Jim Canary (University of Indiana)

Beneath the text in the books and manuscripts of Tibet is a world of artisans that provide the support for the words with paper, pen, and inks. Preserving these texts involves delving into that world to understand how things were done using what materials and how they differ from place to place and in time. As a Conservator and student of Tibetan I have had the opportunity to examine a variety of Tibetan materials and have been documenting the old ways of book production. We will have a look into that world and see the richness of their traditions.

Mond Building Seminar Room, Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit, Free School Lane

4.30-6.00, TUESDAY 28 OCTOBER 2014

ALL WELCOME

http://www.innerasiaresearch.org [1]
Facebook www.facebook.com/miasu.cambridge

Due to exceptional demand for places, the forthcoming AMARC conference has been moved to a larger venue in the Conference Centre at the British Library.

See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/illuminated-manuscripts-conference-more-places-available.html#sthash.5yaEHFFy.dpuf

July 16th-18th 2015

Newcastle University and City Library, Newcastle

Organiser: Jennifer Richards, Newcastle University with Helen Stark, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers

Heidi Brayman Hackel (University of California, Riverside), Anne Karpf (London Metropolitan University), Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast) with The Carnival Band, Perry Mills, Director of Edward’s Boys (King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon)

Although it is often acknowledged that early modern books were routinely read aloud we know relatively little about this. Oral reading is not embedded as an assumption in existing scholarship. On the contrary, over the last two decades it is the studious and usually silent reader, pen in hand, who has been placed centre stage. This conference invites contributions that explore the kind of evidence and research methods that might help us to recover this lost history; that think about how reading/singing aloud relates to other kinds of orality; that recover the civic and/or social life of the performed book in early modern culture; and that reflect on how the performance of the scripted word might inform our reading of early modern writing today. We also welcome papers that think through what it might mean to make ‘voice’ central to our textual practice.

We invite proposals (in English) that address the relationship between orality and literacy in any genre in print or manuscript in any European language. The genres might be literary, religious, musical, medical, scientific, historical or educational. We encourage proposals that recover diverse communities and readers/hearers. We also welcome papers that consider problems of evidence: e.g. manuscript marginalia; print paratexts; visual representations; as well as non-material evidence (voice; gesture). We will be particularly pleased to receive suggestions for presentations that include practical illustrations, performances or demonstrations.

Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• The sound of print

• The physiology of voicing

• Singing and speaking

• Rhetoric: voice and gesture

• Performance and emotions

• Communities of hearers

• Acoustic reconstructions

• Children’s reading / reading to children

200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers from individuals and panels (3 speakers max) to be sent to voicesandbooks15001800@gmail.com. The DEADLINE is Friday January 16TH 2015.

There will be a small number of travel bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers. If you are interested in applying for support please contact Helen.Stark@ncl.ac.uk. The DEADLINE for the bursaries is May 1st 2015.

for 2013-14 can be accessed by clicking here. We’ve tried to round up everything that’s been going on, and have added a new section of relevant publications by members of the Centre, which is quite some list.

Last year was pretty busy, but I have a feeling that the coming year is going to trump it–see the conclusion of the report for a few of our plans.

17 October

1. David Kaiser, ‘Making tools travel: pedagogy and the transfer of skills in postwar theoretical physics’, in David Kaiser (ed.), Pedagogy and the Practice of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 41–74
2. Ursula Klein, ‘Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), pp. 265–302

Supplementary:

• Andrew Warwick, ‘A mathematical world on paper: written examinations in early 19th century Cambridge’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 29 (1998), 295–319

31 October

1. Lisa Gitelman, Introduction and Chapter 3 in Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Supplementary:

• Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogues, 1548–1929, translated by Peter Krapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)

14 November

1. Ben Kafka, ‘Paperwork: the state of the discipline’, Book History 12 (2009), pp. 340–53
2. Ann Blair, Chapters 1 and 2 in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)

Supplementary:

• Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘”Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990), pp. 30–78
• Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘”Furnished” for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture’, Book History 12 (2009), pp. 37–73

28 November

1. Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, ‘Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century’, History of Science 48 (2010), pp. 251–85
2. James Delbourgo and Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Introduction: Listmania’, Isis 103 (2012), pp. 710–15

Supplementary:

• Papers in both special issues, especially Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘Case and Series: medical knowledge and paper technology 1600–1900’, History of Science 48 (2010), pp. 287–314

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

9 October — [no seminar, but please come to the Centre for Material Texts Welcome Party, English Faculty Social Space, 4-5.30]

23 October — James Daybell (University of Plymouth) ‘Gendered Archival Practices and the Future Lives of Letters’

6 November — Discussion of David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (2013)

Respondents: Clare Pettitt and Mark Turner (King’s College, London)

20 November — Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University), ‘Creating a “National” Archive of the English Reformation: The Parker Society and its Legacy’

All welcome.

