Reading the Reader

The Stobaios Conference

Jagiellonian University, Kraków

12-13.05 2023

Call for papers

 The Interdisciplinary Research Project Team Stobaios – Preliminary Research at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Conference Reading the Reader. The Stobaios Conference (see the text below). The conference will take place on the 12th and 13th May 2023 at the Jagiellonian University. We kindly invite those interested in participating to send their proposals by January 15th 2023 to the address stobaeus2023@gmail.com.

The Stobaios Anthology is the largest surviving collection of excerpts from ancient Greek literature, both those saved in the manuscript tradition and those irretrievably lost.

The Anthology was known to Phocius in a more extensive version than the one we have, and its manuscript tradition is difficult to reconstruct and complicated because it ran separately for different parts of the collection.

From the first publication of half of the collection in print by Vettore Trincavelli in 1536, four decades elapsed until the complete edition (Canter 1575), covering the entire surviving body of the book. Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, the text underwent numerous modifications and interpolations. A critical edition had to wait until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Wachsmuth-Hense 1884-1923). Until today, there is no published, complete translation of the entire work of Stobaios into any modern language, no commented edition, and the research on it is overwhelmingly focused on the transmission traditions of particular ancient authors and/or literary genres or philosophical movements, rather than on the work itself and its author – de facto anonymous, hidden under the toponymic name of a man from the Macedonian town of Stobi.

Undertaking a study of the inheritance of Stobaios in its entirety with regard to its coherence and structure, and initiating translations with philological, literary, cross-cultural, philosophical and historical commentary is an urgent need. Studies on Stobaios are partial, marginal and scattered, and the bibliography - if compared, for example, with Diogenes Laertios or Athenaeus - is astonishingly poor.  

Therefore, the team of the project Stobaios - Preliminary Research realised within the framework of the Excellence Initiative Programme at the Jagiellonian University invites to participate in the Reading the Reader conference to be held in Krakow on 12-13.05 2023. 

We are inviting proposals for lectures (up to 30 minutes) on topics related to Stobaios and his work, its reception and status in the philological and philosophical studies.

In particular but not exclusively, we invite the following research topics:

- the literature of excerpts, in particular techniques and approaches to the process of selection and compilation - research methodologies and research objectives;

- modern scholarship on the literature of excerpts - research methodologies and scholarly objectives;

- Stobaios against the background of and in comparison with other doxographic traditions;

- Stobaios textological tradition (MS tradition and Stobaios in print);

- the structure and methodological assumptions of Stobaios’ work;

- Stobaios’ work and its paideutic and didactic aims.

The conference will also provide an opportunity to present the research team’s findings to date and evaluate them in an expert forum. Important aims of the symposium include also (1) summarising and evaluating the status quaestionis of the research on Stobaios, (2) the setting of further research directions, integration of Polish and foreign researchers dealing with Stobaios in order to organize further stages of the study, (3) disseminating the knowledge regarding the significance of Stobaios’ work for world literature and the search for new collaborators for further stages of research.   

We hope that it will provide an opportunity for researchers and students for whom Stobaios and his work are an important point of reference to meet and exchange ideas.

Experts:      Christopher Moore PhD (Pennsylvania State University)

                 prof. Krystyna Bartol (Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań)

Please send abstracts of 300 words max. by emailing a word file to stobaeus2023@gmail.com by December 31, 2022. We aim to respond to submissions by January 15, 2023. In the body of your email, please include your name and affiliation. 

The event is free of conference fee thanks to funding from the Excellence Initiative Programme at the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University.

Lectures delivered during the conference will enter a peer-reviewed post-conference publication in the form of a monograph in a high-impact publication or special issue (deadline for delivery of final articles for external review: 31 May 2022).

Organizing Commitee:

Krzysztof Bielawski

Joanna Janik

Sławomir Sprawski

Aleksandra Klęczar

Michał Bzinkowski

Michał Bizoń

Jakub Kuciak

Mateusz Kula