26-27 September 2025

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/47443/

Historically, religious communities have often expanded by finding ways to overcome language and cultural barriers in material ways. In the case of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), this has taken the form of producing bibles in nearly 700 different languages whilst collecting some of the world’s most precious religious materials for translation into vernacular languages. How did the spiritual economy of bible craft reflect religious community expansion and, in turn, how did expansion change the Bible Society Collection in material ways?

This two-day conference and hands-on workshop invites scholars and specialists in Religious Studies, visual and material culture, and Medieval to Modern collections analysis to tackle Victorian-era bible production, material exchanges and book transliteration culture. State of the field presentations will explore key topics including: global communication, empire and imperial projects, knowledge and technology and more with the goal of opening inquiry in the Bible Society Collections. Featured activities will include panels and roundtable discussions, library and museum technical experts and curators tied to BFBS materials. This event seeks to explore, reveal and protect this collection’s materials in a tangible way for future research.

Speakers

• Edward Cheese, Accredited Conservator-Restorer
• Flavia Fiorillo (CUL Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory)
• Joshua Fitzgerald (CUL Munby Fellow & St John’s College)
• Noam Lefler (Queen Mary University of London)
• Onesimus Ngundu (CUL Curator Bible Society Library)
• Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary University of London)
• Neil (‘Studge’) Rees, BFBS Digital Publishing and Translation Advisor
• Heather Sharkey (University of Pennsylvania)
• Lucy Sixsmith (St John’s Fellow)
• Harry Spillane (CUL Munby Fellow & Darwin College)

Convenors

• Joshua Fitzgerald (University of Cambridge)
• Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary University, London)
• Lucy Sixsmith (University of Cambridge)
• Harry Spillane (University of Cambridge)
  
  

The Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Stanford Text Technologies, Stanford University, and the University Library Research Institute are delighted to announce that registration is open for the international conference ‘The Craft, Texture, and Aesthetics of Letter Forms from Antiquity to the Present‘.

Venue: University of Cambridge, Faculty of English and online.

Dates: 2-4 September, 2025.

‘The Craft, Texture, and Aesthetics of Letter Forms’ will bring together scholars, practitioners and heritage experts to explore the matter of lettering, its practice and study. By marrying a range of disciplinary and professional approaches, we hope to recover the aesthetic, historical, and material significance of letter formation in all its rich variety. We will do this across all material supports – whether stone, vellum, paper, metal or wood – and across media ranging from letters inked, engraved and incised, to those freshly pixelated for our computer screens. In the process, we aim to treat letterforms holistically, as phenomena that migrate dynamically between different times, different cultures, different media, different professions, and ultimately different disciplines.

In-person places are limited but panels will be livestreamed. For further information and how to register for in-person or online attendance: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/events/lettering/ 

If you have any enquiries about conference please direct them to letterforms@english.cam.ac.uk

Chloe Steele

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, first floor foyer

An exhibition of work by the artist Chloe Steele as part of a collaborative project investigating the use of printed forms. Generously funded by a Judith E. Wilson Fund Practice-Led Research Award. For more information, see www.chloesteele.com and https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/projects.

The exhibition and project will be launched at the Centre for Material Texts research seminar on 28^th November 2024 (5pm, Board Room, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge).

The next event in the Cambridge Bibliographical Society’s calendar takes place on Thursday 1st February (5.00-6.00pm) in the Milstein Room at the University Library. [NB THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO UNITE STRIKE ACTION]

Dr Clarck Drieshen and Dr Sarah Gilbert, Project Cataloguers on Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, will present case studies arising from the Wellcome-funded conservation, digitisation, cataloguing and transcription project, which – led by Dr James Freeman – is enhancing the discoverability of medieval medical recipes in 187 manuscripts across 14 collections in Cambridge. 

Sarah will discuss the manuscript collecting, curating, and donating practices of Roger Marchall (d. 1477), fellow of Peterhouse and doctor to the royal household, and will share examples of his unusual approach to ‘perfecting’ the books in his possession. Clarck will talk about collections of medical recipes that contain references to places, patients, and medical practitioners, and how cataloguing such ‘receptaria’ in detail can reveal new insights about their origins. 

