Easter Term 2013, Fridays 2-4 (10 May, 17 May and 24 May)

Trinity College, Junior Parlour

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a new forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. It is hoped to hold a series of workshops annually in the Easter Term, each focusing upon a particular issue, and usually explored through a pair of short presentations and discussion.

10 May           Liturgical texts in their manuscript contexts

Henry Parkes   ‘Visual hierarchy in eleventh-century “liturgical” texts’

Erik Niblaeus ‘Twelfth-Century Breviary Fragments in the Swedish National Archives’

17 May            The process of development in script

David Ganz     ‘Irish cursive script: scribes, styles and development’

Chris Voth      ‘The manuscript evidence for the beginnings of English Square Minuscule’

24 May            The palaeography of musical notation

Eduardo Aubert ‘The notions of pure and mixed (neumatic) scripts in the light of tenth- and eleventh-century sources from Burgundy’

Giovanni Varelli ‘Ransacking the “toolbox” of tenth-century Italian music scribes: reflections on a first survey’

All welcome. For further information, contact the workshop convenors, Tessa Webber (mtjw2@cam.ac.uk) and David Ganz (ganz.palaeography@gmail.com)

The Junior Parlour is on T staircase, Blue Boar Court, located on the opposite side of Trinity Street from the main entrance to the College (next door to Brora). Enter from Trinity Street through the covered archway; go up steps on the right. The entrance to T staircase is half-way up the steps on the right.

Thursdays at 5:30pm, room SR-24, Faculty of English, 9 West Road

Thursday 2 May

Robert Priest (History, Cambridge), ‘Writing to Ernest Renan: Fan Mail, Hate Mail and the Historical Jesus in Nineteenth-Century France’

Thursday 16 May

Lucy Razzall (English, Cambridge), ‘Thinking Inside the Box: Containers and the Materiality of Early Modern Texts’

All welcome. Wine & soft drinks will be served at the start of the seminar.

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)

I’ve been yearning for an excuse, however tenuous, to post this picture of a friend’s mouth-watering library of poetry, but I’ve been completely unable to think of one. So here it is, on no other pretext than that, in a rain-sodden, snow-drifted UK, spring might at last have sprung…

  The organisers of last September’s CMT ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference were touched to receive this stitched postcard  (left; apologies for the blurry photo) from one of the participants shortly afterwards. I was reminded of this lovely thank-you note today after reading the latest blog post from Edinburgh-based writer and designer Kate Davies, in which she shares some beautiful pictures of her collection of machine-embroidered postcards made in France and Switzerland in the early twentieth century. As Davies explains, these sentimental greetings cards were especially popular with British troops serving in France, and surviving examples with their handwritten inscriptions offer poignant glimpses into lives from the past. Unlike the postcard above, these mass-produced material texts were not stamped and sent in the regular postal service, but transported in military mail pouches, and so were more protected in transit. The delicacy of their voile overlays and the bright colours of their jolly floral designs reinforce their optimistic stitched messages (‘A KISS FROM FRANCE’; ‘We are all right’), and must have offered a striking contrast with the bleakness of the front line.

A few of the material texts I encountered during a few days spent in Venice. Here, writers are protesting against the closure of yet more bookshops; the nineteenth-century writer Niccolò Tommaseo dominates a square with books apparently tumbling out from his coat (his statue is affectionately known as ‘cacalibri’); and there’s a shop where a woman can personalize an apron or bib with a calligraphic name in less than a minute!

Today sees the publication by Cambridge University Press of a new edition of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Censorship has always been a key part of the story of Lawrence’s career as a writer, but this edition reveals for the first time how much it affected the poems as well as the novels.

In particular, a sequence of poems that Lawrence wrote in 1916, in which he was fiercely critical of the imperialist ventures of the British army in the Middle East, was rendered meaningless by the refusal of publishers (in the wake of the banning of The Rainbow) to print explicit references to places such as Salonika and Mesopotamia. According to the volume’s editor, Christopher Pollnitz, early readers would have ‘found little that they could understand in these poems beyond two facts, that they were by D.H. Lawrence and referred obliquely to war’.

You can read more about this historic publication, which rounds off CUP’s 40-volume Lawrence edition, here.

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

The Faculty of English wishes to appoint a University Lecturer in Literature and the Material Text to 1500, from 1 September 2013.

The appointee will be expected to have a good first degree and a doctorate in a relevant subject area and possess the ability to work as part of a team. He/she will also be expected to demonstrate evidence of ability to engage in high-level research, with publications and participation in scholarly activity commensurate with stage of career, and to teach effectively at all relevant levels. The appointee should also be able to teach in related fields in English literature and play an effective role in the life and work of the Faculty as a whole, including academic administration.

Appointments made at University Lecturer level will be permanent, subject to a probationary period of five years.

Further particulars for this post, with information about the Faculty, and details of how to apply can be found online, together with the University Application Form.

Quote Reference: GG26472                                                       Closing Date: 26 April 2013

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

The Faculty of English wishes to appoint a University Lecturer in Literature and the Material Text from 1500, from 1 September 2013.

The appointee will be expected to have a good first degree and a doctorate in a relevant subject area and possess the ability to work as part of a team. He/she will also be expected to demonstrate evidence of ability to engage in high-level research, with publications and participation in scholarly activity commensurate with stage of career, and to teach effectively at all relevant levels. The appointee should also be able to teach in related fields in English literature and play an effective role in the life and work of the Faculty as a whole, including academic administration.

Appointments made at University Lecturer level will be permanent, subject to a probationary period of five years.

Further particulars for this post, with information about the Faculty, and details of how to apply can be found online, together with the University Application Form.

Quote Reference: GG26462                                                       Closing Date: 26 April 2013

Thanks to Dan Woodford for drawing my attention to Nina Katchadourian’s ‘Sorted Books’ project–a series of photographs of books with their titles juxtaposed so that they form micro-narratives, poems, jokes… now published in book-form.

Brainpickings quotes Katchadourian: ‘I am always paying attention to the physical qualities of the books, and I try to work with their particular attributes as much as possible. The size of a book carries temperament and tonality, as does the way the text sits on the spine. A heavy volume with large text on the spine, for example, might be exuberant, urgent, pushy; a small typeface might communicate a voice that’s exacting, shy, insecure or furtive’.

And the overwhelming impression that I get from the photos is of a clash of visual voices. Each title moves things in an unexpected direction, as the books agree or disagree among themselves, marshalled by the wit of the artist. I wonder what conversations are going on, unsuspected, on my own bookshelves?

Much debate in the UK about the government’s new proposals for press regulation, in the wake of multiple scandals involving the hacking of mobile phones by journalists desperate for a headline. The plans, agreed by leaders of the three main political parties in meetings that took place in the wee small hours yesterday morning, create a new independent regulatory body with powers to force apologies and exact fines from newspapers that misbehave.

While politicians are celebrating their success in bringing about this deal, the red-top newspapers have been dusting down Winston Churchill’s dictum that ‘a free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize’, and wondering whether the new watchdog will become an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’. As far as their pundits are concerned, the legislation is nothing more or less than revenge for the press’s exposure (from 2009) of how MPs had been fiddling their expenses claims, which seriously dented public trust in the political classes.

And meanwhile everyone is mystified about how the legislation will apply to online publications, including blogs…

Sara Impey, who spoke at the CMT’s ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference last September, has written a review of the event for The Quilter. You can read a PDF of the document here. And if you’d like to revisit our report on the conference, click here.

Acknowledgment: This article first appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of The Quilter, the quarterly membership magazine of The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles: www.quiltersguild.org.uk