An Early Modern Research Centre colloquium at the University of Reading

Friday, 8 June 2012

This colloquium aims to bring together people researching the history of libraries over a wide chronological period and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Papers and discussion will focus not only on particular cases but also on broader methodological questions about the current practice and possible future directions of library history. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Fee: £15 (£10 students and unwaged)

Programme

10.30am  Coffee and registration

11am  Welcome

11.15-12.45pm   

Matthew Nicholls (University of Reading): ‘Libraries in the ancient world: points of communication.’

David Rundle (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford): ‘How libraries die, or what the fate of manuscripts in early modern England can teach us.’

12.45-1.45pm  Lunch

1.45-3.15pm                          

Anne Overell (University of Durham): ‘The libraries of Cardinal Reginald Pole and his friends, ca.1520-1558.’

Daniel Starza Smith (University of Reading): ‘“Well versed in all parts of learning”: the Conway family libraries, 1610-1645.’

3.15-3.45pm Tea

3.45-5.15pm                          

Paddy Bullard (University of Kent): ‘What did Jonathan Swift do in libraries?’

Rose Dixon (King’s College London): ‘Virtual “magazines of learning”: The Dissenting Academy Libraries Project, 1720-1860.’

5.15pm                                     

Warren Boutcher (Queen Mary, University of London): Closing comments followed by discussion.

6pm   Drinks

For a booking form, please visit the EMRC website (http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-events.aspx) or contact the EMRC secretary, Jan Cox:  j.f.cox@reading.ac.uk

Organiser: Rebecca Bullard: r.bullard@reading.ac.uk.

An exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library, London

Curated by Brian Cummings and Hugh Cahill

1st May – 14th July, 2012

This exhibition traces the close relationship between royalty and religion from medieval to modern times. It tells the story of the Book of Common Prayer and its importance in national life. This story is illustrated with books, manuscripts and objects, many of which have royal or other important provenances. For details and tickets see: http://www.lambethpalacelibrary.org/content/royaldevotion

There is also a series of public lectures to accompany the exhibition:

10 May – Professor Eamon Duffy, ‘Latin for Lay People; Medieval Prayer Books’

31 May – Revd. Dr. Judith Maltby, ‘The Prayer Book Under Duress: Public Worship in the Civil War and Interregnum’

6 June – Professor Brian Cummings, ‘The Genesis of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’

5 July – Professors Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson, ‘Coronation, Prayer Book, and People 1660-1953′

Doors open 5.15pm (admission by Library exhibition entrance). Lectures will take place in the Guard Room, Lambeth Palace, at 6 p.m. Exhibition closes for ticket-holders at 8pm. Refreshments will be available after the lecture.

Tickets (including free viewing of the exhibition before and after the lecture) £12 each. Season ticket for the series of four lectures £35. Tickets by pre-booking only. To book lecture tickets please telephone 0743 204 4820, email visitor.manager@churchofengland.org or write to Visitor Manager at the address below, enclosing a cheque payable to Lambeth Palace Library.

Royal Devotion exhibition booking information: Tickets cost £12 Adults, £10 Concessions (over 60s, student and unemployed), under 17s free. Price includes printed exhibition guide. To buy tickets and for more information visit www.lambethpalacelibrary.org or call 0844 847 1698

Opening times:

Tuesday- Friday 11.00-13.30 and 14.00- 17.00 (last entry 16.00), Saturdays and Bank Holidays- 11.00-16.00 (last entry 15.00)

Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7JU

www.lambethpalacelibrary.org

Today’s most provocative acronym came courtesy of a project called Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information, or (yes) SALAMI. The aim of SALAMI was to analyse 23,000 hours of digitized music, breaking it down (or slicing it up) into its constituent elements–intros, verses, choruses, bridge passages and outros (sic) for pop music, more complex categories for classical (‘outros’ become ‘codas’). Quite what the ultimate purpose of the exercise was, or what new research has been made possible by it, was a little unclear, although one can certainly imagine that interesting patterns might emerge over time. There are, though, some important senses in which music is not like salami…

A second musical project to which De Roure drew attention has just been launched by the Bodleian library. What’s the Score? invites any musically-literate person to mark up pages from the library’s collections of mid-Victorian piano sheet music, which have hitherto been uncatalogued. First investigations suggest that it’s quite a fiddly operation. It will be interesting to see whether this latest effort at crowd-sourcing reaps results.

