IMC 2026: Sessions

Paper 313-a:

To read an annotated manuscript is to join an ongoing conversation, one which is rarely perceived in scholarship concerned primarily with the text contained—whether that be to establish its origins or to demonstrate its fluidity. How, then, do marginalia inflect the temporality of reading in manuscripts, and how does this inflection manifest in compositional strategies?

To answer this, I turn to the compositional strategies behind the Paraphrasis of the works of (Ps-)Dionysios the Areopagite by Byzantine historian and philosopher George Pachymeres (1242—1310). In conversation with theories of environmental perception and temporality (Tim Ingold's "taskscape" especially), we see George oscillating in attention between text, marginalia, and composition to create a seamless running commentary. His displacement from Dionysios complements marginalia from which he works to provide interpretive guard-rails. Yet, manipulating these to his own ends he creates a version of the “ancients” which legitimizes his own interpretation without precluding creative interventions. In his practice, past and present are mutually negotiated, indeed constructed, through the implicit rhythms of reading and composition.

Paper 313-b:

Highest rung on a ladder of sacred song, capstone of the books of wisdom, and prelude to the Prophets and the advent of Christ, Song of Songs as rubricated and explicated at the core of Düsseldorf ULB B3, a manuscript likely produced by and for women in the ninth century, treats key themes that pervade the whole codex. Its presentation, moreover, suggests that this was a text used for continual and thorough contemplation and rumination, a lectio of the highest order: it is recounted in full while other scriptural texts are excerpted, and it is carefully and extensively rubricated. Its presentation is striking because it is the most extensively rubricated Song text up to that time (and perhaps in the history of Song rubrication) and also because it works in tension with the treatises that accompany it, which offer their own views of how the verses are to be understood. Bringing together and shifting between two main hermeneutic traditions and introducing some interventions of its own, it would also have rewarded careful study of and deep reflection on Song, a testament to education and hermeneutic activity in early medieval women's communities.

Paper 313-c:

This paper asks how we can trace changing patterns of lay religious interest in the later Middle Ages, and what such changes reveal about the dynamics of popular piety over time. It draws on my doctoral research on the cult of Birgitta of Sweden and its presence in English Books of Hours as a case study for broader questions of manuscript culture and religious change.

Focusing on Books of Hours, the paper argues that these objects are crucial for reconstructing shifting devotional practices in late medieval England. Rather than treating them as fixed liturgical texts, it approaches them as dynamic artefacts that accumulated layers of use, adaptation, and renewal. These layers make visible how new forms of devotion were incorporated into an established and widely standardised genre of prayerbook in use from the thirteenth century.

By tracing when and how Birgittine material was added, copied, or omitted, the paper demonstrates how Books of Hours can map the reception of new saints’ cults across generations of users. In doing so, it highlights how devotional books preserve evidence of changing religious interests and broader transformations in late medieval English religious culture.