Old Combination Room, Trinity College, Cambridge

Thursday 24 November 2011

Organisers: David McKitterick, James Raven and Alex Walsham

Supported by the Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History and the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust

This symposium brings together scholars from Cambridge, the UK, the US and Europe to reflect on recent developments in and approaches to the History of the Book and to discuss both the potential and the problems posed by the ever-growing number of electronic resources available to scholars working in this broad and flourishing field. The last 15-20 years have seen the commissioning and publication of a series of histories of the book (Britain, Ireland, America, etc): these enterprises have borne considerable fruit and extended our knowledge of the worlds of manuscript production, printing, publishing and textual consumption within particular national contexts. But their self-imposed parameters have also restricted our understanding of initiatives and interactions that cut across these boundaries and connected people who were members of other types of imagined communities, including churches and sects and the wider republic of letters that united scholars across borders, continents and oceans. They have eclipsed other dimensions of the topic that demand attention in the context of burgeoning interest in transnational and global history. Building on these reflections, the second aim of this symposium is to consider how major digitisation projects and other databases are transforming how historians study past cultures of communication, as well as other related themes.

10am          Coffee

10.30-12.45 Session I: Histories of the Book

America: David Hall (Harvard Divinity School)

Britain: David McKitterick (Trinity)

Ireland: Toby Barnard (Hertford College, Oxford)

France: Dominique Varry (Lyon)

12.45-1.45 Lunch

1.45-4.00                     Session II: New Resources

Universal STC: Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews)

The Electronic Enlightenment: Glenn Roe (Oxford)

Bibliopolis: Paul Hoftijzer (Leiden)

Old Bailey Online: Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire)

Digitised newspapers: Mark Curran (Leeds and Munby Fellow)

4.00-4.30 Tea

4.30-5.30 Round Table Discussion and Future Directions

All welcome: please advise Alex Walsham if you wish to attend (amw23@cam.ac.uk)