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Colloquium " In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Law, literature and religion 

March 26 and 27, 2026

Colloquium organized by Professor Dario Mantovani, Chair of Law, Culture and Society in Ancient Rome, on March 26 and 27, 2026 at the Collège de France (Marcelin Berthelot site, Room 2).

Digestum vetus (detail), XIIth century, University Library, Padua, Italy. - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Since its emergence in the 1980s, under the pen of Gérard Genette, literary criticism applied to the field of modern print has been able to measure the fruitfulness of the notion of " paratexte ". The philological sciences constitute a privileged space for the reception, questioning and renewal of the concept of paratext in relation to the practices of manuscript books. In recent years, numerous works have brought out of the shadows the marginal or liminal texts that accompany, organize and comment on the " principal " text copied in ancient and medieval manuscripts, or have shed light on the metamorphic status of secondary pieces that pass from appearance to full text. Testifying to contemporary scientific interest in these objects, the "In Margine In Margine " aims to offer a first synthesis of these scholarly practices and their consequences, unequally described in the various fields of ancient and medieval literature in East and West. Together with specialists in Roman and Byzantine law, Greek philosophy and the religious literatures of the three monotheisms, the aim is to begin to sketch out a history of reading informed and directed by the margins of books, highlighting research directions that have yet to be fully exploited.