75th Anniversary Alumni Lecture with Professor Leslie Lockett (Ph.D. '04): "Early Medieval Readers in Dialogue with Augustine’s Soliloquia"

We're celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Medieval Institute with a series of alumni lectures.

Our first talk brings back to campus Leslie Lockett (Ph.D. '04), Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University, to talk about her current research. A reception will follow the event. 

About the lecture: 

Few present-day readers would rank Augustine of Hippo’s early philosophical dialogue called Soliloquia among the most important or influential of his works; scholars have recently labeled it “esoteric” and “peripheral.” We might assume that early medieval readers had a similar opinion of the Soliloquia, but manuscript evidence attests to energetic engagement with this work by readers of the eighth through eleventh centuries. This paper explores the paratexts transmitted by early medieval Soliloquia manuscripts in order to draw out how this dialogue was enthusiastically studied by a surprising range of users, from students of elementary Latin syntax and vocabulary, to scholars of Platonist ontology and the Aristotelian Categories, to a semi-literate reader who used the Soliloquia as a self-help manual.