#  2025 Elizabeth Mazzocco Memorial Lecture: "Sociable materials: the text, the book, the world" 

 



    ![Logo, Elizabeth Mazzocco Memorial Lecture](/sites/g/files/omnuum11031/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-11/Screenshot%202025-11-08%20at%209.36.01%E2%80%AFAM.png?itok=FDJD_A1E) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 18, 2025** 

 05:00PM - 07:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Campus Center, UMass Amherst, Amherst Room, 10th floor**  

 [1 Campus Center Way  
Amherst, MA 01003  
United States



 ](<https://www.google.com/maps?q=US MA Amherst 01003 1 Campus Center Way>) 



 

 



 

Host: The UMass Italian Studies Program and the Department of LLC, UMass Amherst

Speaker: **Guyda Armstrong**, Professor of Italian and Director of the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester, UK

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This lecture will reflect on the Italian literary canon in a world of uncertainties, reading it materially in the travels of its textual artefacts through time and space, and as an expression of a culture made by its book-people, that is, the people who have written, made, read, and disseminated these iconic texts through their work across media. The presentation will focus primarily on Italian medieval and Renaissance literary works, and the ways they have been designed for reading by different communities over time, from the autograph manuscript, through early printed editions, mass-market publishing, and into diverse digital forms. What did these texts – and books – consist of at the time of their making? Where is the Italian literary canon, materially, and where will it go? How can we define a canon in our contemporary mediascape? And what might the future hold?



 

 



 

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