Books Known Only by Title: An Overview

• In Event: Books Known Only By Title: Exploring the Gendered Structures of the First Millennium Imagined Library

Abstract

"Books known only by title" are in some ways a self-explanatory concept, but they open up a multitude of further questions. What is a "book" or a "title"? How much, or how little, can we know about the text? Most importantly, do these books follow any patterns in their appearance and function, viewed as a group? This paper will draw upon the combined findings of the "Books Known Only by Title" CAS project to discuss these books as a whole through the lens of Jewish studies and gender studies: their traits and tendencies, their appearances throughout the first millennium, and their rhetorical function within texts. As we will show, books known only by title can be vectors of both continuity in transmission and disruptive knowledge—both aspects tied closely to the gender of their attributed authors and transmitters. Moving from origins to reception, I will also examine how historical male scholarship responded to these texts with yearning and the desire for mastery; the books were deemed "lost" (and therefore waiting to be heroically found) or "fake" (and therefore unworthy of attention). Books known only by title thus function as underexplored loci of expectation and desire, sometimes even generating new texts to fill their perceived gap. As a whole, this short paper will introduce the central themes of the "Books Known Only by Title" CAS project and point toward future directions for research and theory. In particular, I will examine the project’s many implications for Jewish studies: what do books known only by title reveal to us about scribal culture and the early Jewish imagined library?

Author

• Esther Brownsmith