Friday 5 May, 1-2 pm
Milstein Seminar Room, University Library
Austen Saunders and Julia Smith (Oxford)
Collating early modern printed texts: the Traherne Digital Collator
Monday 5 June, 3-4.30
Board Room, Faculty of English
Sophie Seita (Queens’, Cambridge)
A Century of Avant-Garde Little Magazines: An Introduction
The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.
Friday 28 April 2017, 2-4pm, Faculty of English (West Road), Room SR24
Analyzing scribal technique: the perspective of a practitioner
An informal workshop on scribal techniques in the writing of the formal book-script, littera textualis, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, led by the scribe, Paul Antonio, focusing upon examples from the composite music manuscript, the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médecine, H 196).
Friday 5 May 2017, 2-4pm Faculty of English (West Road), Room SR24
Late-medieval manuscript dissemination
Dr Phil Knox (Trinity College, Cambridge; Faculty of English) ‘Tracking manuscripts of the Roman de la rose in late-medieval Britain: approaches and problems’
Friday 12 May 2017, 2-4 pm Cambridge University Library (Milstein Seminar Room), 2-4pm
Analyzing parchment and binding structures: the perspective of a conservator
An informal workshop on parchment and binding structures of medieval manuscripts in the University Library, led by Edward Cheese, informed by his observations while working on these manuscripts as a conservator.
Convenors: Teresa Webber, Orietta Da Rold, Suzanne Paul, Sean Curran and David Ganz
For further details, email mtjw2@cam.ac.uk
Book-smells are in the news again. Some doughty chemists and heritage scientists at UCL have teamed up to produce a ‘historic book odour wheel’ that links the perceived scent of old books with their chemical olfactory triggers. So, for example, if you think your book smells of chocolate, that’s probably because it’s giving off vanillin, benzaldehyde and furfural, chemicals that are emitted as the cellulose and lignin in paper degrades. The researchers claim that they are shedding light on how libraries communicate through smell, putting the science together with cultural history to explore the elusive linguistics of scent.
This is just one of innumerable projects in which humanists and scientists are currently getting together to explore the history that lies hidden in old books (Cambridge’s own MINIARE is an excellent example of the genre). It can’t be long before we will be able to subject every book to a full body scan, reconstructing its entire history from its chemical composition. But to focus on scent is also to bring in the imponderables of the human relationship to matter, and all of the cultural variables that cannot simply be read off the physical details.
That much is clear from the comments thread at the bottom of the Guardian report on the research, in which scores of people come forward to confess their love or hate for particular old book-smells. The annuals that children cracked open at Christmas smelled lovely, it seems, while school textbooks usually smelled foul. Kindles are repeatedly faulted for their failure to smell. And the smellscapes of particular bookshops and libraries are fondly recalled. Inevitably there are plenty of parodic contributions, with regular allusions to Proust. But perhaps we are a little bit closer to understanding what the nose knows.
The writer Arundhati Roy was the guest on Desert Island Discs this week. The presenter asked her whether it was true that she was granted complete control over the appearance of her bestselling debut novel The God of Small Things. ‘Granted?–I insisted on it!’ she began; ‘I was just a stubborn thing’. Her publishers had asked her what she would like from them. Her answer: ‘Complete design control: no saris, no tigers on my cover!’
Her comments resonated for me with those of another writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently published an essay entitled The Clothing of Books. The clothing of books means their covers, and for Lahiri the cover brings with it a social anxiety that recalls the anguish she felt as a child caught between the clothing styles of her American schoolfriends and her Bengali parents. On becoming a writer, ‘I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world. But what is wrapped around my words–my book covers–is not of my choosing’.
Lahiri writes movingly about the strange sense of alienation from her own creativity that the cover sets in train. Designed by somebody else, suggesting a reading of the book and a projection of its meaning out into the world, a cover gives a book a new personality and makes it something of a stranger to its author. Lahiri yearns to have the book naked, without all the paratextual elements (author-mugshots, blurbs, snippets from reviews) with which we are now deluged. ‘I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me’.
