The Binghamton University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) celebrated its 50th anniversary by hosting a conference at the University Downtown Center on Oct. 21 and Oct. 22. BU students and professors, as well as academics from across the world, gathered to hear others present their work on the pre-modern book in a global context.

Founded in 1966 as an organized research committee combining disciplines, CEMERS focuses on the advancement of medieval scholarship in conjunction with other academic departments at BU.

The CEMERS anniversary conference focused on the developing book as an object. The book has been an integral piece of human civilization for millennia and can be an extremely useful tool in the study of society and culture. CEMERS conference speakers examined the book from their different areas of expertise in hopes of widening the scope of medieval culture understanding.

Speakers analyzed ink samples to determine the true age of manuscripts, spoke about the need to push forward with this work as some of the older iterations of the pre-modern book are deteriorating, and examined context clues to determine who may have had access to books or influenced their development.

Each day began with a plenary lecture addressing the entire conference. Organizer and English professor Marilynn Desmond invited professors from SUNY Institutions and other universities to discuss their work under a particular subheading. In these sessions, professors from all over the globe, including Ireland, England, Finland and Spain, were arranged into smaller, concurrent sessions based on the ways their academic work regarding the pre-modern book intersected with each other.

One of these academic sessions was organized by Bridget Whearty, assistant professor of English and medieval studies, who spoke about different digital approaches to studying pre-modern manuscripts. She felt that the wide array of speakers brought to the conference fostered an extremely productive and interesting academic environment.

“There’s so much nerding out,” Whearty said. “There are so many people here who do interesting, thoughtful work — there’s this mix of academics and non-academics, but then one of the great things about this conference in particular is that there also people whose work I don’t know at all. Getting to learn about all of this is remarkable.”

Olivia Holmes, an associate professor of English and medieval studies, organized a session on Dante’s libelli and the idea of the book. She put her session together in hopes of creating an accurate picture of what books meant to Dante and the people existing during his time. For Holmes, the CEMERS conference was successful in providing a broader academic context for the work.

“For me the conference was especially successful in as much as it went beyond a narrower perspective,” Holmes said. “The conference achieved a perfect balance between the smaller, specialized sessions and the plenary lectures, which provided a broader intercultural and interdisciplinary perspective.”

Whearty said that by studying the scope of the pre-modern book, more people’s contributions to history could be studied.

“The thing about books, or even an iPhone, is you can use it as a tool and use it to get to all kinds of things, but the thing itself tells a story,” Whearty said. “Books are like that for us today; they’re even more like that for thinking about the Middle Ages. … You have this object that helps us see poetry, history and art, but it also helps us see humans.”