Of literary and literal corpora (or the Two Cultures revisited)

This paper will examine how combining the study of the material history of the book and textual and cultural history with recent scientific innovations can reconfigure our understanding of what constitutes a literary corpus and how it can be read through the very materials upon which it has been inscribed. In foregrounding the importance of the substrates upon which texts are written as themselves carriers of meaning, the aim is to emphasise the centrality of the text object to the future of the academic book in the digital age. One focus of the paper will be on the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius whose 500th anniversary falls this year, 2015.