The Program in World Philology
Timbuktu and the Best Friends of the Philologist: A Conversation with Shamil Jeppie
Monday, November 14, 2016
However we define philology it always entails some understanding of the contexts in which texts are produced and in which they circulate/d. In this lecture I shall examine some of the practices that often shape such contexts through looking at the place of manuscripts as they travel from a writer’s working space into collections. Such collections are never stable but grow or disintegrate and in attempting to re-constitute a work from disparate manuscript copies the micro-histories of manuscript movements have to be taken into account. Working in Timbuktu’s manuscript libraries we have found the limitations of working solely from published texts and catalogues and similar scholarly apparatuses.