History of Material Texts Seminar Series
Thursday 27 May 2010, 5.30 p.m.
Subha Mukherji (Downing) will speak on ‘The voice of things: some archival evidence’, and Christopher Burlinson (Jesus) on ‘Maps and letters in the early modern archive’.
Room SR-24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.
All welcome. For further details, contact Daniel Wakelin (dlw22@cam.ac.uk) or Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk). .
On Friday 21 May at 5pm in the Morison Room, University Library there will be a CMT seminar on extra-illustration. Dr Luisa Cale and Dr Lucy Peltz will explore the origins and rise of extra-illustration and examine some important examples of this creative practice. Extra-illustrated materials from the UL’s collections will be available for inspection.
The seminar coincides with the final week of the Folger Library’s exhibition of extra-illustration, ‘Extending the Book’:
If you’d like to attend the seminar, please email Mina Gorji (mg473@cam.ac.uk).
History of Material Texts Seminar Series
The first meeting this term of the seminar in the History of Material Texts will take place on Thursday 29 April 2010 at 5.30 in room SR-24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Rd, Cambridge. All welcome.
This session will be a discussion of two recent articles and new directions in the study of material texts, particularly in the light of the recent CMT conference [see ‘Blog’ above].
The articles are:
Leah Price, ‘From the History of a Book to the “History of the Book”‘, Representations 108 (2009), 120-38
Bill Brown, ‘Obects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things)’, Critical Inquiry 36 (2010), 183-207
Both articles are available online via JSTOR and LION, or via the Faculty’s CAMTOOLS site at
https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/access/content/group/f255c6ab-f8f4-4118-008e-c2b85f3b426d/ Graduate%20_%20Senior%20Seminar/SCAN1628_000.pdf https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/access/content/group/f255c6ab-f8f4-4118-008e-c2b85f3b426d/ Graduate%20_%20Senior%20Seminar/SCAN1629_000.pdf
Centre for the History of the Book Conference: Material Cultures 2010
A three-day conference at The University of Edinburgh July 16-18, 2010
ROGER CHARTIER
JEROME McGANN
PETER STALLYBRASS
Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at The University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’, though papers relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book will be delivered.
http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/MaterialCultures2010.htm
The conference programme is now available online and registration is open. All enquiries should be sent to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk
THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP FOR IRISH STUDIES EASTER TERM 2010
27th April, 8.45 p.m. The Parlour, Magdalene College
Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail
Aspects of Manuscript Transmission in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail is a lecturer at the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics, at the University College Dublin. Irish manuscript studies in recent years have provided evidence for the canny ability of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scribes to exercise editorial judgements which were not only political in intention, but were guided by an aesthetic sense to fashion and refashion literary narrative itself. This is of relevance to an overall re-appraisal of the role of the scribe as a dynamic transmitter of narrative. Ní Úrdail’s paper will present some evidence based on her forthcoming edition of Cath Cluana Tarbh (The Battle of Clontarf), one of the most popular prose texts to have been transmitted in Irish manuscripts dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Gathered Text:
a one-day symposium
Friday 3 September 2010
Seminar Room, New Bodleian Library, Oxford
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/380-gathered-text-conference.html
Keynote speaker: Randall McLeod
Confirmed speakers: John Barnard, Mark Bland, Ian Gadd, Andrew Honey, Peter McCullough, Jason McElligott, David McKitterick, Ian Maclean, Nicholas Pickwoad, Peter Stallybrass, Kathryn Sutherland, Henry Woudhuysen.
The gathering is one of the fundamental units of textual construction during the hand-press book period (c. 1475-1830). So basic is it to the design of early printed texts that it has rarely been considered as a topic for independent enquiry. Gatherings can, however, tell us much about the ways in which early modern texts were constructed and presented to their first readers. The size and format of gatherings, disruptions in numeration or signatures, insertions and cancellations, and the re-use of gatherings in later publications yield crucial information about the cultures of writing, publication and reading during the early modern period. Gatherings can illuminate technical practices such as shared printing, the construction of texts out of pre-existing printed material and the dispersal and re-sale of commercially unsuccessful or contraband texts. They can also help us to gain insight into a range of cultural practices, from censorship to book collecting to literary marketing. Gatherings might even serve a rhetorical function, embodying in material form thematic concerns of the texts that they contain. They offered early modern authors a textual unit that could act as a tool to think with. ‘The Gathered Text’ is a one-day symposium dedicated to exploring all aspects of the gathering in manuscript and print.
Cost: £25 (£15 students) to include tea, coffee, a sandwich lunch and an evening reception.
The Bibliographical Society has generously offered bursaries to assist postgraduate students with the cost of attending this event. If you would like to apply for one of these bursaries, please send i) a description of the ways in which attending the symposium would assist your research; ii) a brief note from your supervisor endorsing your application, to rebecca.bullard@ell.ox.ac.uk
This symposium has been made possible through the support of:
The John Fell OUP Research Fund
The Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Library, Oxford)
The English Faculty, Oxford University
Merton College, Oxford.
It takes place in association with the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford.
To register for this event, please use the symposium website: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/380-gathered-text-conference.html
or go direct to Oxford University Stores: https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/catalogue/products.asp?compid=1&deptid=110&catID=707&hasClicked=1
Those attending The Gathered Text may also be interested in the Rare Books Masterclass, featuring a demonstration of the McLeod portable collator, which takes place on Thursday 2 September in the Seminar Room of the New Bodleian Library. This masterclass is free of charge, but registration is required. More information is available at http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/385-rare-books-masterclass-.html.
For any further information about ‘The Gathered Text’, please contact Rebecca Bullard, rebecca.bullard@ell.ox.ac.uk
History of Material Texts seminar series
5.30 on Thursday 18 February 2010. Room GR06-07, Faculty of English, Cambridge
Hester Lees-Jeffries (St Catharine’s): Shakespeare: Text, Memory, Object; and Kit Grover (designer), in conversation, on literary souvenirs. Participants are invited, but not required, to bring literary souvenirs and memorabilia for a ‘show and tell’ discussion.
These seminars are open to anybody interested in the history and theory of book production and the material forms of texts, the history of reading, reception studies or editing.
The History of Material Texts seminars are organized by Daniel Wakelin and Sarah Cain.