Lost, dispersed, and marginalised manuscript collections
For updates refer to the blog of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures. For more information: clement.salah@queens.ox.ac.uk or shaahin.pishbin@queens.ox.ac.uk
Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford
This workshop brings together scholars working across linguistic traditions, regions, and historical periods to reflect on manuscript collections that have been lost, dispersed, marginalised, or rendered invisible by cataloguing practices, institutional histories, displacement, empire, and changing political or linguistic orders. It asks how such collections can be located, reconstructed, and reintegrated into the study of manuscript and textual cultures. Across two days, papers will move between collection-level histories and close attention to individual artefacts, fragments, catalogues, ownership marks, repositories, and digital data. In doing so, the workshop explores how manuscripts preserve traces of vanished intellectual worlds, and how forgotten libraries continue to shape the ways knowledge is produced, transmitted, and remembered.
Day 1: Tuesday 16 June: The Making and Unmaking of Libraries
Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford
9:00 Welcome
9:15 Shaahin Pishbin & Clément Salah, “Introduction to Forgotten Libraries”
SESSION 1: RECONSTRUCTING DISPERSED LIBRARIES
9:30 Henrike Lähnemann, “Superfluous precious objects: Reconstructing the manuscript production of the Medingen nuns”
10:00 Nour Obeid, “Writers’ Libraries as Houses of Trouble: Fragmentation and Reconstruction in the Arab Region”
10:30 James White, “The Hyperlinked Manuscript: Reading and Bibliography in Seventeenth-Century Iran”
11:00 Coffee Break
SESSION 2: ENDOWMENT, COMMUNITY, AND THE FORMATION OF LIBRARIES
11:30 Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “Endowment practices and the formation of Jewish libraries in the Islamicate world”
12:00 Ronny Vollandt, “A Qaraite Library in 11th century Jerusalem”
Lunch Break
SESSION 3: DISPLACEMENT, EMPIRE, AND RECONFIGURED COLLECTIONS
2:00 Hallie Swanson, “Between Royal Collection and Oriental Repository: The Forgotten Library of Fort William College”
2:30 Gulguncha Lalbekova, “Imperial Legacies and Displaced Heritage: The Case Study of Badakhshani Ismaili Manuscripts in Russian State Archives”
3.00 Coffee Break
SESSION 4: MARGINALISED TRADITIONS AND HIDDEN REPOSITORIES
3:30 Balasubramanyam Chandramohan, “Forgotten Manuscripts: Lost, Dispersed and Marginalised Manuscripts- a case study of Tamil and Telugu Palm-leaf Manuscripts”
4:00 Udaya Cabral, “Hidden Knowledge Hubs: Recovering the Neglected Palm-Leaf Manuscript Collections of Sri Lankan Monastic Libraries”
Day 2: Wednesday 17 June: Tracing and Reconstructing Forgotten Collections
Taylorian Room 2, Taylor Institution, Oxford
SESSION 5: CATALOGUES, DATA, AND THE PRODUCTION OF INVISIBILITY
9:30 Matt Lampitt, “(Un)Mapping the March: Lost Books, Ghost Data”
10:00 Sian Witherden, “Defining ‘Rejected’ and ‘Unidentified’ provenance in Medieval Libraries of Great Britain”
10:30 Maeve Hagerty, “Valued at nothing’: Unsettling the (Post)Colonial Archival History of the Danson Erotica Collection”
11.00 Coffee Break
SESSION 6: LIBRARIES WITHOUT SHELVES: SINGULAR OBJECTS AND DISPERSED WORLDS
11:30 Elisian Ralli, “A lost library by design: ‘Bibliophilie créatrice’ and the reinvention of the modern manuscript”
12:00 Thea Gomelauri, “Forced Migration of Rustaveli’s Epic Poem: Bodleian Library MS. Wardrop d.27”
Lunch Break
SESSION 7: TRACING LOST COLLECTIONS THROUGH FRAGMENTS AND OBJECTS
2:00 Zoe Screti, “Finding Life in Fragments: The Obfuscation of Autograph Albums in Archive Catalogues”
2:30 Ana Dias & Julia Smith, “‘The chest of anonymous relics’: Reconstructing the earliest relic collection of Sens cathedral (France)”
3.00 Coffee Break
ROUNDTABLE AND BROADER PERSPECTIVES
3.30 Collective discussion
