This international conference is the result of an AHRC Networking grant, which has brought together academics and curators from Britain, Russia, and The Netherlands to consider Dutch-Russian exchange through the most significant moment in Russian print culture of the early modern period: Peter the Great’s establishment of a European-style school of printmaking in Moscow. Scholars from The State Hermitage Museum, The State Russian Museum, The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge will discuss the dynamism of Dutch publishing in the late seventeenth century, precedents in Williamite imagery, and the emergence and nature of Europeanised prints in the genres of portraiture, city views and folk prints. This timely consideration of Russia’s historic relationship with Europe will be contextualised by Sir Anthony Brenton KCMG, British Ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008.

Please note that there are a number of free places reserved for students.

Contact: mmh43@cam.ac.uk
To register: https://globalnetworksinprint.eventbrite.co.uk

THE GIANT BIBLES OF TWELFTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

A series of three lectures by Christopher de Hamel, Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The great Latin Bibles, in huge multiple volumes, are by far the largest and most spectacular manuscripts commissioned in England in the twelfth century, decorated with magnificent illuminated pictures.  The lectures will consider the purpose of such books and why they were suddenly so fashionable and also why they passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.

Lecture 1: Monday, 27 October 2014 18.15-19.30

The Bury Bible         

The first lecture will look principally at the Bible of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, now in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The manuscript, commissioned in the time of Anselm, abbot of Bury 1121-48, is usually dated to around 1130.  It was decorated by the hand of Master Hugo, the earliest professional artist in England whose name is known. The lecture will also examine the larger questions of where exemplars and materials were found for the Bible, and at the phenomenal expense of such undertakings.

Lecture 2: Thursday, 30 October 2014 18.15-19.30

The Winchester Bible

The Winchester Bible is still in the cathedral where it was commissioned, doubtless by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester 1129-71.  It too was illuminated by professional painters, who apparently also worked on frescoes in Spain.  The lecture will take advantage of the recent disbinding of the manuscript to make new observations about its production, and to suggest new dates for the different phases of the work, undertaken in parallel with a second (but lesser) giant Bible from Winchester, now in the Bodleian Library.

Lecture 3: Monday, 3 November 2014 18.15-19.30

The Lambeth Bible

Despite its fame and quality of illumination, nothing has been hitherto known about the Lambeth Bible’s original owner or patron.  The lecture will propose that it was commissioned around 1148 for Faversham Abbey by King Stephen, king of England 1135-54. The lecture will end with observations of why giant Bibles passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.

FREE ADMISSION 

18.15 in the Conference Centre

British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

The Oxford edition of the Collected Works of Thomas Traherne has available a fixed-term part-time post of research assistant in early modern European bibliography.

The post consists of72 hourswhich can be worked flexibly (e.g. 6 hours a week over 12 weeks), by agreement with the general editor,between October and December 2014.The rate of pay is £12 per hour.

The Oxford Traherne, under the general editorship of Dr Julia Smith and under contract with Oxford University Press, is the first fully annotated edition of all known works by the seventeenth-century poet, spiritual writer, and theologian Thomas Traherne. The project is currently conducting a census of surviving copies of Traherne’s early printed works: the focus of this so far has been on UK and North American libraries, and the role of the research assistant will be to extend it to European libraries.

Candidates should have at least a Master’s degree in early modern literature or a related field, and expertise in early modern bibliography or the history of the book. The research assistant will also need to have a working knowledge of at least two European languages and some familiarity with special collections in European libraries. A high standard of accuracy, and a willingness to liaise actively with librarians will be essential for this task; a knowledge of Latin would also be desirable, but is not essential.

The work of the research assistant will be based in Oxford, and will be overseen by the general editor, Dr Julia Smith, and Dr Sarah Apetrei, a volume editor. It will also involve collaboration with the project’s existing research assistant, Dr Austen Saunders. The post is supported by the John Fell Fund, and the grant holder is Dr Sarah Apetrei.

The closing date for applications is 1 October 2014. There is no application form; please send applications, including a CV, an account of relevant experience, and the name of one referee to Dr Julia Smith at julia.smith@ell.ox.ac.uk. Applicants should also arrange for their referee to submit a reference by the closing date. Interviews will be held in Oxford, probably in the week beginning 13 October 2014, and shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete a short bibliographical exercise in preparation for the interview.

For further information, please contact Dr Julia Smith at julia.smith@ell.ox.ac.uk or Dr Sarah Apetrei at sarah.apetrei@keble.ox.ac.uk.

In Michaelmas Term 2014 the English Faculty at the University of Oxford (click here for a map) will be hosting a cross-period, interdisciplinary seminar series on literature and material culture. The seminars will take place on alternate Tuesday evenings at 5.15pm in the Faculty’s History of the Book Room throughout the autumn term. Drinks and discussion will follow each seminar.

