My last blogpost touched on the subject of trolling. Another diverting/infuriating form of digital textuality is the phishing email–the letter which tries to persuade you to give away all your numbers and passwords in order to spike your system, compromise your online security, or relieve you of significant sums of money. The etymologists link the word ‘phishing’, predictably enough, with fishing, angling for personal information (the OED dates its arrival to 1996), but explain that it’s probably been crossed with ‘phreaking’–an older scam for getting free telephone calls (dating back to 1971).

This morning members of the University of Cambridge were taken on a particularly creative phishing trip:

“Dear Staff/Student,

As phishing schemes become more sophisticated, with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond, it has become increasingly important for the Webmaster of The University of Cambridge to upgrade the University’s Webmail server to the new and more secured 2013 version.

This will enable your webmail take a new look, with virus protection and anti-spam Security. You are advised to verify and upgrade your account to the University’s 2013 latest Webmail version to enable recommended advanced features.

To verify your account, please click and follow the verification link below for the required upgrade or simply copy and paste the link into your web browser;

[link deleted, for obvious reasons]

To ensure full protection of your account, please take a few minutes now – it could save you a lot of time and frustration later.”

It’s ingenious, isn’t it? Shades of Shakespeare’s Iago, pretending that he wants to keep Othello from harm at the same time as he destroys his marriage and his mind. I particularly like ‘with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond’–such modesty!

CMT GRAND DAY OUT 2013

The AHRC-funded exhibition ‘The Brownlows in Italy: Books and Continental Travel’, curated by Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts as part of the CMT National Trust Libraries project, runs at Belton House in Lincolnshire until 3 November 2013.

So that CMT members can enjoy a private view of the house and the exhibition, we are organizing a day-trip to Belton on *Monday 10 June*. Minibuses will leave from Chesterton Road at 8.30, returning to Cambridge by 5.

The visit is free, but pre-booking is required and places are limited. Please drop a line to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003) and Abigail Brundin (asb17@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to come.

For more information about the house and the project, see > http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/belton-house/ and http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=2925. A poster for the exhibition can be downloaded here.

Robert Priest spoke at our seminar last night about his work on the fan mail and hate mail that arose from Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863). Treating the gospels as a set of unreliable historical sources rather than as Holy Writ, Renan’s study scandalized the Catholic establishment and became one of the most hotly-discussed and bestselling books of the age.

While the Vie received vast numbers of printed rebuttals, Renan himself was subjected to a torrent of letters from all over France and beyond its borders. Some of the letters were from readers who had experienced the  book as a kind of revelation that brought the historical Jesus to life for the first time. But others were savagely hostile, calling the writer an animal and telling him that he would burn in hell for his lack of faith. A third type of communication came from those who sought to bring Renan back to the fold by gentler means, often with prayer cards depicting the Sacred Heart, significant terms underlined so as to drive home the message more directly. Taken together these letters testify to the extent to which the Vie (published in a cheap, simplified edition in 1864, and issued with illustrations in 1870) had penetrated French society, attracting readers among the rural poor as well as among urban elites. And they show how much controversy it continued to cause, while the author sat back and declined to comment on the furore.

For the modern reader, these letters can’t but seem prescient of internet commentings, and of the virulent work of the troll, who employs the invisibility cloak of anonymity to post flagrantly offensive messages. (The recent trolling case involving Cambridge academic Mary Beard was widely publicized). But while anonymity was also a feature in much of Renan’s hate mail, Priest emphasized that these were not proto-posts. With no established line of communication, and no evidence of a concerted campaign of writing, each letter was the result of an individual initiative by the sender, an experiment pitting the power of handwriting against the force of print.

Easter Term 2013, Fridays 2-4 (10 May, 17 May and 24 May)

Trinity College, Junior Parlour

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a new forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. It is hoped to hold a series of workshops annually in the Easter Term, each focusing upon a particular issue, and usually explored through a pair of short presentations and discussion.

10 May           Liturgical texts in their manuscript contexts

Henry Parkes   ‘Visual hierarchy in eleventh-century “liturgical” texts’

Erik Niblaeus ‘Twelfth-Century Breviary Fragments in the Swedish National Archives’

17 May            The process of development in script

David Ganz     ‘Irish cursive script: scribes, styles and development’

Chris Voth      ‘The manuscript evidence for the beginnings of English Square Minuscule’

24 May            The palaeography of musical notation

Eduardo Aubert ‘The notions of pure and mixed (neumatic) scripts in the light of tenth- and eleventh-century sources from Burgundy’

Giovanni Varelli ‘Ransacking the “toolbox” of tenth-century Italian music scribes: reflections on a first survey’

All welcome. For further information, contact the workshop convenors, Tessa Webber (mtjw2@cam.ac.uk) and David Ganz (ganz.palaeography@gmail.com)

The Junior Parlour is on T staircase, Blue Boar Court, located on the opposite side of Trinity Street from the main entrance to the College (next door to Brora). Enter from Trinity Street through the covered archway; go up steps on the right. The entrance to T staircase is half-way up the steps on the right.

