Curious Cures

Events;

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).

Agrippa symposium, 18-19 May

Events, News;

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

Cambridge Bibliographical Society

Events;

Our next talk will be on Thursday 19th 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)?

PAPER AND POETRY: invention through craft

Calls for Papers, Events, News;

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.ukod245@cam.ac.uk, and vg373@cam.ac.uk by Friday 31st 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)

Friday 5th July: Visit to ‘Souvenirs of Italy’ exhibition at Audley End

Events;

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

“SOUVENIRS OF ITALY” EXHIBITION AT AUDLEY END

Events;

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.

Exuviae: Distributing the Self in Images and Objects

Events;

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

Paper-Stuff: Materiality, Technology and Invention

Events;

University of Cambridge, Faculty of English

10-11 September 2018

Under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts and the Writing Britain Conference Series

The introduction of paper to the West was a major technological innovation that transformed the ways in which texts of all kinds were transmitted. Having proved itself over many centuries as the intellectual fabric of Asian and Middle Eastern societies, the medium continued to demonstrate an extraordinary capacity for adaptation and diversification when it arrived in Europe. The stuff of playing cards, votive offerings and amulets, packaging and toilet tissue, wall-coverings and quilt-linings, paper was also crucial to the development of quotidian, democratized literacies and to the unfurling of national bureaucracies and capitalist economies. Light (in a single sheet) yet heavy (in a massive folio), durable yet fragile and throwaway, paper’s ability to combine contrary qualities and its willingness to enter into alliance with other substances and technologies helped it seep into every sphere of daily life. Paper’s smooth surface masked fundamental changes in substance—in particular the move from the rag-paper of the late medieval and early modern periods to the wood-pulp paper of modernity. Its protean surface facilitated deep continuities and extraordinary ruptures in European cultural history.

A spate of recent publications has demonstrated the urgency of getting to grips with paper, at a turning-point in our relations with it. The aim of Paper-stuff is to meet this urgency. It will bring together experts in the field, theorists of material culture and representatives of a variety of disciplines with a stake in the subject, so as to understand paper’s empire in the West. Paper-stuff will also take stock of rapidly evolving technologies available for the analysis of paper.

Plenary speakers:
Professor Pádraig Ó Macháin (University College Cork)
Linda Toigo (paper artist)

For the draft programme, click here.

To register, click here.

For further information please contact one of the organisers at the e-mail below.
Dr Orietta Da Rold (od245@cam.ac.uk)
Dr Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk)

Sponsor: The British Academy

CMT work-in-progress seminar

Events;
Join us on Monday 11 June, 1-2 pm in the Board Room, Faculty of English, for a seminar led by Michelle Taylor (a PhD student working on modernist coteries, especially in relation to T. S. Eliot and Nancy Cunard, currently visiting on the Cambridge-Harvard exchange scheme). She will give a short talk entitled:
“Coterie Culture, Modernist Materiality: Past Models and New Problems”
 
which will be followed by discussion. Feel free to bring your sandwiches!

Cambridge Bibliophiles meetings, Lent 2018

Events;

Wednesday, 31st January, at 8.45 p.m.
James Carley: In the Footsteps of the King: John Leland’s Visit to York in 1541
Friends of Peterhouse Seminar Room, Peterhouse

Wednesday, 7th February, at 8.45 p.m.
Dennis Duncan: Sex and Violence and Pseudonyms: Editions du Scorpion and the Post-War Avant-Garde
Friends of Peterhouse Seminar Room, Peterhouse

Thursday, 15th February, 6 p.m. — 8 p.m.
Drinks reception as guests of G. David
An opportunity to meet exhibitors before the Cambridge Book Fair, David’s Bookshop

Wednesday, 28th February, at 8.45 p.m.
Daniel Margócsy, A Census of Vesalius
Friends of Peterhouse Seminar Room, Peterhouse

Wednesday, 7th  March, at 3 p.m.
Visit to the Library of Pembroke College
Assemble at the Porter’s Lodge of Pembroke

Thursday, 15th March, at 8.45 p.m.
Informal meeting, hosted by Scott Mandelbrote, with Basie Gitlin as guest of honour
4 St Peter’s Terrace, Peterhouse