Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The sixth Early Modern Workshop, held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University from Sunday, August 23, 2009 and to Tuesday, August 25, 2009, focused on the topic of “Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in the Early Modern Period.”

The workshop grappled with questions of developments in reading within Jewish society, of the impact the Jewish book may have had on culture in early modern Europe among both Jews and Christians. Recent studies, mostly on France, England, and Italy, have focused on the people behind “the book” – not only the author, but also those involved in book production and distribution, as well as the readers. As Guiglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier have argued, the text is fixed, whereas reading is ephemeral and creative. In her keynote address, Professor Ann Blair (Harvard University) outlined the state of the field in the history of the book and the history of reading and the workshop opened a discussion of the culture of reading in Jewish society, as well as of the reading of Jewish books in Christian society, during a period of rapid cultural transformation. What was a “Jewish” book, one participant asked? What were the different or parallel developments within Jewish society, with its very different institutions and conventions of learning? How did print and access to books affect readers? Did it facilitate new reading communities? Did it modify existing reading traditions? And did it affect the ways of reading? How did authorities seek to control or prevent access to new texts, and how did these measures affect readers?

These questions were addressed from a variety of approaches: examining the role publishers had in imagining and developing readers (Berger, Rosman) and the information paratexts include (Shear); influence of censorship both external and internal (Cooperman, Francesconi); access to new, or old, texts and development of new ways of reading (Dweck, Bodian); organization of knowledge at the time of the “overload of information” (Bar Levav); the use of “Jewish” books by Christians (Sutcliffe) ; Christian texts adapted for Jewish readers (Maciejko, von Bernuth).

Subscribe to RSS Feed (Opens in New Window)