A great time was had by all who attended the CMT ‘Eating Words’ colloquium at Gonville and Caius College yesterday. A more detailed report of the day will follow, but in the meantime, I was amused to read this message in the email bulletin from my local Freecycle this morning:

‘WANTED: Any Culture, Cookware or Crockery. I am moving into my first house and as you can imagine it is an exciting but costly time. If anyone has any old Culture, cookware or crockery I would greatly appreciate it.’

As yesterday’s second plenary speaker Sara Pennell revealed in her fabulous exploration of religion in the early modern kitchen, there is indeed a lot of ‘old Culture’ to be found amongst pots and pans and other kitchen essentials…

a full report on the ‘Eating Words’ colloquium can be found on the ‘About’ page–click on the tab to the right.

I recently came across the above catalogue for a Sotheby’s auction held in July 2010 called ‘Books for Cooks: From the Collections of Stanley J. Steeger’. The sale featured over 150 items from the sixteenth century to the present day: all manner of manuscript and printed books related to food and cooking including early medicinal texts extolling the virtues of garlic and vinegar, a set of four continental volumes about olives and olive oil from the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century notebooks filled with recipes for puddings and jellies, and some first editions of Delia Smith.

Obviously it is in the interests of any auction house to make their lots appear as desirable as possible, and to this end this catalogue is a glossy book with luxurious paper, lots of photographs, and an elegant font. The description of each item is accompanied by a photograph, either of its title-page, an interesting illustration, or its binding. As well as these photographs, however, the pages of this sleek catalogue feature imposed images of food and drink stains and spillages: a scattering of lentils here, a glistening globule of marmalade and a smear of what looks like fresh pesto there, as well as the casual traces of a glass of red wine. So subtle are modern photography and printing techniques that these tasty spillages look as though they really could be licked off the page.

There’s a delicious irony embodied in this auction catalogue. ‘Fine’, ‘old’, and ‘rare’ books are considered more valuable the better condition they are in – a first edition of Delia Smith covered in dried ketchup smears would be of no interest to Sotheby’s. Yet books about food and cooking often appeal to our senses with lavish photos of the food in the recipes they contain. And in my house, recipe books are the only books I don’t mind accruing traces of various culinary ingredients – in fact, it’s usually inevitable that they will when I use them in the kitchen. It’s easy to find favourite recipes in my mum’s copy of the Cranks recipe book because it always falls open at certain flour-encrusted pages. While potential bidders are being wooed by Sotheby’s with these mouth-watering visual teasers, the items they may be tempted to buy will be also be delectable, but not quite so sticky…

for the CMT’s forthcoming colloquium on the theme of  ‘Eating Words’, see the ‘Events’ page

My little sister got married last week: a happy day. And my even littler sister brought along some unusual confetti–heart-shaped pieces of paper cut from the pages of old Mills & Boon romances. It’s made by a company called ‘bookish’ which sells all sorts of book-related things–bookmarks, book-bags, literary t-shirts, Scrabble-piece cufflinks and even the occasional signed first edition.

Their website (http://www.bookishengland.co.uk/pages/about.html) spells out their ethos: ‘We believe in the power of books. The power they have to help us change and grow, and the power they still hold over us years and years after they have been read. We keep almost all of our old books; we’re hoarders and we just can’t bear to get rid of them. We love the memories. Sometimes we cut up knackered old books and make something else out of them; a handbag or confetti or a lovely paper-chain of little bookish men. We love handmade, vintage, upcycled, recycled, repurposed, reused and reloved bookish things.’

It’s a curious statement, on the face of it. Can you be both a hoarder and a recycler? Can you love something and destroy it, even if your aim is to turn it into something else? But the contradiction reveals what is often suppressed–that the love of reading is a love of the particularities and peculiarities of the medium, the seemingly incidental details that colour and flavour the experience.

These Mills and Boon books have been destroyed, but what remains of them is very eloquent. Take a look, with mixed feelings, dry voices, maybe a touch of quiet desperation.

