ENGLISH LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS 1450-1700

A one-day conference to celebrate the launch online of

Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM)

at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Friday 29 July 2011

Compiled by Peter Beal

in collaboration with John Lavagnino and Henry Woudhuysen

Papers on subjects relating to English manuscripts of this period, taking no longer than 15/20 minutes each, will be delivered by scholars including:

Carlo Bajetta, Peter Beal, Joshua Eckhardt, Germaine Greer (keynote speaker), Elizabeth Hageman, Grace Ioppolo, Gerard Kilroy, Tom Lockwood, Arthur Marotti, Steven May, Richard Serjeantson, and Ray Siemens.

This conference, sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, is FREE and, besides coffee breaks, will include lunch and a drinks reception in the evening.

Please note, prior registration is required. For registration and further details please contact:

Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

The next meeting of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society will be held on 23 March at 5 pm in the Morison Room of the University Library. Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins) will give a talk entitled Neither a Masterpiece nor by Aristotle: the long history of a popular medical book. Tea will be served from 4.30 pm. All are welcome.

Free wine and GILES DE LA MARE on ‘PUBLISHING IN THE BLOOD’ 7:30pm, Tuesday 15th March, Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College. A light-hearted account of Giles’ 50 years in publishing, both at Faber & Faber (where he was company director) and his own company, Giles de la Mare Publishers Ltd. Giles is very entertaining and the talk promises to be of great interest to anyone interested in the publishing industry or literature on a wider scale. Giles is the grandson of poet and author Walter de la Mare. More details at http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=130689217003463

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No, these are not prose poems; they are quotations from the CMT spam queue. Behind the scenes, every day, we delete reams of comments. The highlights are these wonderful agglomerations of discontinuous text that have presumably been created by some not-too-bright translation software.

The more mundane entries are sent by websites called ‘Best Male Enhancement’, or ‘Intimacy Slide Show Tantra’, or ‘Bathroom Worktops’, or ‘Online Ouija Board’. They have two default modes–gushing praise (‘Hello. Awesome website. Thanks for taking the time to post about your thoughts with the planet’) or faint criticism (‘I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?’)

If anyone can shed light on these bizarre goings-on in the arrière boutique, I would consider that truly awesome, and might even be forced to say ‘respect to you, man’..

Since Cambridge’s Lent term is rapidly drawing to an end, it may be worth reminding everyone that for this term only readers are allowed to take cameras into the University Library for fairly unrestricted use in Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Maps (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/maps/photog.html). We hope that this pioneering experiment will prove successful and that the freedom to photograph for research purposes will be made permanent. And that it will become a model for rare books libraries and archives that currently restrict digital photography.

CMT Lunchtime Seminar

Monday 7 March 2011, Board Room, Faculty of English

Authors Under Press(ure): Italian Renaissance Texts between Printing Constraints and Public Demand

Speakers: Prof. Antonio Sorella (University G. D’Annunzio Chieti Pescara) and Prof. Michelangelo Zaccarello (University of Verona)

The first half of the sixteenth century sees a dramatic expansion of the printing industry in Italy: a highly competitive market and an articulate, growing range of readers create a unique intertwining of philological and linguistic issues. The vitality of regional literatures and the ongoing need for an established grammar are factors that force publishers to hire professional editors and proof-readers to produce texts that may be palatable to the widest possible audience. Authors take different approaches to the problem, either permitting such professionals to execute a thoroughgoing revision (Aretino), or personally overlooking and assisting the composition and printing process (Ariosto). The resulting variety of textual profiles makes this period a unique challenge for textual editors, especially in the field of tipofilologia (textual bibliography). A few relevant case studies will be briefly introduced.

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day colloquium will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Questions to be addressed include:

What is the relationship between the visual and the verbal in the history of food?

What archival and physical evidence survives for the textual realms of the kitchen, and what methodological challenges does it present?

Who produces the texts that circulate during the preparation and consumption of food, and for whom?

How do the textual economies of the kitchen relate to those of other household spaces-the study, the library, the gallery-and of the wider world?

How are public historical or cultural events refracted in the domestic locale and its object-worlds?

What permutations has the metaphor of reading-as-eating undergone in its long history?

Speakers include: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre), Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

This one-day workshop will take place under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge, on 13 September 2011. Please submit 250 word proposals for 20 minute papers by 1 May to Melissa Calaresu (mtc12@cam.ac.uk) and Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

download a flyer here: eating words cfp

On Thursday 10 February, our first Lent Term seminar will take place from 1-2 (with
opportunity for informal discussion after 2) in the Ramsden room, St Catharine’s College.

Our speaker, Dr B. Zs. Szakacs, will talk about a digitalized manuscript, the lavishly illuminated Angevin Legendary. The original codex having been cut into separate pieces, it now exists as a unified work only thanks to
modern technology.

All welcome. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please email Dr Nora Berend (nb213@cam.ac.uk) Feel free to bring your own lunch!

Congratulations to Alison Sinclair, Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge, who has been awarded a major grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support her current research on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800-1936: Realities, Representations and Reactions’. The project includes (but is not limited to) the digitization and cataloguing of some 4500 items held in the University Library and the British Library. This body of material offers a rich source of investigation for the project, and will be read in conjunction with other material (newspaper accounts of crime, judicial proceedings on the one hand, and fictional works on wrongdoing to be found in both popular culture and elite culture). The digitization of the ‘pliegos sueltos’ will be a significant contribution to the stewardship, conservation and enhanced accessibility of a body of cultural material which has its counterparts in English, and which allow the research to take place in a broader academic and cultural context.

News today that Prince William’s wedding certificate is going to be written on vellum, and that the happy couple are buying British. William Cowley of Newport Pagnall (est. 1860) are going to be soaking, stretching and scratching the skins until they are white and smooth. On this medium, the evidence of the match may last as long as the Magna Carta and the Domesday Book. The rest of us will have to make do with a mug or a mousemat.

Cowley is a company that regularly hits the news–as in 1999, when the Commons voted to carry on recording Parliamentary Acts on vellum, and in 2006, when the BBC’s royal charter, guaranteeing its funding for the next ten years, was approved. We are perpetuating some very timeworn techniques in our efforts to create what Horace called the monumentum aere perennius (a monument more lasting than bronze). Though he, of course, thought the really lasting medium was poetry–his own…