In other news, the website of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network has just gone live–click here to take a look!

Thursday 17 May

Juliet Fleming (NYU) will discuss pre-circulated sections from her book-in-progress: Counterproductions: Bibliography After Derrida

For copies, please email Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk)

Thursday 31 May

Daniel Wakelin (St Hilda’s, Oxford)

‘Some Scribes Thinking’

For more information, contact Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk)

In last night’s episode of ‘Shakespeare’s Restless World’, MacGregor went to Westminster Abbey to look at some of the tombs and relics of English monarchs which, as today, would have been popular tourist attractions in Shakespeare’s time. Jonathan Bate highlighted the important parallels between visiting the effigy of a famous king (and perhaps listening to a guide translate the Latin inscription on his tomb, telling of his achievements) and seeing Shakespeare’s incarnation of the same hero in action on the Elizabethan stage. I’ll be interested to hear what other material texts feature in this series! The programmes can be found on Radio 4 at 1.45 pm and 7.45 pm on weekdays, but are also available to listen again online.

Saturday 15 September 2012 at Queen Mary, University of London

Keynote speakers: Prof. James McLaverty (English Department, Keele University) and Dr. John Hinks (Chair of the Printing Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leiecester)

This interdisciplinary conference will explore relations between book production, distribution and content to re-examine our notions of textual culture in the eighteenth century. Taking intersections in current scholarship between Book History and Literary Studies as its starting point, it will explore the ways in which we can expand our knowledge of eighteenth-century literary production by revisiting the circumstances of material life in the period.

In the past, book historians tended to separate bibliography and textual criticism from the literary analysis of content, and today the focus on ‘print culture’ remains primarily one of viewing social processes among authors, publishers, wholesalers/ booksellers and readers as primary in book production. ‘Text and Trade’ seeks to broaden this approach by considering the literary and intellectual consequences of these processes. It will do so by examining bibliography and circuits of communication, investigating the link between economic and intellectual trends, and tracing connections between transformations in media and changing perceptions of selfhood.

The book as object is fraught with issues of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention and branding, all of which challenge our notions of author-ity. By focusing on cultural exchange, the conference will pursue questions about the significance and necessity of viewing material culture and print in conjunction. It will address theoretical and historical understandings of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that bear on the creation of print.

‘Text and Trade’ invites papers that seek to bridge the gap between book history and literature via visual culture, education, geography, philosophy and trade. Topics that papers might address include (but are by no means limited to): – the material history of specific texts – literary circulations – information / scholarly networks – the influence of booksellers and publishers on textual creation – trade and craft in literary production – innovation and tradition – sites of textual production, real and imagined – the varieties of printed forms (including manuals, pamphlets, miscellanies, periodicals and chapbooks) and their significance – the marketplace and book production – models of patronage – the textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers and printers

Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email by 15 June, 2012 and should consist of a 250-word abstract. Proposals for panels are also welcome, which should consist of a working title for the panel and an abstract for each of the contributors.

To submit proposals or to make informal inquiries please contact the conference organizers, Dr. Jenn Chenkin and Dr. Tessa Whitehouse: textandtrade15sept@gmail.com

Dr Mark Goldie, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

‘John Locke and the History of the Book: Some Speculations’

Thursday 26 April 2012, 17:00-19:00, Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Conveners: Howard Erskine-Hill and Adrian Lashmore-Davies

All welcome. Drinks served.

In a world where even relatively recent artworks command multi-million pound auction prices (a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, up for sale in New York, is expected to fetch around £50 million), the purchase of the Gospels for £9 million seems like quite the bargain. It is an outwardly modest thing – encased in a plain binding of red leather, and measuring at only 14 x 9 cm it is small enough to fit comfortably in one’s hand – yet it stands at the centre of a 1300-year-old story of the life and legend of a northern saint.

