Professor of Comparative Literature; Residential College
she, her, hers
Office Information:
1502 East Quad
Comparative Literature; Western Europe; Genre; History of the Book; Film and Media; Transnational and Global Cultures; Department Administration
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California, BerkeleyRemember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain
Catherine Brown
Publication Information:
Name of Periodical: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry
Volume Number: 27
Issue Number: 3
Year of Publication: 2011
Page Numbers: 262-278
Manuscript thinking: Stories by hand
Catherine Brown
Manuscript Thinking PDF Abstract This essay suggests that permitting ourselves to be implicated in the ‘flex-point’ of manuscript space-time has much to teach. And not least of the teaching is the importance of allowing ourselves to be wounded by the aspects of our primary materials that seem at first blush to be non-meaningful, non-intellectual, nonverifiable. This approach to manuscripts might be termed ‘empathic codicology’ – a feeling-into the study of the codex. Why not call this manuscript thinking: writing thought by hand, thinking by written hand?
Publication Information...
See MoreIn the Middle
Catherine Brown
A land of unlikeness
The English novel The Go-Between (1953) begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”1 The novel’s narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place...
See MoreContrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism
Catherine Brown
This work of intellectual and cultural history seeks to understand the recurring connection of teaching with contradiction in some major texts of the European Middle Ages. It moves comfortably between patristic and monastic exegesis, the Paris schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and late medieval Spain; between Latin and vernacular, between religious and secular. It assimilates the methodologies of religious and erotic texts, thereby displaying the investment of each in the sensuality and analytical power of language.
The book begins by exploring Christian exegesis, in which...
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