Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture by Daniel Hobbins

The Origins of the Authorial Colophon in the Latin West

Guest Speaker: Daniel Hobbins (University of Notre Dame)

In the early twelfth century, a group of translators working in Iberia began supplying their works with colophons as though they were scribes. They simply replaced the date of copy with the date of composition. Modern scholarship has studied these colophons for their value to the chronology of the translation movement, without realizing that they represent the beginning of a new authorial practice: the colophon had moved from scribes to authors. The authorial colophon might stand as one of the most important authorial innovations of the high middle ages. Yet scholars have never paused to consider its novelty. This paper proposes a chronology for its first appearance. We find the earliest authorial colophons in the Iberian translators, Plato of Tivoli and John of Seville, who imitated the colophons in the Arabic works that they were translating. As we move later in time, we encounter a different world of writing. By the twelfth century, more authors were acting as their own scribes. As authors wrote their own works by hand, they unconsciously absorbed the colophon into their own written practice. In so doing, they repeated the patterns they found in scribal colophons. The case of Frère Angier may illustrate this development. By taking time to record the facts of publication, such authors were emphasizing their own historically specific contribution. Yet they did so without any intent to innovate or any awareness of doing so. Authors found a way to make ambitious claims in the most conservative way possible.

Daniel Hobbins is a historian of high and late medieval Europe, with a particular interest in the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of the period from 1200 to 1500. Under this broad heading, his research has focused on authorship, manuscript culture, textual transmission, the Carthusian order, and fifteenth-century France.

His book Authorship and Publicity before Print (2009) received the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. He is currently completing a book on the history and meaning of the authorial colophon.

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The History of the Book Lecture series, established in 1993 through the efforts of Richard and Mary Rouse, provides an annual venue for internationally recognized authorities on medieval and Renaissance books to present their expertise at UCLA. The lecture’s focus alternates each year between medieval manuscripts and Renaissance books. The topics explored in past lectures were book and manuscript illustration, the development of printing, early book printers and sellers, the book trade, and medieval and Renaissance book and manuscript collections.

More information about past Richard and Mary Rouse History of the Book lectures can be found here.