for 2013-14 can be accessed by clicking here. We’ve tried to round up everything that’s been going on, and have added a new section of relevant publications by members of the Centre, which is quite some list.
Last year was pretty busy, but I have a feeling that the coming year is going to trump it–see the conclusion of the report for a few of our plans.
17 October
Supplementary:
31 October
Supplementary:
14 November
Supplementary:
28 November
Supplementary:
Seminars in the History of Material Texts
Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd
9 October — [no seminar, but please come to the Centre for Material Texts Welcome Party, English Faculty Social Space, 4-5.30]
23 October — James Daybell (University of Plymouth) ‘Gendered Archival Practices and the Future Lives of Letters’
6 November — Discussion of David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (2013)
Respondents: Clare Pettitt and Mark Turner (King’s College, London)
20 November — Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University), ‘Creating a “National” Archive of the English Reformation: The Parker Society and its Legacy’
All welcome.
This international conference is the result of an AHRC Networking grant, which has brought together academics and curators from Britain, Russia, and The Netherlands to consider Dutch-Russian exchange through the most significant moment in Russian print culture of the early modern period: Peter the Great’s establishment of a European-style school of printmaking in Moscow. Scholars from The State Hermitage Museum, The State Russian Museum, The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge will discuss the dynamism of Dutch publishing in the late seventeenth century, precedents in Williamite imagery, and the emergence and nature of Europeanised prints in the genres of portraiture, city views and folk prints. This timely consideration of Russia’s historic relationship with Europe will be contextualised by Sir Anthony Brenton KCMG, British Ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008.
Please note that there are a number of free places reserved for students.
Contact: mmh43@cam.ac.uk
To register: https://globalnetworksinprint.eventbrite.co.uk
THE GIANT BIBLES OF TWELFTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
A series of three lectures by Christopher de Hamel, Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
The great Latin Bibles, in huge multiple volumes, are by far the largest and most spectacular manuscripts commissioned in England in the twelfth century, decorated with magnificent illuminated pictures. The lectures will consider the purpose of such books and why they were suddenly so fashionable and also why they passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.
Lecture 1: Monday, 27 October 2014 18.15-19.30
The Bury Bible
The first lecture will look principally at the Bible of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, now in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The manuscript, commissioned in the time of Anselm, abbot of Bury 1121-48, is usually dated to around 1130. It was decorated by the hand of Master Hugo, the earliest professional artist in England whose name is known. The lecture will also examine the larger questions of where exemplars and materials were found for the Bible, and at the phenomenal expense of such undertakings.
Lecture 2: Thursday, 30 October 2014 18.15-19.30
The Winchester Bible
The Winchester Bible is still in the cathedral where it was commissioned, doubtless by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester 1129-71. It too was illuminated by professional painters, who apparently also worked on frescoes in Spain. The lecture will take advantage of the recent disbinding of the manuscript to make new observations about its production, and to suggest new dates for the different phases of the work, undertaken in parallel with a second (but lesser) giant Bible from Winchester, now in the Bodleian Library.
Lecture 3: Monday, 3 November 2014 18.15-19.30
The Lambeth Bible
Despite its fame and quality of illumination, nothing has been hitherto known about the Lambeth Bible’s original owner or patron. The lecture will propose that it was commissioned around 1148 for Faversham Abbey by King Stephen, king of England 1135-54. The lecture will end with observations of why giant Bibles passed out of fashion in England during the second half of the twelfth century.
FREE ADMISSION
18.15 in the Conference Centre
British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
Private Eye‘s ‘Pseuds Corner’ this week picks up an advert from the London Review of Books, for ‘special limited first edition’ copies of Ian McEwan’s new novel The Children Act:
‘Comprising 100 copies only, printed on Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Seventy-five are quarter-bound in Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin, the sides letterpress-printed on Passport Sage Felt with a design by Edward Bawden and numbered 1 to 75. Twenty-five copies, number I to xxv, are fully-bound in the same leather and contain three facsimile pages of notebook manuscript and one page of hand-corrected typescript from an early draft of the novel, all supplied by the author. Full leather £350 (sold out); Quarter £175’.