‘Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio’ is the theme of the current exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Prized by scholars, collectors, and others for centuries, many of the 232 surviving  First Folio editions of Shakespeare’s works have their own intriguing life stories, and this exhibition brings together books, documents, and objects to tell some of the most interesting ones. One of my favourite exhibits was an Elizabethan-style casket commissioned in 1866 by Angela Burdett-Coutts, with compartments for her First Folio and 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems. The oak from which it was carved came from a tree in Windsor Park which fell in a storm and was given to Burdett-Coutts by Queen Victoria; this ancient tree is mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the casket features four tiny carved figures from the play.  There’s also a replica of the glass box containing the ashes of Edwin Forrest’s First Folio, effectively destroyed by a fire at his home in Philadelphia in 1873. As these two objects suggest, the exhibition conveys a strong sense of how much the First Folio has mattered to people as a material text, as something to be bought, collected, coveted, stolen and preserved, even in dust and ashes.

‘Fame, Fortune, & Theft’ is open until 3 September 2011, and much of it is available to view online here.

The ‘Books and Babies’ exhibition in Cambridge’s University Library (see Jason’s post below) chimes nicely with the theme of a conference I attended last week in Washington, D.C.  The 19^th annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) brought together papers from scholars, teachers, librarians, rare book dealers, and others, focussed around issues of ‘The Book in Art and Science’. Such a theme obviously generated a lot of interest from historians of science; the first keynote lecture, given by Jonathan Topham of the University of Leeds, considered ‘Why the History of Science matters to Book History’, and the rest of the conference saw presentations on seventeenth-century midwifery texts, the history of botanical illustration, the development of nineteenth-century scientific journals, wartime medical text books, and prehistoric beasts in children’s literature, amongst a great many others. I received the most unusual lecture ‘hand-out’ I have yet experienced, a miniature envelope of old American postage stamps, each one related to the history of medicine.

Across many of the arts and humanities disciplines, discussions and debates about the ever-evolving digital world and its relationship to us and to non-digital media are commonplace at the moment. The atmosphere at the SHARP conference was no different, and many conversations were had about the advantages and disadvantages of the  different manifestations of digital media in and beyond academia (is Twitter a good way to communicate about and participate in conference proceedings, for example…?).

One of the most interesting cases was brought  by Mark Curran and Simon Burrow of the University of Leeds, who have created the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, a database which collates information about the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated European publishing house which operated between 1769 and 1794. Hundreds of diligent hours have resulted in an online resource (to be made freely available to all imminently) which ‘tracks the movement of around 400,000 copies of 4,000 books across Europe.  It details, where possible, the exact editions of these works, the routes by which they travelled and the locations of the clients that bought or sold them’. The possibilities offered by this resource are numerous, and the project overview, available here, gives a sense of the almost overwhelming potential of the database. Speaking in the final plenary session at the conference, on ‘Digital Technology’, Curran surprised (and shocked, I think) many in the audience by revealing that although he had dedicated the last five years of his life to this project he is much more excited, ultimately, about the book he is writing. Digital resources are great tools, he reminded us, but they are not in themselves the end of the story. Such tools can be employed to assist us in the creative and dynamic processes of academic research, but in these enthusiastic times of fast-paced digital development, there is sometimes a danger that such tools can be viewed as ends in themselves.

(CMT members: Mark Curran will be taking up the Munby Fellowship in Bibliography in October 2011, so you may get to meet him in person and debate all things digital with him soon!)

I’ve just had a first chance to look round the new exhibition at Cambridge University Library, entitled ‘Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction’. A spin-off from a Wellcome-funded project entitled ‘Generation to Reproduction’, the exhibition packs several thousand years of human thinking about human replication into a single room.

We’re greeted by a stomach-churning image from William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), in which the sensitively-rendered, soft-fleshed foetus nestles in the clinically-carved meat of a dissected female pelvis. Representations of the womb, and battles for control of the female body, remain prominent in what follows. Display cabinets offer us snapshots of the history of midwifery, evolutionary and eugenic thinking, theories of population explosion and practices of birth-control, the abortion debate, the development of ‘test-tube babies’… I was sorry not to see some space given to once-commonplace theories of spontaneous generation (the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog, or serpents out of the Nile mud), but there is at least a medieval bestiary to illustrate the question of whether weasels conceive through the mouth and give birth through the ear or vice versa.

