Spring 2024: Roger Chartier (Penn): "Books as Portfolio"

In 1690, Furetière’s Dictionnaire defined “porte-feuille” as “a double cardboard box covered with parchment, basane or sheepskin, calfskin, Morocco leather or brown chagrin, which opens & closes, & in which one can carry sheets, papers, prints without damaging them.” Books and portfolios were very similar: they were bound in the same materials, they gathered sheets and leaves, they held printed and manuscript texts. This is perhaps a reason to take the designation of the book as “porte-feuille” at its face value and to consider the different documents inserted within some books. Hence the three foci of this talk: 1) printed materials within printed texts, 2) scribal texts in printed books, 3) things left or lost in books. Based on recent acquisitions of our Library, associating Shakespeare and Georges Brassens and dealing with material intertextuality, this presentation is a follow-up to three previous Material Text seminars presented during this Spring Term: by Joseph Howley on Roman wax tablets as archives, by Peter Stallybrass, Heather Wolfe and Ray Schrire on erasable writing technologies and their relations to literacy and numeracy in early modern Europe, and by Lila Goldenberg on library catalogs that associated printed text and handwritten additions in seventeenth-century England.

Roger Chartier is Emeritus Professor of the Collège de France and, since 2001, Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The last books he published during and after the plague are Un mundo sem livros e sem livrarias ?(São Paulo, Letraviva, 2020); Editer et traduire. Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, Gallimard et Le Seuil, Collection ”Hautes Etudes”, 2021) [also in Spanish and Portuguese editions), Won in Translation. Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe, tr. John H. Pollack (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) [also in Italian and Portuguese editions], and Cartes et fictions, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Editions du Collège de France, 2022) [also in Spanish, Russian editions and forthcoming in Portuguese and Italian]. All these books are largely based on talks given at the Material Texts Seminar.