University of Cambridge, Faculty of English

10-11 September 2018

Under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts and the Writing Britain Conference Series

The introduction of paper to the West was a major technological innovation that transformed the ways in which texts of all kinds were transmitted. Having proved itself over many centuries as the intellectual fabric of Asian and Middle Eastern societies, the medium continued to demonstrate an extraordinary capacity for adaptation and diversification when it arrived in Europe. The stuff of playing cards, votive offerings and amulets, packaging and toilet tissue, wall-coverings and quilt-linings, paper was also crucial to the development of quotidian, democratized literacies and to the unfurling of national bureaucracies and capitalist economies. Light (in a single sheet) yet heavy (in a massive folio), durable yet fragile and throwaway, paper’s ability to combine contrary qualities and its willingness to enter into alliance with other substances and technologies helped it seep into every sphere of daily life. Paper’s smooth surface masked fundamental changes in substance—in particular the move from the rag-paper of the late medieval and early modern periods to the wood-pulp paper of modernity. Its protean surface facilitated deep continuities and extraordinary ruptures in European cultural history.

A spate of recent publications has demonstrated the urgency of getting to grips with paper, at a turning-point in our relations with it. The aim of Paper-stuff is to meet this urgency. It will bring together experts in the field, theorists of material culture and representatives of a variety of disciplines with a stake in the subject, so as to understand paper’s empire in the West. Paper-stuff will also take stock of rapidly evolving technologies available for the analysis of paper.

Plenary speakers:
Professor Pádraig Ó Macháin (University College Cork)
Linda Toigo (paper artist)

For the draft programme, click here.

To register, click here.

For further information please contact one of the organisers at the e-mail below.
Dr Orietta Da Rold (od245@cam.ac.uk)
Dr Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk)

Sponsor: The British Academy

Hackles were raised yesterday about journalistic independence, as it was reported that London’s Evening Standard newspaper–now given away for free to commuters, and found in multiple discarded copies in every railway carriage leaving the city–was accepting money from private companies in exchange for favourable news stories. The Standard has denied that any such backroom deals have been done.

Discussing the issue on Newsnight, Emily Maitliss asked whether this wasn’t standard practice for newspapers, who were always linking content with their advertising. Her interviewee, Les Hinton, thought that such connections would become more common as circulation figures continue to decline and advertisers gain ever greater power.

It will be interesting to see whether newspapers start to be sites of product placement, with odd little puffs popping up in the obituaries–‘in her declining years she gained great pleasure from weekly visits to Staples’–or the crosswords–as in ‘refreshing fizzy drink (4,4)’.

Thursday 10 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English                              

Ellis Tinios (Leeds), ‘The Triumph of Calligraphy over Typography: commercial book production in early modern Japan’

Thursday 24 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Tiffany Stern (Shakespeare Institute), ‘Playing Songs and Singing Plays: Ballads and Plays in the Time of Shakespeare’

All welcome

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for the discussion of medieval script and scribal practices, and the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

Friday 4 May 2018    ‘Translating Bernhard Bischoff’

Professor Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (National University of Ireland, Galway)

 Bernhard Bischoff’s Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, first published in 1979 and translated into English by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganzin 1990, remains the principal introduction to the history of script and the cultural history of book production, especially for the period before 1200. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín’s reflections upon the challenges involved in making the translation will also provide an opportunity for discussion of the continued importance of this book in the teaching and study of ‘Latin’ manuscripts (i.e. those written in the Roman alphabet).

Friday 11 May 2018  ‘The Early Manuscript Catalogues of Cambridge University Library’

Dr James Freeman (Cambridge University Library)

This workshop will provide an introduction to the catalogues of the University Library that survive from between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, and their evidence for the acquisition and organization of the Library’s medieval manuscripts.