It’s always startling to be reminded that the modern book world, apparently so open and democratic, is in fact full of status distinctions. There is the basic distinction between paperback and hardback, which seems fairly trivial but has significant implications–in the way it creates a pecking order of early readers and latecomers, or its tendency to separate formal, sit-down reading from informal reading-on-the-hoof. Now we also have ebook editions, bought over a wire, weightless, malleable, accessible from numerous platforms, and so divorcing the experience of reading from any particular physical form. But as we come to terms with this new technology, our culture is still busily producing leather-bound books with mock-manuscript fragments tucked into them–not to mention typescripts with marks from the author’s hand. What should we make of this? More interestingly, perhaps, what would Ian McEwan make of this?
An early reader of a 1570 Euclid — possibly Sir Thomas Tresham — learns the hard lesson that neither number nor magnitude have any materiality. For more on this annotated copy, see our Gallery page.
Throughout the process of scholarly research, tangents seem to reveal themselves all the time. They quickly tempt you away from your original point of focus and offer the possibility of a story entirely different from the one you were looking for. When I came across a set of annotations in a Cambridge University Library copy of Henry Billingsley’s 1570 edition of Euclid’s Elements, I was confronted with one such tangent, which I felt compelled not to ignore.
A ‘pop-up’ from Billingsley’s edition of Euclid; CUL Adams 4.57.1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
I was looking at the book as part of the early stages of my PhD research on the intersections between early modern mathematical thinking and the period’s drama. I felt that to truly understand the intellectual history I was interested in, I needed to learn its content myself, and to put myself through the kind of education an aspiring mathematician in Elizabethan England might have had. I decided to do a quick survey of every mathematical book held in the Munby rare books room, so long as it was printed in London between 1500 and 1650. By far the most beautiful and ambitious of these books was Billingsley’s: a massive volume printed at great cost and featuring what might be England’s first ‘pop-ups’. I quickly found unusual handwritten annotations: three sentences placed at the beginning of the volume’s lengthy preface by John Dee and another three at the end. Their mixture of Spanish and Latin at first made them opaque, but the signature underneath the first set of annotations captivated me: ‘Tresame prisoner’. These were the writings of a criminal.
Annotations in Tresham’s Euclid, CUL Adams 4.57.1. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
It quickly became obvious that this ‘criminal’ was Sir Thomas Tresham, a gentleman architect and builder from Northamptonshire perhaps best remembered for his beautiful and symbolic triangular building, Rushton Lodge. In the 1580s, Tresham was placed under house arrest in Hoxton for Catholic recusancy, and his son would later be involved in the Gunpowder Plot. The date of his imprisonment matched with the date that the author of the annotations had provided (‘19-mar-1587’), and ‘Tresame’ was a version of his surname, adjusted to bring out his obsession with the number three, especially the three-in-one of the Trinity. The copy of Billingsley’s Euclid I was reading, then, had surely once belonged to Tresham, and I was seeing fascinating evidence of his own treatment of this book.
Rushton Triangular Lodge, Northamptonshire.
The simple bit (identifying the author) done, I now needed to decipher what Tresham’s annotations meant, and why they existed at all. Putting my small Spanish and less Latin to work, I was able to slowly piece together fragments of quotation. The single Latin sentence proved easy to find in the Vulgate Bible—it had been lifted directly from Hebrews 12:1-2—and one sentence of the Spanish was helpfully preceded by the word ‘Seneca’. To find its exact location in Seneca’s work, though, I had to translate the Spanish into English and then again into (very shaky) Latin, searching online editions of all Seneca’s writings in both languages to see if I would hit upon it somewhere. Eventually I did, and was able to pin the sentence to Epistulae morales 85.41: ‘Grief, poverty, indignities, imprisonment, exile: these should be feared everywhere, but when they come upon the wise man, they are tamed’. Upon the recommendation of my supervisor, Gavin Alexander, I began poring over the rest of the Epistulae morales: it seemed probable that if one annotation was a quotation from there, others might be also. After hours of trawling, I managed to trace all but two of Tresham’s annotations to the Epistulae morales.