This international conference is the result of an AHRC Networking grant, which has brought together academics and curators from Britain, Russia, and The Netherlands to consider Dutch-Russian exchange through the most significant moment in Russian print culture of the early modern period: Peter the Great’s establishment of a European-style school of printmaking in Moscow. Scholars from The State Hermitage Museum, The State Russian Museum, The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge will discuss the dynamism of Dutch publishing in the late seventeenth century, precedents in Williamite imagery, and the emergence and nature of Europeanised prints in the genres of portraiture, city views and folk prints. This timely consideration of Russia’s historic relationship with Europe will be contextualised by Sir Anthony Brenton KCMG, British Ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008.

Please note that there are a number of free places reserved for students.

Contact: mmh43@cam.ac.uk
To register: https://globalnetworksinprint.eventbrite.co.uk

THE GIANT BIBLES OF TWELFTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

A series of three lectures by Christopher de Hamel, Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The great Latin Bibles, in huge multiple volumes, are by far the largest and most spectacular manuscripts commissioned in England in the twelfth century, decorated with magnificent illuminated pictures.  The lectures will consider the purpose of such books and why they were suddenly so fashionable and also why they passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.

Lecture 1: Monday, 27 October 2014 18.15-19.30

The Bury Bible         

The first lecture will look principally at the Bible of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, now in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The manuscript, commissioned in the time of Anselm, abbot of Bury 1121-48, is usually dated to around 1130.  It was decorated by the hand of Master Hugo, the earliest professional artist in England whose name is known. The lecture will also examine the larger questions of where exemplars and materials were found for the Bible, and at the phenomenal expense of such undertakings.

Lecture 2: Thursday, 30 October 2014 18.15-19.30

The Winchester Bible

The Winchester Bible is still in the cathedral where it was commissioned, doubtless by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester 1129-71.  It too was illuminated by professional painters, who apparently also worked on frescoes in Spain.  The lecture will take advantage of the recent disbinding of the manuscript to make new observations about its production, and to suggest new dates for the different phases of the work, undertaken in parallel with a second (but lesser) giant Bible from Winchester, now in the Bodleian Library.

Lecture 3: Monday, 3 November 2014 18.15-19.30

The Lambeth Bible

Despite its fame and quality of illumination, nothing has been hitherto known about the Lambeth Bible’s original owner or patron.  The lecture will propose that it was commissioned around 1148 for Faversham Abbey by King Stephen, king of England 1135-54. The lecture will end with observations of why giant Bibles passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.

FREE ADMISSION 

18.15 in the Conference Centre

British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

Private Eye‘s ‘Pseuds Corner’ this week picks up an advert from the London Review of Books, for ‘special limited first edition’ copies of Ian McEwan’s new novel The Children Act:

‘Comprising 100 copies only, printed on Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Seventy-five are quarter-bound in Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin, the sides letterpress-printed on Passport Sage Felt with a design by Edward Bawden and numbered 1 to 75. Twenty-five copies, number I to xxv, are fully-bound in the same leather and contain three facsimile pages of notebook manuscript and one page of hand-corrected typescript from an early draft of the novel, all supplied by the author. Full leather £350 (sold out); Quarter £175’.

It’s always startling to be reminded that the modern book world, apparently so open and democratic, is in fact full of status distinctions. There is the basic distinction between paperback and hardback, which seems fairly trivial but has significant implications–in the way it creates a pecking order of early readers and latecomers, or its tendency to separate formal, sit-down reading from informal reading-on-the-hoof. Now we also have ebook editions, bought over a wire, weightless, malleable, accessible from numerous platforms, and so divorcing the experience of reading from any particular physical form. But as we come to terms with this new technology, our culture is still busily producing leather-bound books with mock-manuscript fragments tucked into them–not to mention typescripts with marks from the author’s hand. What should we make of this? More interestingly, perhaps, what would Ian McEwan make of this?

An early reader of a 1570 Euclid — possibly Sir Thomas Tresham — learns the hard lesson that neither number nor magnitude have any materiality. For more on this annotated copy, see our Gallery page.