Friday 18 May 2018‘On paper and its use in Medieval England’

Dr Orietta da Rold (Faculty of English)

Friday 25 May 2018  Round-table on the collation formula 

Including the variety of ways that it has been applied and the issues they raise, and other diagrammatic visualizations of manuscript structure including those made possible by digital media. With contributions from Professor Richard Beadle (St John’s College, Cambridge), Professor Rodney Thomson (University of Hobart), Dr James Freeman (CUL) and Dr Anna Dorofeeva (post-doctoral research fellow, University College Dublin)

All meetings take place 2-4pm in the Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library.

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

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

A unique collection of material texts currently on display at London’s House of Illustration gives a fascinating glimpse into everyday life in one of the most secretive modern states. Made in North Korea brings together posters, badges, food packaging, and comic book covers from the personal collection of Nicholas Bonner, who has led tours to the country for the last 25 years.

The artists who produce the posters, which promote the DPRK’s agricultural industries – ‘For a bumper crop, let’s send more chemical fertiliser to the countryside!’ and its political ideals – ‘With the full heart of a mother, let’s become good caretakers of the People’s lives!’ – are trained at state art colleges to paint in a particular style, using a distinctive palette of colours. The exhibition mixes posters from as early as the 1970s with much more recent ones from the last few years, and it is striking how little the style and conventions of these posters have changed over time.

The comic book covers are similarly unified, with titles such as ‘Woman Sniper’, ‘The Orders Must be Absolutely Fulfilled Until The End’, and ‘The Never-Ending Confrontation’ signalling their ideological purpose. Seeing what we usually think of as ephemeral material texts – labels for tinned fish and meat, sweet wrappers, and postage stamps – displayed alongside these explicit pieces of propaganda is a starkly colourful reminder of how even the disposable material texts of everyday life can be political.

Thanks to Stewart J. Brookes for coming to talk to us last night about Archetype, a dazzlingly rich and flexible tool for image-comparison, designed for palaeographers attempting to substantiate their claims about the dating and development of hands, but now being used to analyse (among other things) the making of the Bayeux Tapestry. The software can be freely downloaded and applied to any set of images you may happen to be grappling with.

We will be able to answer big questions with this. Personally, I’m still trying to answer a very small research question: who in the sixteenth/seventeenth century in England wrote ‘g’s like this?

The centenary of a milestone in the history of women’s voting rights yesterday coincided with my graduate student Molly Yarn handing in the latest instalment of her PhD on female editors of Shakespeare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the women whose history she has been unearthing is Agnes Russell Weekes, who produced editions of As You Like It, The Tempest and Cymbeline for the University Tutorial Series. Weekes had a degree from University College, London; she worked as a tutor and co-wrote novels with her sister, with whom she lived at 9 Queen Anne Terrace in Cambridge. In 1911, Agnes (aged 30) and Rose (aged 36) filled in their census form. In the ‘INFIRMITY’ column, which invited you to note whether anyone included on the form was ‘lunatic’, ‘imbecile’, or ‘feeble-minded’, they wrote ‘unenfranchised’.

Agnes and Rose Weekes were among the thousands of suffragists who either boycotted the census or who used their forms to write messages of protest, such as Dorothy Bowker’s ‘No Vote – No Census. I am Dumb politically. Blind to the Census. Deaf to Enumerators. Being classed with criminals lunatics & paupers I prefer to give no further particulars’. It’s nice to have this opportunity to celebrate the courage of their protests.

Catching up with an article in last Saturday’s Guardian magazine, about whether the YouTube algorithm (the behind-the-scenes formula that directs you to new material) is biased towards particular kinds of content. Did it, in the last election, direct people to Trump-friendly videos, whilst drowning Clinton in wild conspiracy theories? Along the way there’s a quotation that takes me back to our conference on ‘Eating Words‘ (shortly to appear from Routledge as an essay collection):

‘This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods … So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed’.

It’s not a subtle connection–anyone who has ever engaged in ‘binge-viewing’ will be attuned to the connection between visual content and food. The troubling idea here is automation, and the idea that humans might absent themselves entirely from the process of deciding what consumers get to see/eat. Still, I’m looking forward to the day when news comes with warning labels about its fat and salt content.