More Tresham annotations in CUL Adams 4.57.1. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Tresham’s Spanish constructions, however, vary in their degree of translational exactness: sometimes they are close to Seneca’s original Latin, sometimes they are very loose. This, I believe, provides the key to understanding precisely what Tresham was doing that day whilst under house arrest in London. The dull hours of imprisonment must have passed slowly, and offered Tresham a quiet opportunity to sit down and read. The location of his annotations suggest that he read all of Dee’s preface, and used it as a springboard for recalling snatches of his previous reading (Seneca, the Bible) and for practising his foreign languages (Latin, Spanish). He almost certainly did not have a copy of Seneca with him, and he probably did not own a Spanish edition at all. That he chose to write such snatches of Stoic wisdom in a book of mathematics is surely no coincidence. As a devotee of architecture, Tresham attributed great significance to lines, angles and numbers, and reading Dee’s words on the importance of mathematical labour to a truly spiritual existence seems to have inspired his own philosophical reflection. In his annotations, mathematics becomes a grander tale of humanity, brotherhood, life and death. ‘What good is there for me in knowing how to divide an estate into parts, if I do not know how to split it with my brother?’ ‘You know what a straight line is, but how does it benefit you if you do not know what is straight in life?’ (Epistulae morales, 88.11, 13).
Such tangential thoughts perhaps arose from Tresham’s unnerving personal circumstances, and just as he must have been unsure of the details of his future, so must we remain uncertain of the details of his past. My narrative is, I hope, convincing, but it is also necessarily hypothetical. This is the kind of thrill that work with material texts can offer: annotations and marginalia in books offer us flirtatious glimpses of a narrative, but from the physical evidence alone that narrative almost always remains incomplete. It is up to our imaginations to fill the gaps.
Joe Jarrett
If your library has a subscription, you can read Joe Jarrett’s article on the Tresham Euclid here.
A Radio 4 documentary has just been discussing the work of Adam Lowe and his company Factum Arte, which–in the breaks between 3D-printing concrete sculptures for Anish Kapoor–has created a digital scan of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The scan allows you to see every scar and fissure in the skin upon which the map was drawn–not the skin of a calf, apparently, but of a seriously large cow. And the facsimile recreation of the surface lets visitors run their hands across the map for the first time. (A second-best option is to run your eyes over it on the Mappa Mundi website here).
There’s a film that shows the scanning in progress here, and for a commentary by Jerry Brotton, who has been collaborating with Factum Arte, click here.
The Oxford edition of the Collected Works of Thomas Traherne has available a fixed-term part-time post of research assistant in early modern European bibliography.
The post consists of72 hourswhich can be worked flexibly (e.g. 6 hours a week over 12 weeks), by agreement with the general editor,between October and December 2014.The rate of pay is £12 per hour.
The Oxford Traherne, under the general editorship of Dr Julia Smith and under contract with Oxford University Press, is the first fully annotated edition of all known works by the seventeenth-century poet, spiritual writer, and theologian Thomas Traherne. The project is currently conducting a census of surviving copies of Traherne’s early printed works: the focus of this so far has been on UK and North American libraries, and the role of the research assistant will be to extend it to European libraries.
Candidates should have at least a Master’s degree in early modern literature or a related field, and expertise in early modern bibliography or the history of the book. The research assistant will also need to have a working knowledge of at least two European languages and some familiarity with special collections in European libraries. A high standard of accuracy, and a willingness to liaise actively with librarians will be essential for this task; a knowledge of Latin would also be desirable, but is not essential.
The work of the research assistant will be based in Oxford, and will be overseen by the general editor, Dr Julia Smith, and Dr Sarah Apetrei, a volume editor. It will also involve collaboration with the project’s existing research assistant, Dr Austen Saunders. The post is supported by the John Fell Fund, and the grant holder is Dr Sarah Apetrei.
The closing date for applications is 1 October 2014. There is no application form; please send applications, including a CV, an account of relevant experience, and the name of one referee to Dr Julia Smith at julia.smith@ell.ox.ac.uk. Applicants should also arrange for their referee to submit a reference by the closing date. Interviews will be held in Oxford, probably in the week beginning 13 October 2014, and shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete a short bibliographical exercise in preparation for the interview.
For further information, please contact Dr Julia Smith at julia.smith@ell.ox.ac.uk or Dr Sarah Apetrei at sarah.apetrei@keble.ox.ac.uk.