Across the term, established academics (including Dr Adam Smyth, Dr Paula Byrne, and Dr Vike Plock) and graduate speakers (from Canada, UCL and Oxford) will explore three main threads: material texts, clothing in literature, and object-oriented literary biography. We hope to see you there!

Please see literaturematerial.wordpress.com for more information, or contact Claire Johnstone and Hannah Ryley at literaturematerial@gmail.com

16-17 April 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

Across the colonial world, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a flourishing of newspapers and periodicals – some fleeting newssheets, others enduring forums of discussion, some published by the colonial state, others by enterprising editors and entrepreneurs. In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the role of these print media in colonial societies. This, however, has tended to focus on the content rather than the form, mining newspapers for information rather than considering their constitution. What’s more, it has tended to focus on certain publications and regions at the expense of others. This conference brings together scholars working in different disciplines on the colonial societies of Africa, the Middle East, East and South East Asia to consider colonial newspapers in a comparative perspective. It will consider the newspaper, the journal and the magazine as tools of education and government whose owners, contributors and readers often thought of these media as edifying publications.  They were purveyors not just of knowledge about their own societies and the wider world, but also of political prescriptions, linguistic conventions, and ethical norms, which reinforced notions of the self and the other, the state and society, modernity and its lexicons. Together, we hope to encourage enduring and inter-disciplinary conversation amongst scholars about the place newspapers, magazines, and journals played in the constitution of vernacular modernity in various locales, and to lay down the foundations for a new global history of print in the long twentieth century.

Conference panels will focus on the following themes:

• Newspapers and periodicals as a didactic space or ‘encyclopaedia’
• Authorship, editorial policy, financing and the legal framework in which newspapers and periodicals in the colonial world operated, particularly relating to censorship, sedition, defamation and libel laws.
• The relationship of periodicals to the colonial state and the role of the newspaper in shaping modes of political engagement and mobilisation, and understandings of the public.
• Language and the role of newspapers and periodicals in standardising and popularising vernacular language and new lingua francas.
• The visual in colonial newspapers (illustration, caricature, photography, typography, lay-out).

A comparative perspective, engaging with the methodological questions at hand in several settings, is encouraged.  Papers for the conference will be pre-circulated to allow for maximum discussion, and participants will be asked to have their papers ready by 1 February 2015.

The organisers, Andrew Arsan, Emma Hunter and Leslie James, welcome abstracts of no more than 250 words in .doc or PDF format to the following email address:
newspapersinthecolonialworld@gmail.com

Please include a position, institutional affiliation, and email address in your abstract.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is: 15 June 2014.

Lincoln College, Oxford – 23-24 March 2015

An international conference to consider past, present, and future critical trends in Donne Studies.

Plenary Speakers: Achsah Guibbory (Barnard College, Columbia University), David Marno (University of California, Berkeley).

Proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of Donne are warmly invited. We are particularly interested in papers that reflect upon their own methodologies, or engage critically with the roles that have been, or should be, played by theory, religious history, rhetoric, form, genre, scholarly editions, biography, and book history. Please send proposals to peter.mccullough@lincoln.ox.ac.uk by 1 October 2014, and write to the same address for registration details.

There will be bursaries available for registered students.

See further http://www.cems-oxford.org/donne

20 and 28 June 2014, Keynes Library, Birkbeck College.

The illuminated manuscript collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum will be available to view in greater detail than ever before thanks to an £87,582 from Arts Council England. The Digital Layers online archive will explore stunning images of illuminated manuscripts using layer and zooming techniques inspired by internet mapping tools to show their historical, cultural and scientific secrets.

The Fitzwilliam Museum and the colleges of the University of Cambridge have one of the largest, finest and most historically important selection of illuminated manuscripts in existence. Fragile and sensitive to light, temperature and humidity, the manuscripts can only be displayed for short periods of time under special conditions to protect their delicate materials and pigments.

However, illuminated manuscripts are the most representative and best-preserved examples of medieval and Renaissance painting, doubling as portable galleries of artistic traditions through the centuries. The manuscripts collections are also one of the most popular at the Fitzwilliam, with exhibitions such as the Cambridge Illuminations in 2005 drawing record numbers of visitors.

The tools created for the Digital Layers project will be inspired in part by commonly used internet mapping and visualisation resources such as Google Earth and the WorldWide Telescope project (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org). They will explore the different layers of the manuscripts uploaded online, allowing the viewer to examine its creation, from original sketches hidden beneath the illuminations, to the type of pigments, inks, and paint binders used. These different layers will also reveal secrets about artists and patrons: where and when the manuscripts were made, how did highly-skilled professionals collaborate on their production, and how did owners use them over time and across countries.

All of this incredible detail and information has been made possible by two research projects being run by the Fitzwilliam; the Cambridge Illuminations and MINIARE.

University of Cambridge, 23 May