The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) and the Centre for Material Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

THE BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar 1: Renaissance Texts and Publishing

Monday 23rd May 2011 5-6.45pm, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor Jane Taylor (Durham University) on matters of taste in sixteenth-century publishing

and

Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) on preparing digital editions of early modern literature

For more information please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

1 July 2011
Corsham Court Centre, Bath Spa University (deadline: unspecified, but ‘still open’)

Bath Spa University’s newly formed Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is pleased to announce its inaugural conference, ‘Book Encounters, 1500-1750’. In keeping with the Centre’s focus on early modern literary
culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined, this conference invites exploration into early modern encounters with the book. The central theme of the conference will be the role that the book as material vehicle
played in the transmission of ideas. Possible topics of study include

• literary circles
• knowledge communities
• book ownership
• marks in books
• the destruction of books
• letterwriting
• scribal publication
• the intersection of book and manuscript cultures
• private and public libraries

The aim of this conference is to consider a wide variety of encounters with the book: not only from different cultural and geographical sites of production, circulation and reception but also from various periods within early
modernity. Different disciplinary perspectives are particularly encouraged. Proposals for papers (20-25 mins) are still welcome. Please send queries to Chris Ivic (c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk).

Information on the Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is available at www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/humanities-and-cultural-industries/research/book-text-and-place/

Plenary speakers:

David Pearson, Director, Libraries, Archives & Guildhall Art Gallery

Mark Towsey, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of
Liverpool

One-Day Symposium 5th September 2011, King’s College London

The ‘Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic’ (DigiPal) at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at King’s College London is pleased to announce a one-day symposium on digital resources for palaeography. In recent years, scholars have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. The aim of the symposium is to present developments in the field, explore the limits of digital and computational-based approaches, and share methodologies across projects which overlap or complement each other.

Papers of 20 minutes in length are invited on any relevant aspect of digital methods and resources for palaeography and manuscript studies. Possible topics could include: * Project reports and/or demonstrations * Palaeographical method; ‘Digital’ and ‘Analogue’ palaeography * Quantitative and qualitative approaches * ‘Scientific’ methods, ‘objectivity’ and the role of evidence in manuscript studies * Visualisation of manuscript evidence and data * Interface design and querying of palaeographical material

To propose a paper, please send a brief abstract (250 words max) to digipal@kcl.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of submissions is 8th May 2011. Notice of acceptance will be sent by 20th May 2011.

— Dr Stewart J Brookes, Research Associate, Digital Resource for Palaeography

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

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.

Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar, 2pm, Wednesday 23rd February, St Catherine’s College OCR

Dr Jason Scott-Warren will be speaking on ‘Library Catalogues and Laundry Lists’: Refurbishing the Early Modern Reader’. Tea and biscuits served; all welcome!

For more information, please contact Harry Stevenson (hes23), Stephen Cummins (stc28), Laura Kounine (lk279) or Harriet Phillips (hp278).

7.30pm, Monday 21st February, Erasmus Room, Queens’ College

Dr Becca Weir (Jesus) will be speaking to the Queens’ Arts Seminar on ‘Pay, Poetry, and the Culture of Reprinting: Soldiers in the Anglo-African, 1863-1865′ (abstract below). Wine served; all welcome. For more information, contact Harriet Phillips (hp278) or Natasha Moore (nlm31).

Abstract:

In the latter half of the American Civil War, Robert Hamilton’s Anglo-African newspaper championed enlistment as an opportunity for African American men to assert their right to full citizenship. Even as soldiers in the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments used the newspaper to challenge the War Department’s decision to pay them less than their white counterparts, the Anglo-African used ‘original’ and ‘selected’ poetry to further its campaign. Readers recognised the poetry column as a site for public debate and contributed their own verse, whilst Hamilton and his associates reprinted ‘selected’ texts from a host of antislavery titles. These poems raise crucial questions about the ways in which civilians and combatants sought to define black volunteers as representative men. This paper adapts Meredith McGill’s notion of a ‘culture of reprinting’ in order to explore the significance of poetry in the Anglo-African, and suggests that newspaper poetry can help us rethink ‘Civil War literature’.

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