It’s not all books–there are also letters, newspapers, comics, scratched scientific notes, DVD-boxes, small fertility statues, and several condoms and pregnancy testing-kits. But the exhibition does raise interesting questions about the role that different media have played in disseminating ideas. At several points it made me scared about the power that print has had to lay claim to objectivity and to influence thought. The density of a scientific illustration, such as that in the 1934 Gesetz zur Verhütung… (a commentary on the Nazi sterilization programme); or the simplicity of a graph from 1916 showing the disparity between falling birth-rates in upper- and middle-class Hampstead as contrasted with stable rates in working-class Shoreditch; or the photographic feats of a Cesare Lombroso, inventing the discipline of criminal anthropology by juxtaposing scores of heads of ‘delinquent man’ in 1889–these remnants of bygone pseudo-science send shivers down the spine.

The shivers are somewhat allayed by the case devoted to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a cobbled-together book promising to disclose the secrets of sex and childbirth, which was a furtively-thumbed classic from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Here the curators pause to think about individual readers of the text, from James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses to an otherwise unknown French woman who married a London waterman in the mid-nineteenth century. Elsewhere attention to provenance yields bizarre results, when Luther and Melanchthon’s 1523 pamphlet depicting the pope-ass and the monk-calf (two ‘monstrous births’ which are taken to reveal the corruptions of the Catholic church) turns up in the library of the mathematician and eugenicist, Karl Pearson. Could he have seen the Reformation as a clash of good and bad bloodstocks?!

The exhibition is on until 23 December, and there is a website at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Babies/

The darkened exhibition space of the former Reading Room at the British Museum is currently the sanctuary for an arresting display of ornate, glistening objects. The glorious Treasures of Heaven exhibition, which opened on 23 June, brings together sacred riches connected with the Christian devotion to saints from the Museum’s own collection as well as more than 40 other institutions worldwide, including the Vatican. The exhibition enables visitors to see at close hand a fascinating array of reliquaries – gorgeous containers embellished with precious metals and stones in which relics were displayed – as well as Roman burial plaques and bowls, medieval pilgrim badges, and many other artefacts associated with the culture of saints and holy remains.

The exhibition has made headlines already with rumours that curators are having to wipe kiss marks from the glass cases left by visitors for whom these artefacts are not art objects, but sacred things, still to be venerated. Professor Eamon Duffy’s detailed review of the exhibition, available here, beautifully evokes the power that these holy fragments of bone and other materials have had throughout two thousand years of Christianity, as ‘the seeds of transcendence, trophies and tokens of the imperishable glory in store for all whom Christ had redeemed’.

But what of material texts? One of the most remarkable objects in the exhibition is a twelfth-century German portable altar, made of porphyry and bound in gold, which contains relics of over forty saints. The names of the saints are written on the underside of the altar, and curators have opened it to reveal the contents: each tiny relic individually wrapped in a piece of silk or linen, and neatly labelled with the name of a saint. Another reliquary, a triptych from Rome commemorating the miraculous mass of St Gregory, opens to reveal a central icon surrounded by many tiny glass-covered compartments, each containing a relic wrapped in cloth accompanied by a fragment of paper again bearing the name of a saint.

The exhibition does not provide any further historical information about these tiny material texts, these faded labels purporting to certify which saints were enclosed within the reliquaries. Relics are traditionally touched and kissed by the faithful, but these labels, hidden or locked behind glass or metal, cannot easily be read, and the reliquaries have to be literally taken apart for them to be deciphered by curators. Ironically, while the relics themselves often seem  dehumanised, as unidentifiable dusty fragments enclosed within dramatically rich containers, these small scraps of handwriting are moving reminders of the human hands which have come into contact with these objects over many hundreds of years.

