Our conference aims to rethink the history of late medieval literacy. We will focus on texts that can labelled as compendia of knowledge, i.e. collections of knowledge from around the world in the form of historical, philosophical, medical, ethical, or catechetical summaries. Some of these texts were read by large audiences across different strata of medieval society and were copied, adapted, and even translated into the vernacular throughout the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Their popularity is documented by the large number of surviving manuscripts.

Codicological study of this body of manuscripts has the potential, in some cases, to reconstruct the channels of transmission and dissemination of the compendia. As they spread gradually, initially to elite centres of learning, but later to a larger range of recipient groups (parishes, citizens, nobility), we consider them to be suitable material for researching the readers.

Participants are invited to rethink a variety of questions, including:

• Can we categorise Books of Knowledge as a genre?
• How does the cultural milieu influence the nature of the text’s reception and its final form?
• Through what channels were medieval compendia disseminated?
• What evidence explains the extensive number of preserved manuscripts of a particular text?
• What does this prove about their codicological context?
• What are the limits to research about the communities of readers in the Late Middle Ages?
• What did the reception of a specific text look like in different social, political, and confessional milieus?

Organizers:

Pavlína Cermanová, Vojtěch Bažant, Jaroslav Svátek and Václav Žůrek

Centre for Medieval Studies

The Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Project: Transmission of Knowledge

Programme

>> Program v PDF

THURSDAY 18th OCTOBER

14.00 Introduction (Pavlína CERMANOVÁ, Václav ŽŮREK)

14.15 Keynote

Chair: Pavlína CERMANOVÁ

Steven J. WILLIAMS, Beyond the Hyperbole: An Overview of the Reception and Readership of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets

15.00 Coffee

15.20–16.50 Session I

Chair: Pavel SOUKUP

15.20 Lucie DOLEŽALOVÁ, Between Scylla and Charybdis. The De tribus punctis christianae religionis (1316) by Thomas Hibernicus and its heyday in late medieval Bohemia

15.50 Gleb SCHMIDT, The Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis and its readers in the Late Medieval Italy (14th-15th centuries)

16.20 Jaroslav SVÁTEK, Devotion and Religious Polemics. Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis in Late Medieval Czech Lands

FRIDAY 19th OCTOBER

9.30–10.30 Session II

Chair: Dušan COUFAL

9.30 Vojtěch BAŽANT, Chronicle of Popes and Emperors by Martinus Polonus in urban milieu in Kingdom of Bohemia

10.00 Nadine HOLZMEIER, Patterns of Knowledge in Late Medieval Historiography. The „Chronologia Magna” of Paolino Veneto

10.30 Coffee

10.50–11.50 Session III

Chair: Pavel BLAŽEK

10.50 Lukáš LIČKA, Two Anonymous Commentaries on Peckham’s Perspectiva communis Written by the Hand of Reimbotus de Castro

11.20 Nicolas WEILL-PAROT, The commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics in the universities of Central Europe (c.1350-c.1500): a reassessment of the impact and metamorphosis of the “Buridanian” model

11.50 Lunch

14.00–15.30 Session IV

Chair: Jaroslav SVÁTEK

14.00 Václav ŽŮREK, Chess, Moral Principles, and Ancient Stories. Reception of Cessolis’s Liber de moribus and other Classicizing Works in Medieval Bohemia

14.30 Barbora HANZOVÁ – Pavel BLAŽEK, The Pseudo-Bernhardine Epistola de cura rei familiaris and its Reception in Medieval Bohemia

15.10 Coffee

15.30–17.00 Session V

Chair: Lucie DOLEŽALOVÁ

15.30 Julia BURKHARDT, A handbook for everyone? The circulation of the “Book of Bees” in Late Medieval Europe

16.00 Dana STEHLÍKOVÁ, Kristan’s of Prachatice Latin Herbarium and its successful journey to the Old Czech literature

16.30 Baudouin VAN DEN ABEELE, The Physiologus Theobaldi: A most successful bestiary in medieval schools and monasteries

SATURDAY 20th OCTOBER

9.30–10.30 Session VI

Chair: Pavlína CERMANOVÁ

9.30 Petra WAFFNER, “How Collections shape the Text”– manuscript evidences of the Book of Sidrac

10.00 David MORRIS, The Czech Connection: The Proliferation of Pseudo-Joachim in Medieval Bohemia

10.30 Coffee

10.45–11.45 Session VII

Chair: Zdeněk ŽALUD

10.45 Benedek LÁNG, What handbooks of practical magic were used for in the 14th-15th centuries?

11.15 Agnieszka REC, Beinecke MS 650, A Book of Universal Knowledge

11.45 Coffee

12.00–13.00 Session VIII

Chair: Václav ŽŮREK

12.00 Godefroid DE CALLATAŸ, The Impact of the encyclopaedic corpus known as RasāʾilIkhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), with Emphasis on al-Andalus”

12.30 Pavlína CERMANOVÁ, Secretum secretorum versus Auctoritates Aristotelis: Channels of Dissemination

13.00 Closing Remarks