Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late antiquity to 1550

Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late antiquity to 1550

The University of Melbourne: 13th to 15th July 2011

Convenors: Andrew Turner, Giulia Torello Hill

In 2011 the University of Melbourne, in association with the
University of Queensland, will host an international conference with
the title Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late
antiquity to 1550. Illustrated manuscripts of classical authors often
transmitted an insight for much later readers into how ancient
illustrators (and thus audiences) visualized these works, but also
provided current reinterpretations of the texts. Both tendencies are
best exemplified in a cycle of illustrations to the plays of Terence,
which provides an almost unbroken continuum from the Carolingian era
through to the dawn of the age of printing. But despite the fact that
these illustrations represented the action on stage, even down to
details of masks and props, there is no evidence at all that the
plays were performed in the mediaeval period—they were simply
literary texts, to be studied and at the most recited by a lector.
Rather, revivals of the Classics on stage began in the Ita!
lian Renaissance, and the theoretical knowledge which critics
gleaned from writers like Vitruvius were poured back into the
illustrated tradition, providing an extraordinary amalgam of ancient
and ‘modern’. This conference will explore the connections between
text, illustration, and revival.
Confirmed speakers so far include Gianni Guastella (University of
Siena), who has written several seminal publications on the reception
of Roman comedy in the Italian Renaissance, Dorota Dutsch (University
of California, Santa Barbara), author of Feminine Discourses in Roman
Comedy (Oxford 2008), who has most recently been investigating the
semiotics of gesture in the illustrated Terence manuscripts; and
Bernard Muir (University of Melbourne), a world authority on the
digitization of manuscripts, who has published extensively on Latin
palaeography and on the mediaeval transmission of texts, and who most
recently, with Andrew Turner, is the editor of a digital facsimile of
a 12th-century manuscript of Terence from Oxford (Terence’s Comedies,
Bodleian Digital Texts 2, Oxford 2010). We are hopeful that selected
proceedings will eventually be published following the conference.
You are now invited to submit proposals for papers (lasting 30
minutes). We are particularly interested in submissions on the
following topics, although we will look at other submissions on the
broad area of classical drama between Late Antiquity and 1550
sympathetically.
• The manuscript traditions of the classical dramatists;
• Mediaeval scholia and commentary traditions;
• Illustrations of drama in the manuscript and early printed
traditions;
• The physical environment of performances of ancient drama;
• Reception and translation of Greek dramatists in the West
before 1550.
The deadline for submission of a title and an abstract of 100 words
is 25th February 2011. We intend establishing a web site early next
year which will progressively include information on the conference,
registration, and accommodation. For the meantime, please direct any
enquiries (including proposals for papers), to: