About the conference
Organizers
The Textus et Pictura conference has been co-organized since 2017 by the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University Library in Toruń, and since 2022 – in cooperation with the Center for Studies on the Civilization of the Renaissance at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences. The forum was initiated in 2017 by Monika Jakubek-Raczkowska and Marta Czyżak. During the first edition of the conference, the “Catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts of the University Library in Toruń” was presented.
Objectives
The Textus et Pictura conference is a cyclical forum, integrating researchers of medieval manuscript heritage from various disciplines – historians and art historians, bibliology scholars, codicologists, philologists and paleographers, monument conservators. The subject of the debates is the medieval manuscript codex, treated as an integral whole, in which the leather-bound block of parchment leaves is a carrier of writing and various types of decorations, which in turn are carriers of content, meanings and aesthetic values, and more broadly – cultural values subject to protection. The aim of creating a nationwide conference forum, which over time is becoming increasingly internationalized, is to confront scientific perspectives, discuss the results of monographic research, present current developmental research projects, and create conditions for methodological reflection on research aspects, evaluation, and conservation priorities. This is achieved through papers discussed in thematic blocks, project presentations, and discussion panels in the form of a round table. It is an important step towards the scientific integration of the dispersed, interdisciplinary, multi-generational community, providing a perspective for designing joint research projects in the future.
The conference proceedings are published as monographs by the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press in the series: “Studies on Scriptoria and Medieval Manuscript Heritage“.
Subsequent meetings are modeled around a leading idea, with each meeting also providing space for presentations of research results and ongoing projects not directly related to it. Reflections are concentrated around thematic groups organized into blocks: Textus (content analysis, paleography); Liber (codicological analysis, book structure and binding, history and state of preservation, and related problems and findings); Pictura (analysis of artistic forms and iconography of illuminated codices); Musica (musicological and liturgical problems, musical codices, musical paleography); Libraria (libraries and collections); Fragmenta (broadly understood research on relics of medieval books, including binding waste); Traditio (continuity of medieval tradition, second life of the codex, methodological problems – description, documentation, digitization, state of preservation and protection of manuscript heritage as cultural heritage, evaluation).