Lahiri cares so much about her books because she feels them to be, in some sense, part of her. A recent autobiographical work, In Other Words, has her photo on the cover, and this is fitting: ‘In the end the author is the book’. When she asks herself to imagine her ideal cover, it is a reproduction of a still life by Morandi or a collage by Matisse. Having written this thought down, she find herself the very next day, coming out of a building, confronted by posters of Morandi to her right and Matisse to her left. For a few moments she imagines herself ‘transformed into the pages of a book’. Some demand complete design control; others have it thrust upon them.
An opportunity to discuss your current research with other CMT members. UL tea-room, 11am, Monday 13 March.
Jane Austen’s Sanditon – 200 Years: the history of an unfinished work
The Cambridge English Faculty is currently displaying material tracing the public life and textual forms of Sanditon, Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, which she composed in the year of her death, 1817.
The manuscript of Sanditon is held in King’s College, Cambridge, where Jane Austen’s great-nephew was Provost. This exhibition traces the public life and developing textual forms of Sanditon, from the first public reference to the work in James Edward Austen’s-Leigh’s 1871 Memoir of his aunt, through to the first published edition of Austen’s fragment (1925), the first facsimile edition (1975) and other continued, illustrated and translated editions, up to digital text. The items on display in this exhibition are on loan from Cambridge University Library and from the Gilson collection at King’s College, Cambridge.
The exhibition, to be found in the first-floor atrium of the Faculty, coincides with a conference about Sanditon to be held at Trinity College, Cambridge, 29-31 March, 2017: details, including registration information are here: https://sanditon200years.wordpress.com
CMT coffee and cake: Thursday 16 March, 10.30, in the exhibition space
Friday 2 June 2017, Woburn Suite, Senate House
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
CALL FOR PAPERS
2017 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Louis Elzevier, bookseller and founder of the publishing house which dominated Dutch printing in the seventeenth century. Elzevier books spread across the known world, through their own vast international trade network and via the many foreign students who read them while studying at Dutch universities. They thus helped shape how the topics represented were understood, learned, taught, read, collected and pirated. The renowned dynasty lives on today through the long collectability of its output and through its namesake, the Elsevier publishing house. This conference explores material evidence of the production and consumption of academic books in the early modern period, based around publications by the Elzeviers and their contemporaries.
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on topics related to early modern scholarly publishing. Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:
The conference will coincide with a display of Senate House Library’s Elzevier collection, one of the largest worldwide.
Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words and a short paragraph of biographical information to Dr Cynthia Johnston at cynthiajohnston@sas.ac.uk by 24th April 2017.
https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/elzeviers-and-their-contemporaries-conference
Ben Jonson’s 1624 masque Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion opens with ‘The Poet, entering on the stage to disperse the argument’. The Spanish Tragedy shows Hieronymo presenting the King with a ‘Copie of the Play’ and an ‘Argument of that they show’ before the performance of Solyman and Perseda. Nowadays we might refer to such synopses or summaries distributed to the audience as ‘programmes’. As they are today, programmes would have been useful during performances for their explanation of the masques’ action and symbolism, and as records or tokens of the performance.
Manuscript summaries of speeches and devices were already being distributed in the late sixteenth century at Elizabethan tilts. Philip Gawdy wrote to his father on 24 November 1587, enclosing ‘ij small books for a token, the one of them was given me that day that they ran at tilt’. Roy Strong draws attention to a Revels account payment ‘for the fair writing of all the devices on the 17 day of November … in two copies for the Queen’.
Synopsis of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queenes, in BL Harley MS 6947, fol. 143r. By permission of the British Library.
