
3020 "The Boardroom".

This talk grows out of the University of Heidelberg Collaborative 
Research Centre 933 (CRC 933), in which faculty-led research groups from 
different disciplines examine script-bearing artefacts such as pillars, 
steles, portals, tombstones, potsherds, amulets, scrolls, papyri, and 
parchment codices in order to examine the specific materiality and the 
evoked presence of the inscribed artefacts and the written texts 
themselves. I will talk about the research being undertaken in the 
research group to which I belong, “Inscriptionality: Reflections of 
Material Text Culture in the Literature of the Twelfth to 
Seventh-Centuries,” which is examining medieval representations of 
fictional inscription on script-bearing artefacts in literary fiction. I 
am focussing on writing featured or imagined in alternative places and 
materials such as trees, dog leashes, and so on. These extraordinary 
forms of writing reveal medieval knowledge of the practices and 
conditions of writing and they allow modern scholars to to reflect in 
historically appropriate theoretical terms on the potentials and 
limitations of the technology of writing.

Dr. Michael Ott received his PhD in medieval German Literature from the 
University of Frankfurt and is currently a research fellow and 
instructor in the Department of Medieval German Studies at the 
University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he is also a research associate 
in the project “Inscriptionality: Reflections of Material Text Culture 
in the Literature of the Twelfth to Seventh-Centuries.” He is a guest 
researcher in UW's Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies until May.

-- 
Janet Vaughan
Administrative Assistant and Graduate Coordinator
University of Waterloo
Germanic and Slavic Studies (ML 220)
519-888-4567, ext. 32428

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