The new Cambridge University Library exhibition opens today. Entitled ‘Curious Objects’, it’s a fascinating display of some of the things that the library accumulated, mostly in a period before the strict demarcation between libraries (for books) and museums (for objects) had kicked in.

Among the curiouser articles on display is a leather boot from Lithuania, which was presented to the library along with a shoe and a copy of the New Testament in Lithuanian by the widow of the translator, Tomasz Ramsaeus. Quite why she thought the library needed this footwear is not fully explained. There is also a ‘luminous trumpet’ or spirit trumpet, for use in a séance, together with some ectoplasm in the form of a ‘cloth-like substance’ (which appears to the untrained eye merely to be cloth). ‘This example was captured during a séance given by the medium Helen Duncan and is part of the archive of the Society for Psychical Research’.

For devotees of literature like me, there’s a tobacco stopper made of wood from the mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare at New Place in Stratford. The catalogue tells us that the tree was cut down by the Reverend Francis Gastrell in the 1750s because he had ‘grown tired of tourists asking to see it’. (That’s one solution to the blight of tourism). Souvenirs made from Shakespeare’s mulberry were apparently commonplace in later eighteenth-century England. A neighbouring cabinet has a beautiful silk bookmark with thirteen strings, each woven with a verse from a medieval Latin prayer to Jesus.

Those of us who suspect that the theory of evolution would not have been formulated had it not been for the proliferation of facial hair in Victorian England will have their views confirmed by another item in the exhibition: a set of cuttings from the beard and whiskers of Frank Chance, who considered himself an exception to Darwin’s rule that ‘when in man the beard differs in colour from the hair of the head … it is … invariably of a lighter tint’, and who wrote to Darwin (with enclosures) to tell him so.

Stone-age tools from Nigeria, wall-paintings from Pompeii, children’s games from Paris, slippers from South India, oracle-bones from Sumatra, spear-heads from Western Australia: there is a whole world of stuff in there. Go see!

A display of the work of J.H. Prynne is available to view on the first floor of the English Faculty, with additional materials in the Faculty Library.

Reading J.H. Prynne celebrates the poet’s role from the beginnings of the British Poetry Revival, as well as his influential part in the pedagogy of this university and the study of English abroad. The display includes poems, prose, correspondence, supervision handouts, a manuscript (facsimile), annotations, as well as responses to the work by longstanding friends and fellow poets. Of especial interest is a new poem in response to Sub Songs (London: Barque Press, 2010) written by John James, entitled On Reading J.H. Prynne’s Sub Songs (Ashburton: QoD Press, 2016), with artwork by Bruce McLean.

Other materials that are not widely available include a copy of the manuscript of Kazoo Dreamboats (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2011), as well as the poet’s annotations to Al-Dente (Cambridge: Face Press, 2014). Both are available to be examined in the Library for the course of the display.

Reading J.H. Prynne will be on display until November.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 30 July – 30 December 2016

www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour

The COLOUR exhibition and its catalogue mark the bicentenary of the Fitzwilliam’s foundation by displaying 150 of the Museum’s illuminated manuscripts. They showcase the collection – the largest and finest museum collection of illuminated manuscripts in existence. They also celebrate the advanced research supported and inspired by the collection.

Two cross-disciplinary projects form the research platform for the COLOUR exhibition and catalogue: Cambridge Illuminations, which is publishing the 4000 illuminated manuscripts and incunabula preserved at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/research/cambridgeilluminations), and MINIARE, which employs non-invasive analytical methods to identify materials and techniques in illuminated manuscripts, and integrates scholarship in the arts, humanities, physical sciences and digital technology (http://www.miniare.org/).

The research and themes presented by the COLOUR exhibition will be explored in a broader, international context during the conference organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum in association with the Departments of Chemistry and History of Art, Manuscripts in the Making: Art and Science, 8-10 December 2016 (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour/conference).

Wednesday 19th October, 12-30-2, Board Room, Faculty of English

Matthew Symonds (University College London/CELL) will introduce the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe Project and the new Digital Bookwheel (http://www.bookwheel.org/viewer/)

Wednesday 16th November, day symposium

‘Scribal Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe’ (Trinity Hall/Magdalene)

Convenors: Dr Alexander Marr and Professor Sachiko Kusukawa

A workshop organised by project members from Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science and Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society. 

Speakers include Professor Peter Stallybrass, Dr Jonathan Gibson, Dr Jan Loop, Dr Angus Vine and Dr Andrew Zurcher.

Wednesday 30 November, 12.30-2, Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington St

A guided tour of the Fitzwilliam exhibition ‘Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts’, in the company of the curator Dr Stella Panayotova.

