The Reading Mind: Practices of Annotation and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy

14 January 2026

Photo: Carolina Lehan/HEPMASITE

The HEPMASITE project would like to invite you to a lecture on Wednesday, 14 January 2026, at 17:15. Mario Meliadò (University of Siegen) will talk about "The Reading Mind: Practices of Annotation and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy."

Convenors

• Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)
• Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)
• José Maksimczuk (University of Hamburg)

Abstract
This lecture begins from a simple but often overlooked idea: philosophical thought is not only produced through writing—it is shaped and transformed through acts of reading. Yet the history of philosophy, as commonly practiced, remains largely a historiography of authored texts and explicit doctrines. Reading, although ubiquitous and constitutive of philosophical activity, is almost entirely absent from the standard narrative. My lecture argues that this absence has led to significant distortions in our understanding of medieval philosophy, for the primacy of authorship and originality, assumed in modern accounts, does not adequately reflect how medieval thinkers themselves conceived and exercised their intellectual practice. Rather than merely enlarging the corpus of written texts, the study of annotations and marginalia enables a shift in perspective: these fragmentary material traces illuminate a largely invisible yet epistemically generative agent in the history of thought—the reading mind.

Mario Meliadò is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Siegen. His research focuses on the philosophical schools of the fifteenth century and the reception of Platonic sources in medieval and Renaissance Latin philosophy. He is currently directing the DFG-funded project manicula, which investigates Nicholas of Cusa’s reading practices and aims to produce a critical edition of his marginalia on Plato and Aristotle.

Venue 
in person and online
Institute for Jewish Studies

Further information
For registration and further information please write an e-mail to: hepmasite.reli@uni-hamburg.de

Invitation poster: PDF download