Cuthbert was born c.635, and lived his adult life as a monk in various foundations in the north of England, becoming most closely associated with Lindisfarne (where he was prior and later bishop) and Inner Farne (where he spent most of his later life as a hermit until his death on 20th March 687). The Gospel Book that takes his name is of obvious codicological importance: it dates from the late seventh century and is the earliest intact European book in existence, ‘the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out’, with the original binding enclosing the text of St. John’s Gospel, likewise unaltered since it was produced.

Yet also, just as in the medieval period, it is the association with St. Cuthbert that lends this book its particular fascination. It was placed in Cuthbert’s tomb at Lindisfarne when it was first opened in 698, and remained alongside the body of the saint until the tomb was opened again at Durham Cathedral Priory in 1104, an event witnessed by the chronicler Symeon of Durham. The book was found, according to a thirteenth-century inscription in the book, ‘near the head of our blessed father Cuthbert lying in his tomb’.

The tomb had been moved out of Lindisfarne in the eighth century, and the body and book together were carried by the community of monks around northern England, then to Chester-le-Street and eventually to Durham. The wanderings of the Gospel Book continued after the destruction of the tomb in the sixteenth century: it was donated to the English Jesuit community at Liège in the eighteenth century, was briefly misplaced while on loan to the Society of Antiquaries in the early nineteenth century, and has eventually come to rest at the British Library (where its new classmark – Add. MS 89000 – scarcely hints at the book’s importance).

When Cuthbert’s tomb was first opened in 698, it was found that ‘the skin had not decayed nor grown old, nor the sinews become dry…but the limbs lay at rest with all the appearance of life’. The incorruptability of a body was crucial evidence in the canonization process, and (whether accurate or not) such accounts are repeated over and again in medieval hagiographies. Holy books, too, were imbued with similar properties of indestructability: according to Symeon, the Lindisfarne Gospels (also at the British Library) were washed overboard during a voyage across the Irish Sea but were found miraculously unharmed on the shore. Few librarians nowadays would be willing to trust the safety of their collections to the intervention of a guardian saint!

It is the vulnerability of manuscripts to damage or destruction that makes the survival of the Gospel Book of St. Cuthbert in such excellent condition so remarkable – dare we say, even miraculous? The historical significance of the book would be no less diminished if it were damaged – but the smoothness of its bindings, the cleanness of its pages and the crispness of its written text cannot but mark it out as exceptional, even though its survival in this state is the outcome of historical chance. To what degree are aesthetic appreciation and scholarly study complementary? Is the Gospel Book of St. Cuthbert powerful as a physical (if not religious) relic of the past because of its unblemished state? In tracing the provenance of a manuscript – like the provenance of a medieval relic – are we seeking more than simple identification and verification? Perhaps a tangible physical connection with the past? Or the privilege of seeing and touching something that is now just as it was more than a millenium ago?

Programme

9.45-10 Registration
10-10.15 Welcome and introduction (Adam Smyth)

10.15-11.30 Session 1: Manuscripts
Daniel Wakelin (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), ‘“Her faileth thing that is nat yt made”: imagined
omissions in early English manuscripts’
Eleanor Collins (Oxford University Press), ‘Transcribing early modern theatre history: Henry
Herbert’s lost “office-book”’
Karen Britland (Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Acting or sighing: royalist letters and encryption in the
English civil wars’

11.30-12 Coffee and tea

12-1 Session 2: Bodies and sexualities
Jason Scott-Warren (Trinity College, Cambridge), ‘Lambarde’s Pandecta: the book last seen in
Queen Elizabeth’s bosom’
Heather Tilley (National Portrait Gallery), ‘“It ought never to be published”: Old-maidish
scruples and the disappearance of Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon’

1-2 Lunch (own arrangements)

2-3.15 Session 3: Remembering
Bethan Stevens (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Spekphrasis: writing about lost works of art’
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), ‘Re-membering the missing collection of Charles I’
Caroline Archer (Birmingham City University), ‘Paris underground: the missing memory of the city’

3.15-3.30 Coffee and tea

3.30-4.30 Session 4: Multi-media
Gill Partington (Birkbeck), ‘Tom Philips’ A Humument’
Patrick Davidson (Steinhardt School of NYU), ‘Reading YouTube Comments: The Diamond Is The Rough’

4.30-5 Roundtable discussion

5 Wine reception