Libraries: New Research Directions

An Early Modern Research Centre colloquium at the University of Reading

Friday, 8 June 2012

This colloquium aims to bring together people researching the history of libraries over a wide chronological period and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Papers and discussion will focus not only on particular cases but also on broader methodological questions about the current practice and possible future directions of library history. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Fee: £15 (£10 students and unwaged)

Programme

10.30am  Coffee and registration

11am  Welcome

11.15-12.45pm   

Matthew Nicholls (University of Reading): ‘Libraries in the ancient world: points of communication.’

David Rundle (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford): ‘How libraries die, or what the fate of manuscripts in early modern England can teach us.’

12.45-1.45pm  Lunch

1.45-3.15pm                          

Anne Overell (University of Durham): ‘The libraries of Cardinal Reginald Pole and his friends, ca.1520-1558.’

Daniel Starza Smith (University of Reading): ‘“Well versed in all parts of learning”: the Conway family libraries, 1610-1645.’

3.15-3.45pm Tea

3.45-5.15pm                          

Paddy Bullard (University of Kent): ‘What did Jonathan Swift do in libraries?’

Rose Dixon (King’s College London): ‘Virtual “magazines of learning”: The Dissenting Academy Libraries Project, 1720-1860.’

5.15pm                                     

Warren Boutcher (Queen Mary, University of London): Closing comments followed by discussion.

6pm   Drinks

For a booking form, please visit the EMRC website (http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-events.aspx) or contact the EMRC secretary, Jan Cox:  j.f.cox@reading.ac.uk

Organiser: Rebecca Bullard: r.bullard@reading.ac.uk.

‘Royal Devotion: Monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer’

An exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library, London

Curated by Brian Cummings and Hugh Cahill

1st May – 14th July, 2012

This exhibition traces the close relationship between royalty and religion from medieval to modern times. It tells the story of the Book of Common Prayer and its importance in national life. This story is illustrated with books, manuscripts and objects, many of which have royal or other important provenances. For details and tickets see: http://www.lambethpalacelibrary.org/content/royaldevotion

There is also a series of public lectures to accompany the exhibition:

10 May – Professor Eamon Duffy, ‘Latin for Lay People; Medieval Prayer Books’

31 May – Revd. Dr. Judith Maltby, ‘The Prayer Book Under Duress: Public Worship in the Civil War and Interregnum’

6 June – Professor Brian Cummings, ‘The Genesis of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’

5 July – Professors Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson, ‘Coronation, Prayer Book, and People 1660-1953’

Doors open 5.15pm (admission by Library exhibition entrance). Lectures will take place in the Guard Room, Lambeth Palace, at 6 p.m. Exhibition closes for ticket-holders at 8pm. Refreshments will be available after the lecture.

Tickets (including free viewing of the exhibition before and after the lecture) £12 each. Season ticket for the series of four lectures £35. Tickets by pre-booking only. To book lecture tickets please telephone 0743 204 4820, email visitor.manager@churchofengland.org or write to Visitor Manager at the address below, enclosing a cheque payable to Lambeth Palace Library.

Royal Devotion exhibition booking information: Tickets cost £12 Adults, £10 Concessions (over 60s, student and unemployed), under 17s free. Price includes printed exhibition guide. To buy tickets and for more information visit www.lambethpalacelibrary.org or call 0844 847 1698

Opening times:

Tuesday- Friday 11.00-13.30 and 14.00- 17.00 (last entry 16.00), Saturdays and Bank Holidays- 11.00-16.00 (last entry 15.00)

Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7JU

www.lambethpalacelibrary.org

Text and Trade: Book History Perspectives on Eighteenth Century Literature

Saturday 15 September 2012 at Queen Mary, University of London

Keynote speakers: Prof. James McLaverty (English Department, Keele University) and Dr. John Hinks (Chair of the Printing Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leiecester)

This interdisciplinary conference will explore relations between book production, distribution and content to re-examine our notions of textual culture in the eighteenth century. Taking intersections in current scholarship between Book History and Literary Studies as its starting point, it will explore the ways in which we can expand our knowledge of eighteenth-century literary production by revisiting the circumstances of material life in the period.

In the past, book historians tended to separate bibliography and textual criticism from the literary analysis of content, and today the focus on ‘print culture’ remains primarily one of viewing social processes among authors, publishers, wholesalers/ booksellers and readers as primary in book production. ‘Text and Trade’ seeks to broaden this approach by considering the literary and intellectual consequences of these processes. It will do so by examining bibliography and circuits of communication, investigating the link between economic and intellectual trends, and tracing connections between transformations in media and changing perceptions of selfhood.

The book as object is fraught with issues of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention and branding, all of which challenge our notions of author-ity. By focusing on cultural exchange, the conference will pursue questions about the significance and necessity of viewing material culture and print in conjunction. It will address theoretical and historical understandings of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that bear on the creation of print.