A selection of manuscripts from the project will be on show from 4.45pm and briefly after the talk.

Those interested in attending are asked to e-mail Liam Sims (ls457).

On the afternoons of 18 and 19 May, in conjunction with Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Centre for Material Texts, Cambridge, Justine Provino (Jesus College, Cambridge) is organising a symposium on the self-destructive artists’ book Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992) by the writer William Gibson, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the publisher Kevin Begos Jr.

The event will feature: a hybrid book tour of the surviving copies of Agrippa in public institutions and a show-and-tell on the archive of Agrippa’s publisher at the Bodleian; a round table with scholars of Agrippa moderated by Cambridge Digital Humanities Director, Caroline Bassett, and a panel discussion on the place of artists’ books in book studies, between the New York-based book-artist Russell Maret and Gill Partington, Fellow in Book History at the Institute of English Studies. The event is held in conjunction with the Bodleian’s annual D.F. McKenzie Lecture, to be delivered by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. 

For further information and registration in person and online to the Agrippa Symposium and McKenzie lecture, please follow the links below:

Thursday/Friday, 18/19 May, from 2 pm

Symposium: Agrippa: A Book of the Dead

https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/may23/agrippa-a-book-of-the-dead

Thursday 18 May 2023, 5 pm

The D.F. McKenzie Lecture 2023

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Maryland) ‘The New Nature of the Book: Publishing and Printing in the Post-Digital Era’

https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/may23/new-nature-of-the-book

Our next talk will be on Thursday 19^th January at 5.00pm in the Milstein Room at the main University Library. Professor Marc Smith, of the École nationale des chartes in Paris, will speak on Searching for Paper in Cambridge: Import, Use and Manufacture (c. 1450-1560).

Paper historians have long considered the circulation and use of paper stocks mainly as clues leading back to places and dates of production, thus largely neglecting Britain where almost no paper was manufactured before the late sixteenth century. A new survey of virtually all paper documents in Cambridge archives to the mid-sixteenth century shows the local market reflecting shifts in the international paper trade, up to the point when a paper mill was established on the outskirts of the town by an entrepreneur from Strasbourg, Remi Guédon. His business lasted only briefly and many questions remain but a fresh look at the documents and at the paper itself, widely used in the 1550s, clarifies and broadens the picture significantly.

The room will be open from 4.45 and there should be a display of related materials for attendees to view. Could you let me know if you plan to attend (email ls457@cam.ac.uk)?

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

 21 –22 September 2023, The Paper Foundation, Burneside, Cumbria. 

How do the making of literary texts and the making of paper shape one another? Paper is one of the most durable and ubiquitous materials in the history of writing surfaces. We conventionally associate paper with the unit of the codex or the sheet, but we also encounter paper in textual culture as endleaves in the form of printed ‘waste’, or in the envelopes and fragments which shaped the poems of Emily Dickinson, or in the work of contemporary book artists who use paper to challenge the very concept of the book. From the medieval period to the present day, writers, artists, and makers have given imaginative and physical form to paper whilst their creative work has in turn been shaped by paper’s materiality.  Paper and Poetry: Invention Through Craft seeks participants to explore the historical and contemporary intersection between literary and material paper forms at the Paper Foundation in Burneside, Cumbria. 

The Paper Foundation offers a unique opportunity for immersive paper-making from pulped rags to the drying and pressing of sheets using historical techniques. Alongside these practical elements of the symposium, a writing workshop led by poet Vona Groarke themed around surface, material, and flaw will offer participants the chance to respond creatively to the paper-making process; Orietta Da Rold will also lead a workshop on paper in the history of the book. Together these workshops will explore paper’s material and imaginative role in shaping literature from past to present day. Finally, participants will take part in roundtables to discuss the place of paper in their own writing and/or research, with around 15 minutes per speaker.  We hope that these roundtables will reach across the creative-critical divide to explore the place and impact of paper-making in both academic and poetic writing. We welcome scholars working on paper in any field including literature, history, art history, and media studies, along with creative writers who engage with the materiality of their surfaces. 

