Lost Provenance and What It Reveals about Manuscript Studies: Lessons from the CULTIVATE MSS Project

Engaging with pre-modern books and manuscripts necessarily involves reckoning with the paradox of loss. While a historical document from the distant past is the material survivor of a singular attempt to hedge against the disappearance of an idea, image, or text, the extant specimen always has to be considered alongside missing exemplars, damage and erasure, lost comparanda, and the vanished life-worlds that produced the object in the first place. This symposium will interrogate the notions of loss, survival, and recuperation in manuscript studies, so often in the background but rarely acknowledged as defining features of the field.

This workshop, 'Lost Provenance and What It Reveals about Manuscript Studies: Lessons from the CULTIVATE MSS Project', was given at the 14th Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies (17-19 November 2021) by the Cultivate MSS team on 19 November 2021.