‘Text and Trade’ invites papers that seek to bridge the gap between book history and literature via visual culture, education, geography, philosophy and trade. Topics that papers might address include (but are by no means limited to): – the material history of specific texts – literary circulations – information / scholarly networks – the influence of booksellers and publishers on textual creation – trade and craft in literary production – innovation and tradition – sites of textual production, real and imagined – the varieties of printed forms (including manuals, pamphlets, miscellanies, periodicals and chapbooks) and their significance – the marketplace and book production – models of patronage – the textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers and printers

Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email by 15 June, 2012 and should consist of a 250-word abstract. Proposals for panels are also welcome, which should consist of a working title for the panel and an abstract for each of the contributors.

To submit proposals or to make informal inquiries please contact the conference organizers, Dr. Jenn Chenkin and Dr. Tessa Whitehouse: textandtrade15sept@gmail.com

Early Modern Seminar, Pembroke College

Dr Mark Goldie, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

‘John Locke and the History of the Book: Some Speculations’

Thursday 26 April 2012, 17:00-19:00, Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Conveners: Howard Erskine-Hill and Adrian Lashmore-Davies

All welcome. Drinks served.

Saturday 2 June 2012 — all papers in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square. Registration will be £15 on the door (£10 for students)

Programme

9.45-10 Registration
10-10.15 Welcome and introduction (Adam Smyth)

10.15-11.30 Session 1: Manuscripts
Daniel Wakelin (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), ‘“Her faileth thing that is nat yt made”: imagined
omissions in early English manuscripts’
Eleanor Collins (Oxford University Press), ‘Transcribing early modern theatre history: Henry
Herbert’s lost “office-book”’
Karen Britland (Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Acting or sighing: royalist letters and encryption in the
English civil wars’

11.30-12 Coffee and tea

12-1 Session 2: Bodies and sexualities
Jason Scott-Warren (Trinity College, Cambridge), ‘Lambarde’s Pandecta: the book last seen in
Queen Elizabeth’s bosom’
Heather Tilley (National Portrait Gallery), ‘“It ought never to be published”: Old-maidish
scruples and the disappearance of Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon’

1-2 Lunch (own arrangements)

2-3.15 Session 3: Remembering
Bethan Stevens (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Spekphrasis: writing about lost works of art’
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), ‘Re-membering the missing collection of Charles I’
Caroline Archer (Birmingham City University), ‘Paris underground: the missing memory of the city’

3.15-3.30 Coffee and tea

3.30-4.30 Session 4: Multi-media
Gill Partington (Birkbeck), ‘Tom Philips’ A Humument’
Patrick Davidson (Steinhardt School of NYU), ‘Reading YouTube Comments: The Diamond Is The Rough’

4.30-5 Roundtable discussion

5 Wine reception

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in early November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’.

The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation

• The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future

• Alternatives to the permissive archive

• Archival research as discovery or construction

• The archive which challenges or disrupts

• Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it

• New findings

• Success and failure

• Broken or dispersed collections

• The archive and the environment

• The archivist and the historian

• The ethics of the archive

• The comedy of the archive

• Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@gmail.com

Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.

The commerce of literature, the literature of commerce: Anglo-French perspectives in the long eighteenth century

What role does literature play in commercial society? To what extent can literature resist or even counter market forces? In what ways does commercial society use the book trade to promote its own system of values? This conference proposes to illuminate the ongoing debates regarding the place of literature within commercial society – topics that have long exercised many working in the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic – from a historical perspective, focusing on the long eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century writers were acutely aware of living in an age in which social and international relationships were being rapidly reshaped by commercial forces. The world of letters played a crucial role in helping to assimilate, explore and influence this changing world: from histories of civil society to economic philosophy, merchant handbooks and, last but by no means least influential, imaginative literary genres, most notably the emerging modern novel. The eighteenth century was also a period, in which the world of letters itself was dramatically reorganized by these same commercial pressures and interests, bearing witness to the rise of the professional author and the rapid expansion of the book trade across European boundaries and across the seas. It is thus unsurprising that the objects of this growing international trade – the books and pamphlets – should reflect not only on commercial society in general but also on the economics of writing more specifically. While these were developments that were associated with an increasingly global commerce, France and England were key players. Furthermore, their books on trade and their mutual trade in books shows clearly the extent to which these two European powers each singled out the other for particular attention, motivated by conflicting sentiments of admiration, hostility and rivalry.

