Lincoln College, Oxford – 23-24 March 2015

An international conference to consider past, present, and future critical trends in Donne Studies.

Plenary Speakers: Achsah Guibbory (Barnard College, Columbia University), David Marno (University of California, Berkeley).

Proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of Donne are warmly invited. We are particularly interested in papers that reflect upon their own methodologies, or engage critically with the roles that have been, or should be, played by theory, religious history, rhetoric, form, genre, scholarly editions, biography, and book history. Please send proposals to peter.mccullough@lincoln.ox.ac.uk by 1 October 2014, and write to the same address for registration details.

There will be bursaries available for registered students.

See further http://www.cems-oxford.org/donne

yet again… last week we learnt that ebook sales are predicted to overtake physical book sales in 2018, although apparently all the figures are skewed by Amazon’s refusal to release sales figures for Kindle books. Then the Guardian ran a report on how Foyles, the world-famous bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has moved to new premises in the hope of continuing to sell serious numbers of physical books. (The online version comes with a rather nice time-lapse video).

Meanwhile the scholarly folks at SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, have been having a vociferous online discussion about whether their journal should accept books for review in electronic formats. The interventions have really run the gamut. Ebooks are inconvenient because they (sometimes) don’t have page numbers, or they don’t reproduce images well, or they don’t allow sufficiently easy access to notes; physical books are hopeless because they are so cumbersome, or because you have to keep on typing in the long urls they supply as footnote references. Ebooks are cutting-edge technology, set to replace the printed book just as the codex replaced the scroll; ebooks as we currently know them are anything but cutting-edge, and are just a stop-gap which will be replaced by something far better in the coming decades. We ought to have physical books to test-drive if physical books are what is being sold; we ought to accept ebooks so that we can point out the deficiencies of the format to authors, publishers and readers. The cat is clearly among the pigeons. Who knows what will be left when the feathers have stopped flying?

Monday, 2 June 2014, 17:00 – 18:30

Location: CRASSH Meeting Room, Alison Richard Building

This Skype meeting with Nicholas Jenkins, creator of ‘Kindred Britain‘, will offer participants an opportunity to reflect on the project and to consider the potential of digital work to transform our understanding of histories and cultures. Organised by the Digital Humanities Network and the Centre for Material Texts.

Kindred Britain is a network of nearly 30,000 individuals — many of them iconic figures in British culture — connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation. It is a vision of the nation’s history as a giant family affair. For example, see how Jane Austen was related to Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde.

Nicholas Jenkins is associate professor of English at Stanford University, specializing in the study of modern and contemporary poetry.

Participation in the seminar is free but spaces are limited. If you would like to come, please register in advance by clicking on the online registration link here. Participants are asked to spend some time exploring the ‘Kindred Britain’ site in preparation for seminar discussion. You should consult Jenkins’s online essay “Originating Kindred Britain”.

20 and 28 June 2014, Keynes Library, Birkbeck College.

The Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, has been digitising its manuscripts–including lots of medieval devotional books and chronicles, copies of poems by Chaucer, Langland, Lydgate, and Donne, plus gems such as the notebook kept by Milton which includes his drafts of Lycidas and a first go at Paradise Lost (in dramatic form). You don’t have to be able to read old hands or foreign languages to appreciate them–many are illustrated, including an elegant volume described as ‘Drawings of Roman Sculpture Etc’ (R.17.3), dated to the 1580s.

You can access the full list of ‘virtual manuscripts’ by clicking here.

I’ve just caught up with the inspirational video that the British Library has made to celebrate the opening of its new ‘Newsroom’, which brings its enormous archive of newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century to the present, to the main library St Pancras. (Previously, the newspapers were hived off in a separate facility at Colindale in North London). In fact, in a typically modern paradox, the real newspapers are being moved to Boston Spa in Yorkshire, where they can be preserved in a low-oxygen environment, while digital reproductions are made available in London. (Apparently the paper versions will be available on request).

