While humanistic scholarship has focused on the semantic meaning of written, printed, and electronic texts, it has neglected how people perform texts mentally, orally and theatrically and manipulate the material text through aesthetic engagement, ritual display, and physical decoration. Ritualizing the material form of books — their iconic dimension — is to revere them as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. Ritualizing books’ expressive or performative dimension through song, artistic illustration and theater aims for inspirational effects.

This Equinox book series encourages innovative research on the iconic and expressive/performative uses of written texts. It supports the activities of the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT), and also studies of these issues by other groups and individual scholars.