The conference organizers invite papers that explore from any of the above perspectives the interactions between commerce and literature across the long eighteenth century, in England and/or France and their respective colonies. Comparative studies are particularly welcome. Possible topics might include:
– the book trade: in what ways was the book trade integral to commercial society, offering a vital conduit for the commerce of ideas, including ideas on trade, that in turn fostered networks and attitudes conducive to finance and trade? What impact did the commerce of literature have on the national economy?
– the diverse literatures of commerce and their interactions: merchant handbooks, histories of civil society, economic philosophy, pamphlets…
– reflections on commerce within imaginative literature: what roles are played by plays, poetry, the novel in assimilating, promoting or contesting commercial society? in shaping the profile of the professional author? how are these imaginative genres shaped by market forces?
– Anglo-French connections: trading contacts, commercial and financial rivalries, practices of emulation…

Proposals of no more than 500 words should be submitted to c18anglo.french@gmail.com and the deadline for submissions is 16 April 2012. Prospective participants may wish to contact the organisers to register interest before submitting a full proposal.
Dates: Monday 2nd July – Tuesday 3rd July 2012.
Conference Organisers: D’Maris Coffman and Jenny Mander
Venue: Centre for Financial History, Newnham College, Cambridge
Deadlines: call for papers: 16 April 2012; registration: 15 June 2012
Sponsored by the Newnham College Senior Members Research Fund, the Centre for Financial History, the Trevelyan Fund of the History Faculty and the French Department at the University of Cambridge.

Bath Spa University is appointing professorships to enhance the university’s existing research profile, one of which could be in book history. This is from the university’s advertisement:

“We are seeking to appoint scholars with a track record of internationally excellent or world-leading research in their specialist field. They will also have a track record of achieving major research grants. It is likely that the successful candidates will be asked to undertake ambassadorial and recruitment work for the University at conferences and symposia outside of the UK. These posts are intended to extend and enrich the strong existing team in English at Bath Spa University by adding further expertise in key areas such as Writing and the Environment, Contemporary Writing, Book, Text and Place, 1500-1750, or by developing new fields. There are opportunities to help us develop new programmes of study in your specialist field. We are also happy to explore Visiting Professor appointments for those already committed to a fractional role in another university.”

The Book, Text, and Place, 1500-1750 research centre focuses on early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined. Further details are available at http://www.bsuprofessors.co.uk/

The Counterculture Research Group is an interdisciplinary series of seminars, lectures and associated events that focuses the multiple artistic, historical and social manifestations of the countercultural impetus.

For further information contact yps1000@cam.ac.uk or rjer2@cam.ac.uk.

17 February, 5pm
Wolfson College, Gatsby Room

Francis Crick, Race, and The Poetry of Richard Nixon

Josie Gill (University of Cambridge)

15 March, 5pm
Wolfson College, Seminar Room

‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’: Mass-Observation, Hermeneutic Paranoia and the Invasion of Cambridge

James Purdon (University of Cambridge)

Wednesday, March 14th speaker change!

Seminars are held in St. Catharine’s College OCR, 2.00pm – 3.30pm, unless otherwise stated. Tea, coffee and biscuits are served. All welcome!

Michaelmas 2011

Wednesday, October 19th: Graduate session
Austen Saunders, English Department, University of Cambridge
‘John Dixon’s annotations to The Faerie Queene: the 1590s blogosphere?’
and
Harriet Phillips, English Department, University of Cambridge
‘How the ploughman learned, and then forgot, his Pater Noster: figuring the Tudor everyman’

Wednesday, November 2nd
Round-table session: ‘Letter writing and networking in the early modern world’

Wednesday, November 16th
Professor Thomas Mayer, Augustana College (USA)
‘Trying Gallileo’, 2.15 pm, Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity

Wednesday, November 23rd
Dr Paul White, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge

‘Does Poetry Teach Morality? Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462-1535) and Debates about Humanist Education’ – Ramsden Room, St. Catharine’s College

Wednesday, November 30th: Graduate Session
Hannah August, King’s College London, and Simon Smith, Birkbeck College, London

‘Early modern English commercial drama and the creation of delight’

Lent 2012

Wednesday, February 1st
Hannah Newton, University of Cambridge

‘Cur’d in a different manner: children’s medicine in early modern England, c.1580-1720’ Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College

Wednesday, February 15th
Richard Serjeantson, University of Cambridge

‘”Published after the old fashion”: Reconstructing a scribal publishing operation in an age of print’ Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College

Wednesday, March 14th

Joe Moshenska, University of Cambridge

‘Sir Kenelm Digby’s Interruptions: Piracy and Romance in the 1620s’

Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College, 2-3.30

Easter 2012

Wednesday, May 2nd:
Professor John O’Brien, Royal Holloway, University of London

‘The Disclosure of Truth in Montaigne’

Wednesday May 9th
Will Poole, University of Oxford

(TBC)

Wednesday May 23rd
Meredith Hall, Cambridge

‘Text and Image in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Satire’, Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

Wednesday June 6th
Tom Blaen, University of Exeter

(TBC)

For further details, please check the website or contact:

Jennifer Bishop
Cassie Gorman
Jonathan Patterson
Erin Walters