Treasures of Heaven is at the British Museum until 9 October 2011.

One of the most well-hidden libraries in Cambridge must be the Cory Library at the University Botanic Garden, a collection of over 9000 horticultural works dating from the seventeenth century to the present day. This book cupboard at the Botanic Garden, in which some of these volumes must once have been kept, is now left empty inside the humid glasshouses, but a lovely archive photo of it in use can be seen here.

From ‘Pseuds Corner’ in this week’s Private Eye, citing a health spa advertisement:

“For £22, Groupon guests will be able to enjoy a two-pronged availing assault to smooth [sic] and sate the human form. The thoughtful therapists will help turn over a new page of person parchment with a moisturising exfoliation scrub before thoroughly kneading the mortal dough with a full body massage”.

Followed by a gruelling work-out for any metaphors that may lie hiding in your folds? I can’t wait!

This week has offered plentiful opportunities to reflect on the current state of work in the digital humanities. On Monday, the CMT held its first joint workshop with the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin. One of the contributors to this event, Eugene Giddens (ARU), spoke about digital editing in his neck of the woods, early modern literary studies, characterizing it as almost entirely a history of failure. Fantasies nurtured in the 1990s—dreams of hypertext editions that would allow one to move fluidly between different versions of a work, exposing the many contingencies of the textual condition—have come to nothing. We have no online Shakespeare to can compete with the massed ranks of Ardens, Riversides and Nortons. We have few compelling online editions of other authors, major or minor. And in the rare cases where such editions have been completed, the bells and whistles (say, video-clips from modern performances of playtexts) may do more to obstruct than to facilitate engagement. Publishers seem to have despaired of finding a viable financial model for the online edition, while they continue to commission the familiar printed behemoths. Meanwhile scholars flock to sites that dump low-grade but plentiful facsimile images on the web. ‘Early English Books Online’ is the one unqualified success-story of digital editing in this area, and it isn’t (in the standard sense of the word) an edition.

Having absorbed some of the force of this analysis, it was surprising to go on a second collaborative event, a workshop on ‘Digital Editing and Digital Editions’ run at CRASSH on Wednesday. The speakers at this event were mainly upbeat about digital editing projects, one of them—John Rink of the Cambridge Music Faculty—having worked on an extremely complex and interesting project to create a variorum edition of Chopin (see http://www.ocve.org.uk/index.html and, relatedly, http://www.cfeo.org.uk/dyn/index.html). The miraculous interface for this project does things that Shakespeareans can only (continue to) dream of, allowing bar-by-bar comparison between the various original manuscripts and early printed scores, all of them testifying eloquently to this particular composer’s inability to stop improving and improvising, and to the material circumstances in which his works took shape. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the site continues to grow and may in future incorporate audio performances to further diversify and enrich its content.

The other presentation at this event was similarly inspiring. Here Eleanor Robson of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science explored ORACC (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/index.html), the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, an ever-expanding archive of cuneiform texts that was initiated in the 1990s and which has continued to grow ever since. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, ORACC was developed without direct funding, mostly it seems as a means of facilitating the research projects of its founders. The site offers an enticingly open, free-form model for online editing (Robson patiently explained that the site’s acronym alludes to ORAC, the supercomputer-sidekick of the intergalactic renegades in the 1980s sci-fi series Blake’s 7). This vast, intricately-coded archive of cuneiform texts has a very direct impact on teaching and draws together numerous research collaborations with sites and institutions across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Wednesday’s meeting concluded with a round-table discussion chaired by Andrew Zurcher (Faculty of English) which aired questions of longevity (making digital projects last), interoperability (making them talk to one another), impact (making them useful), and respectability (making them count on a CV). The Cambridge Digital Humanities Network will be carrying these discussions forward in the coming months and years: watch this space for more information. Meanwhile, the CMT is hosting two lunchtime meetings in the next couple of weeks (see this site, under ‘Events’) to discuss nascent digital projects.

for further discussion of the CRASSH workshop, see the intranet Members’ Forum (click on the sidebar tab)