Ancient Libraries Conference
School of Classics, University of St Andrews
9-11 September 2008
Libraries operate as the core foundation of research and study in the modern Western world. Historically, they have enabled the preservation and transmission of knowledge from antiquity to the Middle Ages, to the contemporary era. Yet in the diachronic history of the library, we still lack fundamental facts about its institutional role, organisation and mode of operation in the ancient world. This is especially acute as both archaeological research and the study of ancient literary texts have enabled significant advancement to our knowledge and understanding of ancient written culture and its various loci of production and dissemination.
One of the ‘Science and Empire’ project’s principal research objectives is to examine the institutional contexts associated with the production and dissemination of ancient scientific, technical, and encyclopaedic writing. Our conference, accordingly, aims to re-open discussion of the role, function and users of ancient libraries. We are keen to explore the shifting conditions under which the library operated as a physical and institutional entity, but also as intellectual and symbolic space over the long span of antiquity. In addition, we wish to investigate a variety of scholarly practices and social and intellectual networks that developed within the domain of the ancient library. We thus hope to illuminate the relationship between the library and the broader culture of reading, writing and intellectual exchange in antiquity.
The conference will bring together literary scholars, historians and archaeologists of all periods of Graeco-Roman antiquity specialising in the above fields.
Papers
Papers will cover the following broad themes:
- The library as both material and intellectual archive: its history, significance and development
- Libraries and the reading culture of antiquity
- Patterns of source usage, cross-referencing and annotating in antiquity
- The institutional function of ancient libraries, and their role in ancient intellectual life
- Libraries and patronage, or benefaction
- Libraries and acquisitiveness, material or intellectual
- The organisation and operation of ancient libraries
- The topography of the ancient library: libraries and civic space
- Public and private libraries in the ancient world
Invited speakers
- Ewen Bowie (Oxford)
- Annette Harder (Groningen)
- Myrto Hatzimichali (Cambridge)
- Dan Hogg (St Andrews)
- George Houston (Chapel Hill)
- Christian Jacob (Paris)
- William Johnson (Cincinnati)
- Paul Nelles (Ontario)
- Richard Neudecker
(Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom) - Matthew Nicholls (Reading)
- Dirk Obbink (Oxford)
- Massimo Pinto (Bari)
Conference organisers
- Dr Jason Konig (jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk)
- Dr Katerina Oikonomopoulou (ao40@st-andrews.ac.uk)
- Prof. Greg Woolf (gdw2@st-andrews.ac.uk )
Links to
Conference dinner menu choices