Here’s a holiday snap from northern France: a carved stone panel showing the four evangelists, from the mid sixteenth century. While it’s common to see the writers of the gospels holding books and accompanied by their symbols (from L-R here: Mark with a winged lion, John with an eagle, Luke with a winged bull, and Matthew with an angel), I was struck that this panel depicts all four of them caught in the very act of writing. Matthew (whose gospel was for a long time believed to be the earliest) balances a scroll on his knee, while the angel holds up his ink pot. Luke makes use of a lectern and the other two work with much more compact-looking codices. The carver included scroll flourishes behind each figure – and if the panel was once polychromed, presumably they bore words which could be read.

Spotted on a bookstall in Nice… who was the Demoiselle Vinet de Gray who recorded her thoughts in such redoubtable script?

Saint Isaac of Syria on the pleasures of silent reading, as quoted by Alberto Manguel:

“I practice silence, that the verses of my readings and prayers should fill me with delight. And when the pleasure of understanding them silences my tongue, then, as in a dream, I enter a state when my senses and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”

In Michaelmas Term 2014 the English Faculty at the University of Oxford (click here for a map) will be hosting a cross-period, interdisciplinary seminar series on literature and material culture. The seminars will take place on alternate Tuesday evenings at 5.15pm in the Faculty’s History of the Book Room throughout the autumn term. Drinks and discussion will follow each seminar.

Across the term, established academics (including Dr Adam Smyth, Dr Paula Byrne, and Dr Vike Plock) and graduate speakers (from Canada, UCL and Oxford) will explore three main threads: material texts, clothing in literature, and object-oriented literary biography. We hope to see you there!

Please see literaturematerial.wordpress.com for more information, or contact Claire Johnstone and Hannah Ryley at literaturematerial@gmail.com

Our prediction that the ‘intelligence services’ would have to go back to using snail mail, following the revelations of the extent and relative ease of electronic interception, has been fulfilled. Yesterday the Guardian reported that the German government had bought a new consignment of typewriters, now cutting-edge technology in the war on snooping. Only problem is, they seem a little bit embarrassed at the fact that this news has leaked out…

We are a little late with the news of the waxwork image of Jane Austen that has been created with the help of a ‘forensic scientist’ working for the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. This is the closest ‘anyone has come to the real Jane Austen for 200 years’, according to press reports. Commentary feels superfluous here–let’s just be grateful, and head for the gift shop!

Friday 27 June 2014, SR 24, Faculty of English, 12.30-2

Randall McLeod (University of Toronto)

‘The Birth of Italics’

Randall McLeod’s lecture details the printing of the first book in italics, Aldo Manuzio’s 1501 Vergil, with type created for him by Francesco da Bologna. McLeod will offer not a reading of Vergil, but a reading of Book.  Printing began before the fount was complete, and the coming on stream of a dozen ligatures during production reveals the printing schedule: it was not in the narrative order imposed on the book by binding.  Aldo’s schedule is rendered even more precise by readings of the blank tops and bottoms of some pages (as the title page or colophon), for often they are not really blank, but are printed with type, like the other parts of these pages, but printed blind — that is, without ink. What do these invisible texts say?  Why are they present? And where do they come from?

… this copy of the works of Charles I, a tiny little book now falling apart at the seams. It claims to have been printed in 1657 in the Hague by Samuel Browne, but in fact this is a false imprint and the book was really published in London. The reason for the duplicity is obvious–during the interregnum you were not supposed to be printing the Reliquiæ Sanctæ Carolinæ (the relics, or textual remains, of the holy Charles). To publish these writings, and in particular the Eikon Basilike or ‘Royal Portrait’ that supposedly set out the King’s pious responses to his tribulations during the 1640s, leading up to his execution, was an oppositional gesture. To own these works was oppositional, too, andthis copy comes with a handwritten inscription, ‘In perpetuam rebellionis infamiam / 1648’–‘Concerning the perpetual infamy of the rebellion’. (This looks like a parodic inversion of ‘Ad perpetuum rei memoriam’–‘as a perpetual remembrance of the matter’–a classical formula relating to things that deserved to be recorded forever).

What I really like about this copy, though, is the mark of ownership. On a flyleaf, the book declares itself the property of one William Sanford, 1658. Then it adds ‘Ex dono pecuniæ suæ / Pretium 3s 4d’–‘The gift of his own money / Price 3 shillings 4 pence’. People routinely gave books as presents in this period, and recorded these acts of generosity in ‘ex dono’ inscriptions, often with flowery adjectives describing the firm friendship between giver and recipient. This purchaser says the book was the gift not of a friend but of his purse. Was he disgruntled? Or was he proud?

The Times Higher Education Supplement reports that the Warburg Institute library is under threat again, as the University of London heads off to court to contest the terms of a deed of trust made in 1944.

Anyone who has worked in the library, based in the Institute’s building in Woburn Square, will know how special it is. With vast amounts of material, much of it available nowhere else in the UK, and instantly accessible on open shelves, it’s a goldmine for scholar working on the history of European art and literature.

The Warburg apparently runs a £500,000 annual deficit–which is presumably small change for an institution of the size of the University of London. Let’s hope that the administrators can be made to see sense.

16-17 April 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

Across the colonial world, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a flourishing of newspapers and periodicals – some fleeting newssheets, others enduring forums of discussion, some published by the colonial state, others by enterprising editors and entrepreneurs. In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the role of these print media in colonial societies. This, however, has tended to focus on the content rather than the form, mining newspapers for information rather than considering their constitution. What’s more, it has tended to focus on certain publications and regions at the expense of others. This conference brings together scholars working in different disciplines on the colonial societies of Africa, the Middle East, East and South East Asia to consider colonial newspapers in a comparative perspective. It will consider the newspaper, the journal and the magazine as tools of education and government whose owners, contributors and readers often thought of these media as edifying publications.  They were purveyors not just of knowledge about their own societies and the wider world, but also of political prescriptions, linguistic conventions, and ethical norms, which reinforced notions of the self and the other, the state and society, modernity and its lexicons. Together, we hope to encourage enduring and inter-disciplinary conversation amongst scholars about the place newspapers, magazines, and journals played in the constitution of vernacular modernity in various locales, and to lay down the foundations for a new global history of print in the long twentieth century.

Conference panels will focus on the following themes:

• Newspapers and periodicals as a didactic space or ‘encyclopaedia’
• Authorship, editorial policy, financing and the legal framework in which newspapers and periodicals in the colonial world operated, particularly relating to censorship, sedition, defamation and libel laws.
• The relationship of periodicals to the colonial state and the role of the newspaper in shaping modes of political engagement and mobilisation, and understandings of the public.
• Language and the role of newspapers and periodicals in standardising and popularising vernacular language and new lingua francas.
• The visual in colonial newspapers (illustration, caricature, photography, typography, lay-out).

A comparative perspective, engaging with the methodological questions at hand in several settings, is encouraged.  Papers for the conference will be pre-circulated to allow for maximum discussion, and participants will be asked to have their papers ready by 1 February 2015.

The organisers, Andrew Arsan, Emma Hunter and Leslie James, welcome abstracts of no more than 250 words in .doc or PDF format to the following email address:
newspapersinthecolonialworld@gmail.com

Please include a position, institutional affiliation, and email address in your abstract.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is: 15 June 2014.