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/

Eating Words: a one-day CMT workshop

Gonville and Caius College. Cambridge, 13 September 2011

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day workshop will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Plenary Speakers: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre) & Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

To download a flyer, click here. A draft program is available here. A booking form is available here.

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.

A unique leaf from the Legenda ad usum Sarum (Paris: Guillaume Maynyal for William Caxton, 1488), CUL Inc.2.D.1.18, sig r4 recto.

The Incunabula Cataloguing Project began in October 2009 and is scheduled to run until 2014. Generously funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, it will see the creation of a modern and comprehensive catalogue of  the University Library’s renowned collection of incunables (books printed in or before the year 1500).  Until the start of the project, access to this collection was only available via the printed short-title catalogue compiled by J.C.T. Oates and published in 1954. At the end of the project, detailed records for all incunable holdings will be available online via Newton, Copac and OCLC WorldCat.

The UL’s collection comprises some 4,650 separate works, collected over the 500-year course of the Library’s history, with books previously found in the libraries of the great collectors from Thomas Rotherham (1423–1500) to A.W Young (1852–1936) and beyond. The collection includes examples of some of the oldest, rarest and most beautiful incunables extant worldwide, with particular strengths in holdings from the presses of the low countries and England.

Dott. Laura Nuvoloni was appointed to the post of Research Associate in October 2009, and has already passed the 1000-catalogue-records mark.  The cataloguing work has revealed much new information about the books, spanning many book-historical fields:

• The possible identification of the editio princeps of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (CUL Inc.3.B.3.1b[1332]).
• The identification of Felice Feliciano as the annotator of a copy of Roberto Valturio’s De re militari (SSS.4.14).
• The discovery of an unknown edition of the Liber de intentionibus, a work by the 14th-century Dominican friar Franciscus de Prato, in an edition of Johannes Versoris’s Quaestiones librorum praedicabilium et praedicamentorum et posteriorum Aristotelis (Inc.5.B.7.10[4004]).

The progress of the project is documented on the Incunabula Project blog, where you can find posts about new discoveries and unsolved mysteries.  Guest posts from those studying CUL incunabula are warmly welcomed: see, for example, Paul Needham’s reassessment of three editions by Laurentius Canotius of Padua.

The catalogue records created in this project include detailed information about the binding, illumination and decoration, provenance, and imperfections of the copies held by the Library.  Browsable indexes of institutional and personal ownership are now available on the project pages, and are continually updated as new records are added to the catalogue.

The books can be viewed in person by placing orders as normal in the Munby Rare Books Reading Room of Cambridge University Library.

Katie Birkwood

Rare Books Specialist, Cambridge University Library

“Text, Image and the Digital Research Environment: Parker Library-Keio EIRI Conference on Medieval Manuscripts and Printed Books”

Friday 9 September 2011

Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Parker Library and the EIRI Project at Keio University (Tokyo) are co-organising a one-day conference focusing on new and future advances in digitisation and digital resources and on the ways in which they are creating new research environments for medieval manuscripts and rare books. Papers will range from individual research papers to institutional projects. More information about speakers and the registration is available at:

http://parkerkeio2011.wordpress.com/

For further information, please contact: 　Gill Cannell and Suzanne Paul (Parker Library): parker-library＠corpus.cam.ac.uk 　Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University/Corpus Christi College): satoko＠flet.keio.ac.jp

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!

‘SHARING THE WONDER’— a collaborative approach to promoting, preserving and sharing the content of special collections

A one day conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge on 12th September 2011

The uniqueness and specialised appeal of our collections offers little protection from financial constraints. Many are under threat – of dispersal, of neglect and even disposal in favour of digitised copies – and this conference focuses on ways in which colleagues are sharing their expertise and knowledge to ensure their collections ‘work’, that is, that they continue to be relevant and available to meet the needs and interests of their varied audiences – be these scholars or the public at large.

Speakers will include:
Dr Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and mainstay of the ‘Cambridge Illuminations’ project to exhibit, catalogue and publish information about  the entire body of illuminated manuscripts held in the Colleges and other parts of the University.

Dr Alison Walker, retired head of the National Preservation Office at the British Library, who is coordinating a project to catalogue the dispersed library of Sir Hans Sloane that forms the 18th century core of the British Museum and Natural History Museum libraries.

Natalie Adams, Senior Archivist at the Churchill Archives who is involved in a commercial project to make Sir Winston Churchill’s papers available online.

We will also hear from the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, which has collaborated with Stanford University to make its entire manuscript collection online; and from conservators at the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium, who will describe how their work helps to keep special collections ‘in working order’ and also offers unexpected insights into the history of the book.

The cost of attendance is £25 and the programme includes lunch and a visit to a choice of special collections within a few minutes walking distance of Queens’ College.

To Book, please complete the form here.

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)