Inscription and Textual Objects (Workshop)

Harbour Centre 2200
Organizer: Elaine Treharne

This workshop will combine epigraphy, palaeography, and materialist approaches to consider the importance of metal, stone, rock, wood, fabric, and skin objects to textual studies. We'll work through introductory methodologies for identifying and interpreting various artefacts dating from c.200 - c.1400 that are inscribed in Latin, Ogham, Welsh, English, and Old Norse. Our objects will include bracteates, runestones, ecclesiastical inscriptions and garments, sculpture, gravemarkers, jewelry, coins, manuscripts and tablets. Participants will have the opportunity to handle various materials to think through the significance of substrate and form in any attempt to gain the fullest interpretation possible of the extant medieval textual corpus.