Do any programmes survive from masque performances? Some extant manuscript summaries of masques may have their roots in these elusive books. For example, the summary of Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634) now found in BL Harley MS 4931 goes to greater lengths than the printed edition to clarify the masque’s symbolism. It would be easy, however, to confuse these ‘programmes’ with summaries produced for other reasons, such as post-performance accounts, or pre-performance plot proposals for the Court. The summary of Jonson’s Masque of Queenes (1609) now in BL Harley MS 6947, for example, which contains different names for two of the characters, is more likely to have been written for the Court’s inspection before the performance, than copied from a masque programme.
The book which most fits the bill is an undated printed quarto attributed to Aurelian Townshend called The Ante-Masques which, as Karen Britland has recently demonstrated using the evidence of broken type, was printed by Felix Kingston for an entertainment at Oatlands House in August 1635. This quarto summarises the entertainment, including verses from the anti-masques and a ‘Subiect of the Masque’, which explains the masque’s proceedings.
Masques have long been understood as multimedia experiences, incorporating music, gesture, language, stage design and dance. These references to performance programmes reveal that the printed or written page could have also been a part of this experience, and may have been consulted for further information, clarification, or as a record of an ephemeral performance. Unfortunately, these programmes appear to have also lived ephemeral lives themselves.
The Whipple Library’s ‘Science in Print’ seminar examines the
production of printed science books from the early 1500s to the early
1900s over the course of two terms. Following on from the success of
last term’s ‘hand press’ section, we look forward this term to thinking
about mechanized book production in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in a series of 3 sessions led by Drs Sarah Bull and James
Poskett on Wednesday 1, 8 and 15 March from 11.00am to 12.30pm in the
Whipple Old Library (further details below). There will be an additional
workshop at the University Library on Monday 20 March (11.00-12.30) to
look at a broader range of examples of the techniques and materials
discussed during the seminars.
The sessions are open to all (undergraduates, graduates, visitors and
beyond), but places are limited to ensure all have full access to the
examples. Please contact Anna Jones (ahr23@cam.ac.uk) to register your
interest as soon as possible. The sessions are conceived as a series,
but if you can’t manage all three, please indicate which you would like
to attend so we can allocate spaces accordingly.
_More about Science in Print II_
Understanding how a book is made and distributed is vital to the study
of its contents, helping to locate its economic and social context, its
audience, and its historical significance. Using examples from the
Whipple Library’s collection of rare books and periodicals, this
workshop series will explore some bibliographical techniques to identify
and describe the production and distribution of printed material from
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the focus will be
on scientific texts and illustrations, these sessions will be of
interest to book historians in all disciplines, and all are welcome.
I (1 March): Review of the material structure of the book; Introduction
to 19th and early 20th century printing methods.
II (8 March): Illustration methods in the 19th and early 20th
centuries.
III (15 March): Print and technologies of distribution in the 19th and
early 20th centuries.
IV (20 March): Workshop at UL to discuss further examples.
Fascinating to learn last week that three seventeenth-century letters that have been found beneath the floorboards in an attic at Knole House in Kent. The National Trust has reproduced the text of one of the letters, which asks for various goods to be brought from London to a house in Essex:
Mr Bilby, I pray p[ro]vide to be sent too morrow in ye Cart some Greenfish, The Lights from my Lady Cranfeild[es] Cham[ber] 2 dozen of Pewter spoon[es]: one greate fireshovell for ye nursery; and ye o[t]hers which were sent to be exchanged for some of a better fashion, a new frying pan together with a note of ye prises of such Commoditie for ye rest.
Your loving friend
Robert Draper
Octobre 1633
Copthall
The Trust knows exactly how this letter came to Knole, since ‘my Lady Cranfeilde’ married Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, in 1637, and there are documents showing that trunks full of linen, items of furniture and collections of papers were transferred from Copt Hall to Knole in the early eighteenth century.
What I like about the letter is that, both in its contents and in its later history, it is all about the transfer of stuff–the constant, pleasurable yet headache-inducing exchanges that we have with the things in our lives. I also love those ‘greenfish’. The term refers simply to fresh, unsalted fish, but one can’t help wondering whether they weren’t a bit off-colour when they arrived in the cart.