Places are limited–please email Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003) if you would like to come.

A bicentennial conference: Birkbeck College, University of London, July 20-21, 2017

This conference takes the bicentenary of Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves as an opportunity to reflect on the materiality of the paper archive, and processes of dispersal, scattering and recollection. We welcome proposals on the composition, publication and reception of romantic poetry, particularly those which take into account the metaphorical, material and political implications of the ‘leaf in flight’.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be emailed to sibyllineleaves2017@gmail.com by 15 October 2016.

For more information, please visit the conference’s website: https://sibyllineleaves2017.wordpress.com

Dates: 8-10 December 2016

Venue: Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Lensfield Rd, Cambridge CB2 1EW (map)

The conference will accompany the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary exhibition COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (30 July – 30 December 2016).

This interdisciplinary conference will aim to break new ground in integrating recent advances in the art historical and technical analyses of illuminated manuscripts with research in social and intellectual history.  While Western illuminated manuscripts from the 6th to the 16th centuries will form a major focus of discussion, the conference will also include papers on Byzantine, Islamic and Pre-Columbian material.

For further information, visit http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour/conference

to Elizabeth Savage, a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the CMT and the Faculty of English, who has just been appointed Lecturer in Book History and Communications at the Institute of English Studies in London’s School of Advanced Studies. We wish her every success in this exciting new role.

10 November 2016 – 11 November 2016
Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall

Convenors:  Dr Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge), Prof. Horst Bredekamp (Humboldt University), Dr Christopher Heuer (Clark Art Institute), Dr Pablo Schneider (Humboldt University).

This workshop is part of the Epistemic Images in Early Modernity Research Project, funded by the Cambridge-DAAD Research Hub and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The project seeks to examine how and why images came to play such a decisive role in the production of new knowledge in early modernity. It will do so by bringing together German and Anglophone scholars from art history, Bildwissenschaft, and history of science in a series of workshops to be held in Cambridge, Berlin and Williamstown.

Further details and registration available at
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26883

Two lovely news stories about non-reading this weekend. The first was about how scientists have discovered that you can use terahertz radiation (a band of radiation between microwaves and infrared) to read closed books, to a depth of nine pages. The technology is facilitated by the fact that the pages of a book trap a pocket of air that is twenty microns deep (one-fifth of the thickness of the average human hair). The bending of the rays allows you to distinguish the signals from different pages and to reconstruct the writing on them. Possible applications include: reading letters without opening the envelopes, and reading books that are too fragile to open.

The second story really relates to what literary critics call ‘distant reading’, rather than non-reading. Two intrepid book-scanners have come up with an algorithm for a bestseller. Advance press reports of what exactly the algorithm shows are rather contradictory. Having scanned 5,000 (or 20,000) books, it can pick out future bestsellers with 80% accuracy. Bestsellers address ‘topics grounded in reality, like marriage, love and crime’ rather than making up fantasy worlds. Bestsellers confine themselves to two topics, such as ‘work’ and ‘human closeness’ (or ‘children and guns’, or ‘love and vampires’–vampires being grounded in reality, I assume), each of which should take up 30% of the space. Bestsellers use the word ‘need’ more than the word ‘want’, and their characters spend their time being rather than seeming. I guess we will have to wait and read the book to make sense of this.

Meanwhile a world where unopened bestsellers are written and read by machines is approaching. We may not notice much of a difference.

EXHIBITION ON THE FERRARS OF LITTLE GIDDING IN MAGDALENE COLEGE OLD LIBRARY

SUNDAY 4th SEPTEMBER to SUNDAY 11th SEPTEMBER
(closed Monday 5th)

2pm to 5pm daily.  Open to all, free of charge.

THE FERRAR FAMILY was influential in a broad sphere of seventeenth-century life, and beyond: they were Deputies of the Virginia Trading Company – they were Founders of the Anglican Community at Little Gidding (made famous again in the twentieth-century by T S Eliot’s Four Quartets) – they were
entrusted with the posthumous publication of the work of the great metaphysical poet, George Herbert – they designed and constructed Harmonies of the Gospels – and they were collectors of prints, artworks, books and music.

THE FERRAR FAMILY PAPERS, housed at Magdalene College, provide an intriguing and illuminating window into their world.

THE EXHIBITION takes place in conjunction with the conference, The Ferrars, hosted by Magdalene English Department and the Historic Libraries of Magdalene College, to mark the completion of the project to conserve the Ferrar papers and prints.

Further information:

Dr M E J Hughes

litfest@magd.cam.ac.uk

Lecturer, Fellow and Pepys Librarian
Magdalene College