Thursdays at 5:30pm, room SR-24, Faculty of English, 9 West Road

Thursday 2 May

Robert Priest (History, Cambridge), ‘Writing to Ernest Renan: Fan Mail, Hate Mail and the Historical Jesus in Nineteenth-Century France’

Thursday 16 May

Lucy Razzall (English, Cambridge), ‘Thinking Inside the Box: Containers and the Materiality of Early Modern Texts’

All welcome. Wine & soft drinks will be served at the start of the seminar.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

I’ve been yearning for an excuse, however tenuous, to post this picture of a friend’s mouth-watering library of poetry, but I’ve been completely unable to think of one. So here it is, on no other pretext than that, in a rain-sodden, snow-drifted UK, spring might at last have sprung…

A few of the material texts I encountered during a few days spent in Venice. Here, writers are protesting against the closure of yet more bookshops; the nineteenth-century writer Niccolò Tommaseo dominates a square with books apparently tumbling out from his coat (his statue is affectionately known as ‘cacalibri’); and there’s a shop where a woman can personalize an apron or bib with a calligraphic name in less than a minute!

Today sees the publication by Cambridge University Press of a new edition of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Censorship has always been a key part of the story of Lawrence’s career as a writer, but this edition reveals for the first time how much it affected the poems as well as the novels.

In particular, a sequence of poems that Lawrence wrote in 1916, in which he was fiercely critical of the imperialist ventures of the British army in the Middle East, was rendered meaningless by the refusal of publishers (in the wake of the banning of The Rainbow) to print explicit references to places such as Salonika and Mesopotamia. According to the volume’s editor, Christopher Pollnitz, early readers would have ‘found little that they could understand in these poems beyond two facts, that they were by D.H. Lawrence and referred obliquely to war’.

You can read more about this historic publication, which rounds off CUP’s 40-volume Lawrence edition, here.

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

The Faculty of English wishes to appoint a University Lecturer in Literature and the Material Text to 1500, from 1 September 2013.

The appointee will be expected to have a good first degree and a doctorate in a relevant subject area and possess the ability to work as part of a team. He/she will also be expected to demonstrate evidence of ability to engage in high-level research, with publications and participation in scholarly activity commensurate with stage of career, and to teach effectively at all relevant levels. The appointee should also be able to teach in related fields in English literature and play an effective role in the life and work of the Faculty as a whole, including academic administration.

Appointments made at University Lecturer level will be permanent, subject to a probationary period of five years.

Further particulars for this post, with information about the Faculty, and details of how to apply can be found online, together with the University Application Form.

Quote Reference: GG26472                                                       Closing Date: 26 April 2013

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

The Faculty of English wishes to appoint a University Lecturer in Literature and the Material Text from 1500, from 1 September 2013.

The appointee will be expected to have a good first degree and a doctorate in a relevant subject area and possess the ability to work as part of a team. He/she will also be expected to demonstrate evidence of ability to engage in high-level research, with publications and participation in scholarly activity commensurate with stage of career, and to teach effectively at all relevant levels. The appointee should also be able to teach in related fields in English literature and play an effective role in the life and work of the Faculty as a whole, including academic administration.

Appointments made at University Lecturer level will be permanent, subject to a probationary period of five years.

Further particulars for this post, with information about the Faculty, and details of how to apply can be found online, together with the University Application Form.

Quote Reference: GG26462                                                       Closing Date: 26 April 2013

Thanks to Dan Woodford for drawing my attention to Nina Katchadourian’s ‘Sorted Books’ project–a series of photographs of books with their titles juxtaposed so that they form micro-narratives, poems, jokes… now published in book-form.

Brainpickings quotes Katchadourian: ‘I am always paying attention to the physical qualities of the books, and I try to work with their particular attributes as much as possible. The size of a book carries temperament and tonality, as does the way the text sits on the spine. A heavy volume with large text on the spine, for example, might be exuberant, urgent, pushy; a small typeface might communicate a voice that’s exacting, shy, insecure or furtive’.

And the overwhelming impression that I get from the photos is of a clash of visual voices. Each title moves things in an unexpected direction, as the books agree or disagree among themselves, marshalled by the wit of the artist. I wonder what conversations are going on, unsuspected, on my own bookshelves?