To apply, please send a 150-200 word abstract of your paper-based academic research or creative project to gemw2@cam.ac.uk, od245@cam.ac.uk, and vg373@cam.ac.uk by Friday 31^st March 2023. Please also get in touch with any questions. 

Topics of interest might include: 

The role of paper in contemporary poetry

Paper in the literary imagination (in any period) 

Paper in the history of painting, art, design

Craft, intellectual labour, and embodied knowledge 

Paper and flaw/error/perfection

Paper and temporality/ephemerality

Paper and the history of the book

The Paper and Poetry convenors: 

Orietta Da Rold (Professor in Medieval Literature and Manuscript Studies, University of Cambridge)

Tom Frith-Powell (Paper-Maker, The Paper Foundation, Burneside) 

Vona Groarke (Writer-in-Residence, St John’s College, University of Cambridge) 

Georgina Wilson (Research Fellow in Early Modern English, University of Cambridge)

You are warmly invited to join a CMT/Cambridge Bibliographical Society visit to the ‘Souvenirs of Italy’ exhibition at Audley End. 

Our party will meet at Audley End on Friday 5th July at 10, and will proceed to the library to see the exhibition, followed by a visit to the Howard Sitting Room to see the grand tour portrait. The tour, which will end at around 11.30, will be led by the exhibition organisers, Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts, with the curator of collections at Audley End, Peter Moore.

Places are strictly limited; to sign up, please email Liam Sims (ls457@cam.ac.uk).

For more information about the exhibition, see https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?cat=4

Co-organised by Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/audley-end-house-and-gardens/things-to-do/

From 1st April until 31st October, an exhibition entitled Souvenirs of Italy: an English Family Abroad will be on display in the Library at Audley End. Created in a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and English Heritage, the exhibition focuses on the European travels of former owner of Audley End and later 2nd Lord Braybrooke, Richard Neville.

The exhibition invites visitors to discover how Richard’s experiences abroad left a lasting personal and cultural legacy at Audley End through a showcase of personal possessions, letters, books and manuscripts – many of which have never been on public display before.

A conference convened by Jason Scott-Warren and Caroline van Eck.

CRASSH, Cambridge, 10-11 May 2019.

‘As social persons, we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency’. This is the contention of the anthropologist Alfred Gell, who in his posthumous study Art and Agency (1998) elaborates the idea that personhood is distributed, extending outwards into the world through a variety of artefacts and technologies. Material things have an excessive and sometimes bizarre power to distribute the self, facilitating the transmission of human and divine agency over vast tracts of space and time. Gell invites us to think of the objects that serve this purpose as exuviae: remnants, relics, cast-offs or spoils, which while they have been separated from their host remain a part of it, or sometimes the whole of it, as a relic manifests a saint. Considered as exuvial, a portrait is not a dead and distant representation; it is part of its sitter, which continues to manifest life and presence once it has been sent out into the world. And many other kinds of object play a similar role.

On the twenty-first birthday of Art and Agency, this conference will explore Gell’s notion of the exuvial in all of its multiplicity and richness. Bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, it will pursue some of the numerous ways in which the self has been circulated, around the world and across history. Our comparative study will take us from the intimately bodily (hair, teeth, skin), via coverings such as clothing and armour, to material media such as printed books and painted panels. We will also take in more intangible social skins such as fame, gossip and reputation, as well as posthumous avatars such as ghosts, souls and children. Among the questions that we will ask are: what historical forces conspire to give artefacts the power to transmit presence and personhood? How do different kinds of exuviae work together, and how do objects compete with one another for exuvial status? What happens when a whole class of objects is barred from exerting any exuvial force? Our presupposition is that many cultural variables come together to shape the story of human distributions. By exploring these variables, we will achieve a fuller understanding of our place in the world of things.

For further information see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27902