Alternate Tuesdays, during term time
CRASSH
Michaelmas Term 2011: 12.00-14.00
Light lunch provided

The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts.

11th October: Professor Simon Schaffer and Professor Nick Thomas on the Nature of “Artefacts”
25th October: Dr Kim Sloan and Dr Charlie Jarvis on the Understanding of “Botany”
8th November: Dr Richard Dunn and Dr Alexi Baker on the Universe of the “Telescope”
22nd November: Dr Catherine Eagleton and Dr Martin Allen on the Meaning of “Money”

THINGS poster

Why can’t people learn to sign their names more clearly? It’s the second line of this inscription which is causing headaches…

How the secularization of religious houses transformed the libraries of Europe, 16th-19th centuries <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm>

Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Libraries Conference at St Anne’s College, Oxford, 22-24 March 2012

Convenors: Richard Sharpe (Oxford); Cristina Dondi (Oxford); Dorit Raines (Venice)

What impact did the closure of monasteries and the dispersal of their collections have on the shape of libraries, access to libraries, and the preservation or otherwise of books from the past — the intellectual heritage of Europe?

* Monastic collections and the foundation of national libraries

* Dispersal of collections and new reading publics

* Effects on the market for early books and manuscripts

This 3-day conference also examines the historical and bibliographic tools that are available to address these questions, with speakers from 14 countries. See the conference page for the full list of speakers and themes, and to register: <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm> .

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.

The University Library has acquired Early European Books Collections 1 and 2 published online by ProQuest.

Complementing Early English Books Online, Early European Books aims to provide researchers and students with access to all works printed in Europe before 1701 and held in the partner libraries, regardless of language, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield.

The value of the collections is enhanced by the use of full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts. There is extensive metadata for each work.

Collection 1 is drawn from the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen. It offers a comprehensive survey of its holdings of items listed in Lauritz Nielsen’s Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1600 and its supplement. All of the Royal Library’s Danish and Icelandic imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fall within its scope, from the earliest works printed in Denmark – Breviarium Ottoniense (Odense Breviary) and Guillaume Caoursin’s De obsidione et bello Rhodiano (‘On the siege and war of Rhodes’), both printed by Johann Snell in Odense in 1482 – through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546–1601).

Collection 2 from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze focuses in particular on four of the library’s collections:

• The Nencini Aldine Collection: more than 1,000 editions printed by the Aldine Press
• Marginalia: a collection of more than 80 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes which have been identified for the importance of the marginal annotations, including those written by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on his own personal copies of works by Euclid, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and Horace.
• Incunabula: almost 1,200 volumes, including rare first editions of the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 100 volumes by the controversial preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498).
• Sacred Representations: over 600 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of sacre rappresentazioni, popular verse plays depicting Biblical scenes, episodes from the lives of the saints and Christian legends, which were originally performed in Florence and elsewhere in Tuscany and are considered by scholars to form the foundations of Italian theatre.

Early European Books is available throughout the University and off campus at http://eeb.chadwyck.co.uk/ or follow the  link from the Library’s electronic resources A-Z list.

An Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium in the Arts and Humanities
Supported by Pembroke College and the Faculty of English

Pembroke College, Saturday 24th September 2011

For more information, or to register (£5), please contact Katarina Stenke (ks446@cam.ac.uk)

Draft Program:

8.45am-9.15am: Registration.

9.15am-9.30am: Welcome.

9.30am-10.40am: Panel One – The Fragments of History.
Mario Wimmer (ETH Zürich, Swiss Institute of Technology), ‘Archival Bodies and philological factish’
Mark Williams (Faculty of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), ‘Austin Clarke and the de-fragmentation of Irish myth’

10.40am-11.00am: Coffee Break.

11.00am-12.10pm: Panel Two – Fragmentation and Authorship.
Joanna Bellis (Faculty of English), ‘Fragmentation or assimilation? The case of a fifteenth-century war poem’
Ian Goh (Faculty of Classics), ‘Lucilian Satire: Already Fragmentary in the Roman Republic’

12.20pm-1.30pm: Panel Three – Fragments and Knowledge.
Cassie Gorman (Faculty of English), ‘Not quite ‘ALL THINGS’: Thomas Traherne and the Commentaries of Heaven (c. 1670-74)’
Sarah Weaver (Faculty of English), ‘Fragments as Raw Material: Julius Charles Hare and Guesses at Truth’

1.30pm-2.30pm: Lunch.

2.30pm-4.10pm: Panel Four – Micro-Fact and Micro-Fiction.
Lucy Bell (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Collecting Fragments: Augusto Monterroso’s Anthology of Flies and the Aesthetics of Micro-Fiction’
Rebecca Varley-Winter (Faculty of English), ‘Frightening fragments: Félix Fénélon’s ‘novels in three lines’ and photographic captions’
David Jiménez Torres (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Part or Whole? The Journalistic Article as Fragment’

4.10pm-4.30pm: Coffee Break.

4.30pm-6.00pm: Fragments across the Disciplines: Round-table Discussion
Chaired by Charlotte Roberts, Harriet Phillips and Katarina Stenke

6.00pm: Wine Reception.

*Manuscript Identities and the Transmission of Texts in the English Renaissance*

*Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May 2012,*

*Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University*

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Early Modern Manuscript Poetry: Recovering our Scribal Heritage’, this conference will explore the role of manuscripts in the production of individual and corporate identities in early modern culture, including the commissioning, copying, circulation, and collection of manuscripts. The conference welcomes multidisciplinary approaches and is keen to consider the relationships between manuscript and print identities in the period.

*Topics might include:

* ownership and commissioning; selection criteria (authorial, thematic, generic, miscellaneous); scribal identities; collection and donation; manuscripts and place; the construction of poetic, religious, political, and regional identities in manuscript; coteries; circulation and dissemination; manuscript afterlives; editing

Speakers include: Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, London), Arthur Marotti (Wayne State University), Steve May (Sheffield University), Mary Morrissey (Reading University), Fred Schurink (Northumbria University), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow University), and Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London)

Please submit 200-word proposals for 20 minute papers by *Friday 30 September* to Alan Bryson (a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk <mailto:a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk>) and Cathy Shrank (c.shrank@shef.ac.uk <mailto:c.shrank@shef.ac.uk>).

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.