Next Wed to Fri, there will be a German Studies heavy symposium on ‚Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects‘ in Freiburg, organised by Evanghelia Stead as part of her fellowship at FRIAS. Her interest stems from looking into the circulation of ‚Faust’ (Faust I in prints and book objects: Germany, England and France, 1816-1925) but the time frame of the symposium extends from the (late) Middle Ages to digital material. For those of you who would like to attend but cannot make it to Freiburg, there is the option of following the conference via twitter (#booksFRIAS) or revisiting the conference website post festum when it is intended that a number of the papers will be uploaded as podcasts.

Henrike Lähnemann, July / August 2015: Senior Research Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies FRIAS | Albertstr. 19 Office 02 006 | D - 79104 Freiburg | 0049 761 203-97363


Wednesday 15 July 2015


Cultural Practices and Devotional Books (Chair: Michael Stolz)

14:15-15:00   Henrike Manuwald (Freiburg), «A fourteenth-century devotional booklet (Montpellier, BUP, H 396): a unique document of cultural practices»

15:00-15:45   Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford/FRIAS), «From devotional aids to antiquarian objects. The prayer books of Medingen»


Philologies on the move: Reading and Interpretation (Chair: Norbert Bachleitner)

16:15-17:00   Guyda Armstrong (Manchester), «The Afterlives of St Catherine of Siena»

17:00-17:45   Ralph Häfner (Freiburg), «Philologie und Zivilisationsgeschichte. Praktiken der Textinterpretation bei Caspar Barth»


Thursday 16 July 2015


Library and Codex Practices (Chair: Henrike Lähnemann)

8:30-9:15      Michael Stolz (Bern), «Otium and negotium. Reading processes and their cultural backgrounds in early Italian and German humanism»

9:15-10:00    Christoph Mackert (UB Leipzig), «Dichten, Schreiben und Abschreiben im Leipziger Thomasstift: die literarische Sammelhandschrift Ms 1279 und die Buchkultur an St. Thomas im 3. Viertel des 15. Jahrhunderts»

10:00-10:45   Anja Grebe (Freiburg), «Singing the Codex. Practices of Reciting Texts in Different Cultures»



Circulation of Images and multiplying (Chair: Alfred Messerli)

11:15-12:00   Alberto Milano (Milan), «Change of use, change of public, change of meaning. Printed images traveling through Europe»

12:00-12:45   Christina Kuhli (Freiburg), «Fluidität der Bilder oder die Komprimierung der Medienvielfalt im Buch: Galeriewerke und die Histoire métallique»


Reading and Cultural Practices in the 19th century (Chair: David Skilton)

14:00-14:45   Stefanie Lethbridge (Freiburg), «Personalising Cultural Experience: Nineteenth-century Poetry Anthologies between Cultural Object and Private Memory»

14:45-15:30   Barbara Korte (Freiburg), «Gift Books and the Promotion of the Heroic Girl in Late-Victorian Britain»


On illustration (Chair: Barbara Korte)

16:00-16:45   Alfred Messerli (Zürich), «Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm und ihre ikonographische Rezeption zwischen 1823 und 1873»

16:45-17:45   Giorgio Bacci (Pisa), «Pinocchio (1883-2004): an illustrated adventure over more than a century»


Friday 17 July 2015

Reading with Images (Chair: Corinna Norrick-Rühl)

8:30-9:15      Hélène Védrine (Paris), «Relectures iconographiques: Les Fleurs du mal illustrées par Armand Rassenfosse et Carlos Schwabe»

9:15-10:00    Norbert Bachleitner (Vienna), «The Relation between Text and Illustration in German and English Editions of Arthur Schnitzler’s Works»


Modern and Contemporary practices (Chair: Evanghelia Stead)

10:30-11:15   Corinna Norrick-Rühl (Mainz) : «Book Sales Clubs, Book Ownership, and Cultural Trends during the Long Twentieth Century»

11:15-12:00   David Skilton (Cardiff), «Victorian illustration and the remediation of a novel by Anthony Trollope into a comic book»

12:00-12:45   Stephan Packard (Freiburg) : «New Identities and Differences: On some Emerging Material Conditions for Critique in the Early Age of Digital Reading»