What is most wonderful/shocking about the video, for me, is the fact that it features *digital* microfilm readers. Anyone who has visited a county record office will be familiar with these frustrating machines, to which you are directed whenever the original material is deemed to fragile for consultation. They are something like those old-fashioned, two-spool tape-recorders that disappeared from view at some point in the 1960s or 70s (the ones that bulk large in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation and Samuel Beckett’s one-man-play Krapp’s Last Tape). The first challenge is to work out how to get the reel onto the spool, so that you can start to move through the document–usually you begin by putting it on upside-down, or back-to-front, and you have to do various mental and physical gyrations to correct your mistake. Then, when you’ve sorted that out and found the right page, you’re confronted with a depressingly grimy image that gives you an instant headache when you try to read it (see below for a sample). The idea that new technology might render the whole experience palatable or even pleasurable is extraordinary–and might just do something to stop all that celluloid ending up in landfill.

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 a pair of short presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

Convenors: Teresa Webber, Orietta Da Rold, Suzanne Paul and David Ganz

For further details, email mtjw2@cam.ac.uk

Friday 2 May 2014, Cambridge University Library (Keynes Room), 2-4pm

Scribal Identification and its Hazards

Benjamin Pohl, ‘The hand of Robert of Torigni: methods of scribal identification’

Richard Beadle, ‘CUL MS Ee.1.12: the hand(s?) of James Ryman’

Friday 16 May 2014, Cambridge University Library (Milstein Seminar Room), 2-4pm

Transcription and its Hazards: Interpreting Scribal Practice

This workshop will focus upon various signs and penstrokes traced by scribes that are, by convention, either ignored in transcription or interpreted and recorded in a standardised form despite uncertainties about their function. Two informal presentations will focus upon vernacular manuscripts of the later middle ages, but it is hoped that discussion will broaden to include any such issue, whether encountered in copies of Latin or vernacular texts, and in manuscripts of any period.

Anna Dorofeeva: on diacritical marks and other problems of transcription posed by manuscripts of the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik and its later re-workings (for the Kaiserchronik project, see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/staff/kaischron.html)

Daniel Wakelin: on the use, possible function(s), and editorial treatment of the ‘otiose strokes’ with which scribes completed certain letters or letter combination in late-medieval copies of Middle English texts

Friday 23 May 2014: please note the Inaugural Colloquium of the Network for the Study of Caroline Minuscule to be held in the Cambridge University Library, Milstein Seminar Room, 9 am – 6 pm. Full details and information about registration may be found at http://carolinenetwork.weebly.com/

There’s much online buzzing this evening about the purported discovery (on eBay!) of Shakespeare’s dictionary–a copy of Baret’s An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie, first published in 1580, supposedly annotated by the playwright. I haven’t had time to read the lavish publication in which two intrepid antiquarian booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, justify their claim. So I don’t know quite what has led them to the extraordinary conclusion that they have uncovered a literary goldmine. But I have spent an hour ogling the high-quality digital images that they have generously supplied on the project’s beautifully-produced website. On the basis of a brief look, I’m happy to report that we can all go to bed at the usual time. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the annotator of the volume.

The dictionary is certainly thickly annotated–as are many dictionaries of the period. One of the main jobs that the annotations do is to make up for missing entries in the text, supplying English headings or lemmas where they are lacking, and sometimes offering translations, particularly into French. This reader wants to improve their book–as many early modern readers did. And this reader wants to be able to speak French, copying down sometimes quite obscure idioms and phrases in order to get the trick of the language. So the book will be useful for those who want to study the process of language-acquisition in the sixteenth century. And it will delight those, like me, who love to work with annotated books. Beyond that, it may prove to be something of a damp squib.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

24 April — Mark Towsey (History, Liverpool)

1 May — Peter Mandler (History, Cambridge)

‘Good Reading for the Million: The Advent of the Mass-Market Non-Fiction Paperback’

15 May — Laura Moretti (AMES, Cambridge)

‘Broadsides in Early Modern Japan: The Osaka Publisher Shioya Kihei and his ‘Kobanzuke”

29 May — Hildegard Diemberger and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

‘Palm-leaf, paper, Digital Dharma; Exploring the Materiality of Tibetan Buddhist Texts and their Transformations’

All welcome.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)