We are pleased to announce the call for papers for our international conference ‘The Modular Text in Antiquity’. The event will take place on 18th-19th November at Newcastle University, England.
Many of antiquity’s professional and technical traditions transmitted their knowledge as collections of discrete, bounded textual units: mathematical problems, pharmaceutical or gastronomic recipes, astrological or meteorological predictions, technical instructions, or even lexicographical entries. The units that make up such collections, and the collections themselves, share a set of structural properties that are rarely discussed across disciplinary boundaries. This conference seeks to develop new analytical frameworks for these shared properties. In the absence of a convenient critical term, we propose to investigate these properties under the provisional label of ‘modularity’, and posit the salient features of the modular text in antiquity as follows:
- Self-contained: given appropriate expectations, each unit is intelligible on its own, such that the order of units around it does not condition its meaning.
- Distinctive: modular units are written in such a way as to be recognisably a module in the genre or discipline with which they are connected, even if they are hard to interpret for an outsider.
- Informationally rich: modular units are often structured to convey key information with a minimum of stylistic elaboration, frequently relying on a limited set of syntactical units and/or discipline-specific vocabulary.
- Portable: a consequence of self-containment is that modular units can be brought together in new combinations, detached from one collection and inserted into another. For instance, the same pharmaceutical recipes migrate through different compilations.
- Scalable: modular units can be added to or removed from collections, or recombined into wholly new collections, without affecting the coherence of the whole.
- Inflationary: technical information can typically be exemplified or explicated in more than one way, e.g. in the context of the ancient practical mathematical tradition, by changing the numerical values used in assignments. Given their scalable and inflationary nature, modular traditions can thus grow into huge and unwieldy corpora.
- Malleable: units can be readily adapted to suit the stylistic or structural needs of new contexts, including those of continuous exposition.
These properties have fundamental consequences for how we understand the ways in which ancient technical texts were conceived, composed, transmitted, and used in antiquity, and raise questions that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, including the histories of science, literature, and scholarship, manuscript studies and papyrology. By placing traditional ‘text-critical’ methodologies and the insights of New Philology / Material Philology into dialogue (see e.g. ‘The New Philology’, Speculum special issue 1990; Nichols 1997; Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg 2017), the conference seeks to interrogate the consequences of textual modularity for our understanding of and editorial approaches to technical and professional knowledge in antiquity.
A. Composition and Use
- What does it mean to ‘author’ a modular text as author or compiler; (how) do we distinguish between the creator(s) of individual units and the creator(s) of a collection? Was the distinction significant in antiquity?
- How do ancient compilers-cum-authors-cum-copyists signal boundaries between modules; how do they order texts and what navigation aids do they provide for their readers (e.g. numbering systems, rubrics, paratexts, layout conventions)?
- In what ways and in what contexts were modular texts intended to be read; what evidence do we have for their ancient usage? In particular, what role does modularity play in pedagogical contexts, where the ordering, selection, and adaptation of units may reflect the demands of teaching and learning?
- In what ways are modular units altered or adapted when incorporated into new collections?
- How do modular collections and corpora function as information systems: what intellectual practices and structures do they presuppose? What is the relationship between the module and the frame, or between one collection and another? (In what way) are modular collections greater than the sum of their units?
B. Transmission and editorial method
- (How well) do conventional text-critical methods cope with modular texts? What editorial approaches are appropriate for modules that migrate between collections or for multiple redactions of a particular collection? How do we embrace contamination as a standard feature of textual history?
- How can digital approaches/databases help us represent these texts; (how) can data models capture the module as both independent unit and a fixed part of a larger collection?
C. Definition and Limits
- What are the limits of modularity? Why and in what circumstances is modularity abandoned in favour of ‘continuous’ exposition?
- (How) are modular texts distinct from florilegia or genre-based anthologies?
Confirmed speakers include Courtney Roby (Cornell), Annette Warner (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main), Max Leventhal (Edinburgh).
We welcome topics on disciplines including, but by no means limited to, mathematics, metrology, medicine, the natural sciences, astrology, music, grammar, rhetoric, architecture, engineering, law, and magic / ritual. We also welcome cross-cultural and cross-temporal perspectives from beyond the Greco-Roman world (e.g. ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, Syriac, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and medieval European traditions). The conference is part of the AHRC-funded ‘AgRoMa: The Agrimensores and Roman Mathematics’ project, based at Newcastle University (https://agroma.ncl.ac.uk).
Please send abstracts of 150-200 words for papers of ca. 20 minutes duration to Dr Richard Marshall (richard.marshall@newcastle.ac.uk) by Friday, 19th June 2026. Please mention your academic affiliation and the position you are currently holding. The selection of contributions will be announced by 3rd July.
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.