Thursday 27 January, 5:30pm, SR-24, Faculty of English
Harriet Phillips: ‘Waste Paper: Early Modern Broadsides as Popular Print’; and Marie Léger-St-Jean: ‘“long for the penny number and the weekly woodcut”: Early Victorian Popular Authors and their Readers’

Thursday 24 February, 5:30pm
Managing curious collections: Stuart Stone (Radzinowicz Library): a visit to the collection of ‘banned books’ from the Home Office; Katie Birkwood (St John’s College Library), on managing the Fred Hoyle Collection of papers, books and other material texts.

(Please note that the seminar on 24 February will begin at 5.30pm in the Radzinowicz Library at the front of the Institute of Criminology on the Sidgwick Site, for a ‘show and tell’ of banned books, and will move for the second presentation and discussion to the Faculty of English.)

All welcome. For information, this term contact Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk)

This term’s seminars in the History of Material Texts are as follows.

Thursday 14 Oct, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Printers Without Borders: Translation and Literary Transnationalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

Thursday 11 Nov, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Jim Secord (HPS, University of Cambridge) Nebular Visions: Image and Text in John Pringle Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens

All are welcome. The seminar is a forum for research across disciplines and across periods, for all those interested in the history of the book, bibliography, histories and theories of reading, and the intersections between intellectual history and material culture, including the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, editing and subsequent history of texts as material objects in manuscript, print, digital media or other forms.

For information, contact this term Daniel Wakelin (dlw22@cam.ac.uk).

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.

• Dr Luisa Cale (Birkbeck): ‘Reading and Cutting through the Page: William Blake and the extra-illustrated book’
• Dr Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery): Facing the Text: the origins and rise of extra-illustration c.1770-1840

The seminar coincides with the final week of the Folger Library’s exhibition of extra-illustration, ‘Extending the Book’:

• http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/On-Exhibit-Extending-the-Book/Extending-the-Book.cfm
• http://titania.folger.edu/ExtraIllustratedBooks/

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

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.

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.