Garrick Allen
Welcome to the Paratexts Seeking Understanding project blog! You can find regular updates here from the various teams involved in this international and interdisciplinary project. We are using both empirical and philological approaches to understand how paratexts–all the things in, with, and around the text itself, like page numbers, marginal notes, titles, commentary, and much more–influence the ways the people read and achieve understanding from literature. Our focus is on sacred texts, particularly in Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions, as they are found in the manuscripts.
To explore our project’s main questions our scientific team based in Glasgow works with manuscript experts based in the UK, Ireland, US, Germany, France, Australia, and Israel to explore the ways that their particular traditions influenced how readers engaged these works from antiquity onward. We’re already starting to see new studies, findings, publications, and discoveries, and we hope that you’ll tune in to the blog to follow us as we explore this new research space.