Last month the Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) announced the shortlist for its photo competition, ‘Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty’. Andy Graham, photographer of the shortlisted ‘Leeds’ (pictured), writes: “There are no people at Clarence Dock in Leeds they say, nobody wants to go there. This image on a snowy february morning shows just how many people actually do live here. The hidden folk have for once left their footprints behind.”

CABE’s competition invites an appreciation of the urban environment as beautiful in its own right, in contrast to the more conventional ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. As Graham’s photo so strikingly reveals, foregrounding human activity makes the city differently legible. Snow in Clarence Dock elegantly materialises the multiple, unmarked journeys crisscrossing space, allowing us to see the city as the dynamic and evolving product of multiple agencies: not only the municipal authorities responsible for trees and tarmac, but the “hidden” trajectories “they say” do not exist.

Graham’s commentary articulates a division between the ‘panoptic’ space of the urban planner and the ‘practised’ space of the urban pedestrian that might remind us of Michel de Certeau. ‘Leeds’ vividly illustrates de Certeau’s definition of “walking as a space of enunciation”, in which the traces of individual journeys, when transcribed on a map, can “only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by… They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984: pp. 97-8). Graham’s photo encourages us to see the city as a text articulated by journeys, in which the “hidden” life made visible by the camera can only be read briefly and in absentia, as traces in the snow before it melts.

The rest of the shortlist is available at http://www.cabe.org.uk/news/aoub-shortlist

The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk, was launched in November 2009, making available online at no cost the most important single archive of manuscripts on professional theatre and dramatic performance in early modern England, the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker, Chettle, and so many of their contemporaries.

This electronic archive and website has just been updated to offer easier access to high-quality digital images of over 2000 manuscript pages at Dulwich College of Philip Henslowe and the great actor Edward Alleyn, including:

–every page of Henslowe’s world-famous ‘Diary’, recording box-office receipts and payments to dramatists, actors, censors, costumers and theatre personnel
–every page of Alleyn’s 1616-1622 Diary, itemising every daily expense for goods, materials, labour, travel, legal matters, food and drink
–The contract to build the Fortune playhouse and the deed of partnership to build the Rose playhouse
–The only surviving actor’s ‘part’ or script of the age of Shakespeare
–One of only five extant backstage ‘plots’ of the age
–A complete manuscript text of the play The Telltale showing the typical layout and style of dramatic manuscripts of the age
–Ben Jonson’s autograph manuscript of two poems
–Alleyn’s draft letter to his father-in-law John Donne
–hundreds of pages of deeds, letters patent, leases, receipts, and bills, as well as correspondence among Henslowe, Alleyn and political and religious leaders.

Also included are succinct essays by leading scholars on fifteen of the most important documents. For example, Prof. Susan Cerasano and Julian Bowsher, senior archaeologist at the Museum of London, discuss how the excavations at the Rose playhouse site in London have changed our views of early modern playhouses: http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/essays/rosecontract.html

We hope to add transcripts of documents and a searchable index soon. We believe that, even at this stage, this project will be of interest not only to specialist scholars but to all those interested in early modern English drama and theatre history, as well as in social, economic, regional, architectural and legal history, palaeography and manuscript studies.

Grace Ioppolo
Director, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project

CALL FOR PAPERS
Out of Bounds: Mobility, Movement and Use of Manuscripts and Printed Books, 1350-1550 Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Early Book Society
in collaboration with the Twelfth York Manuscripts Conference in honour of Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya
3-7 July 2011
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York

The Early Book Society will hold its twelfth biennial conference in collaboration with the York Manuscripts Conference, at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, from the 3rd to the 7th of July 2011.  The theme of this year’s conference will be Out of Bounds: Mobility, Movement and Use of Manuscripts and Printed Books, 1350-1550. This theme may be interpreted literally or figuratively: papers might consider unbound or rebound MSS and books, or MSS and books without bindings (rolls), or marginalia beyond the boundaries of the text, or the ways in which such boundaries might be created, or even MSS and books that travel from their place of origin. Secondary threads running through the conference will be related to Prof. Takamiya’s manuscripts or Nicholas Love (the conference includes a visit to Mount Grace Priory).  Please submit proposals for 20-minute papers relating to the conference themes either to Martha Driver or Linne Mooney by 1 December 2010.  Proposals sent via email should be copied to both (LRM3@york.ac.uk and MDriver@pace.edu) or by post to Martha:

Prof Martha Driver
English Department
Pace University
41 Park Row, 15th floor
New York, NY  10038
USA

Please include your name, title and affiliation, the proposed title of your paper, a brief abstract of your paper, and indication of any electronic aids requested (data projector, overhead, and/or slide projector).

Linne R. Mooney
Professor in Medieval English Palaeography
University of York
King’s Manor
York  YO1 7EP
U.K.

telephone (UK)  01904 433909
telephone (from USA)  011 44 1904 433909
lrm3@york.ac.uk

Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA): 2-6 May 2011

The Institute of English Studies (London) is pleased to announce the third year of this AHRC-funded course in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, the Warburg Institute, and King’s College London.

The course is open to arts and humanities doctoral students registered at UK institutions. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval manuscripts in the digital age to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first part of the course involves morning classes and then visits to libraries in Cambridge and London in the afternoons. Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning’s themes to concrete examples. In the second part we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.

The course is aimed principally at those writing dissertations which relate to medieval manuscripts, especially those on literature, art and history. There are no fees, but priority will be given to PhD students funded by the AHRC. Class sizes are limited to twenty and places are ‘first-come-first-served’ so early registration is strongly recommended.

For further details see <http://ies.sas.ac.uk/study/mmsda/> or contact Dr Peter Stokes at mmsda@sas.ac.uk.

Book Destruction: Call for Papers for a Conference at Senate House, University of London, 16 April 2011

Much attention has been given in recent years to the book as a material, historical object and its possible technological obsolescence in the era of digitization. Such reflections have tended to concentrate on the production and cultural circulation of books, their significance and their power to shape knowledge and subjectivities. But there is another aspect to our interactions with the book which remains relatively unexplored: the history of book destruction. In certain circumstances books are treated not with reverence but instead with violence or disregard. This conference invites reflections on this alternative history of the book, and we welcome papers from a range of historical periods and disciplinary backgrounds. We welcome proposals from postgraduate students, as well as from more established academics.

Why do people destroy books? What are the mechanics of book destruction: the burning, pulping, defacing, tearing, drowning, cutting, burying, eating? What are the cultural meanings that have been attached to book destruction, and what do they reveal about our investments in this over-familiar object? Why should the burning of books have such symbolic potency? Book destruction is often invoked as a symbol of oppressive, despotic regimes; what is our ethical position, now, in relation to such acts? What is the relationship between book destruction and other forms of cutting up (quotation; collage)? When do acts of destruction become moments of creativity? How does destruction relate to recycling and reuse? Do transitions in media (manuscript to print; print to digital) threaten those older forms? How might the current phase of digitization and the gradual disappearance of library stock relate to prior moments of destruction? In the internet age, is it still possible to destroy (that is, completely erase) a text? What does materiality mean in a digital age?

Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20 minute paper) and a brief CV, to Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk), by 10 January 2011.