During the Covid lockdown, the London Review of Books has been exploring its back-catalogue, and sending out choice articles to cheer its subscribers up. Today I had my day interrupted by an article on the way that social media interrupts our day–Rebecca Solnit’s ‘In the Day of the Postman‘.

It’s a rueful meditation on the simplicity of the lives we used to lead, written by someone whose life has straddled the digital divide. As another straddler, I don’t find it all easy to make moral judgments about the before and after–life before was, as I recall, often quite boring, while life after seems to involve too many people playing Candy Crush or watching James Bond on their phones. But Solnit analyses it very well, and her proposal that we need to work to put the world back together again–to regain a local, meaningful, slow and honest relationship to our experience–resonates. Will I be deleting Facebook and Twitter? Soon, I promise, but not just yet…

Thursday 25 April, 5 pm, GR06/7, Faculty of English

Tom Mole (Centre for the History of the Book, Edinburgh)

‘Thinking Through the Material: Byron at Work’

In this paper, I examine some of Byron’s manuscripts (especially those for Childe Harold Canto Three and Don Juan Cantos One and Two) in order to think about how he made use of the affordances and limitations of the manuscript page in the process of composing works that he intended for print.  In particular, I will suggest, he ‘thought through’ the material process of writing in ways that he knew would be effaced by the publication of his works. 

This seminar will be held in association with the 18th Century/Romantic Literature seminar.

Thursday 16 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Felix Waldmann (Cambridge, History)

‘Prolegomena to a revised edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government‘.

My paper discusses the editorial history of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) and a prospectus for a new critical edition of the work, superseding Peter Laslett’s monumental Cambridge University Press edition of 1960. The paper examines how scholarship in the last six decades has questioned or overturned a number of Laslett’s editorial and interpretative suppositions, including the significance of the so-called ‘Christ’s College’ association copy, the influence of Thomas Hobbes on Locke’s political thought, and the possible co-authorship by Locke of James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681). 

All welcome

I’ve just finished reading Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari (2017), an engrossing attempt to speak about the experience of growing up in poverty and to think about the gulf that separates the middle classes from the ‘underclass’. Along the way I found this impassioned defence of public libraries, attacking the fashion for blending libraries with community centres, and thus removing that crucial element of the library experience–silence:

“Admittedly, many of us don’t use libraries any more, but for those who do, it’s impossible to overstate how indispensable the service is. Particularly in communities characterised by poor education, low opportunity and high levels of stress, the library is an engine room of social mobility where people go to complete college and job applications, get help filling out forms to access benefits and bursaries as well as accessing the internet and books to learn new skills or find information. People who enter a library are actively trying to better themselves in some way and often lack the basic resources or skills to reach their goals. When you are in a public library, you are in the presence of people who are attempting to take a massive stride forward in their often chaotic and stressful lives. Aside from this more obvious function, the library performs a much simpler one–one which any librarian worth their salt will guard jealously. As well as not costing any money, the library is one of the few places in a deprived community that is quiet enough to hear yourself think.

To get a sense of how difficult it is to concentrate when there are things going on around you, pick up your smart phone and start thumbing through a selection of ring tones, while continuing to read this page–I’ll wait. Now imagine you are already pretty stressed, perhaps because you have no money, or because debt collectors and council tax are breathing down your neck. Now throw in the fact you are maybe not the best reader. Maybe you are a single mum, with a learning disability like dyslexia, or you might be battling with a drink problem. Maybe you’re looking to get back into education and have a limited amount of time for activities that require concentration? Maybe you are a young man, recently released from prison, perhaps on a tag, who has been given an apprenticeship in a barbers or a local deli but have no experience? Throw a little ADHD in the mix and an underlying psychological issue, which is exacerbated by stress, and suddenly the simple act of entering a library becomes an immense act of personal courage.

… Then we have the senior citizen, largely forgotten in the beard-stroking dither of progressive politics. Perhaps a widow who lives alone, or a disabled man who uses a wheelchair and can only access a certain number of buildings in the area. The library is one of the only places they’ll be allowed to stop for more than five minutes without being expected to spend money. And let’s not forget, there’s a reason why people in areas like this need to get out of their homes every now and then: paper-thin walls that mean you can hear your neighbours flushing toilets, boiling kettles, having sex, arguing, doing DIY, cutting their grass, revving their cars–at every hour of the day. This is not to mention the less-than-serene sounds of a stressful community, and all the challenging, often frightening, behaviour it fuels; couples engaged in aggressive disputes, drunken young people shouting in the streets, strangers coming and going all day and night. Not to mention the regular sound of police cars, ambulances and fire engines.

The library is one of many dwindling resources, like the community centre, that act as safety valves. A library provides a safe and supportive environment where vulnerable people can educate themselves or mentally regroup. But increasingly, they will arrive at the library to find children running around, or people taking part in discussions or courses, or Mother/Toddler groups. These activities are equally essential–but they should be going on in a community centre. Libraries have become busy, often quite noisy places, which seriously defeats their intended purpose.”

I’m still basking in the glow of William Noel’s wonderfully engaging 2019 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, on the theme of ‘The Medieval Manuscript and its Digital Image’. Arguing that images of medieval manuscripts are in their way as artificial as the ‘photograph’ of the Sombrero Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Probe, Noel emphasized the value for repositories of treating their images as open-source data, thickly documented in the metadata so that they can be used and abused by the networked community in innumerable ways. While scholars need to know when, where and by whom an image was produced, as part of their ongoing investigation into a manuscript, the maker of tea-towels just needs an appealing image, and in Noel’s view both should be able to get their pictures without punitive fees. (In the questions after the second lecture, he said that academics need to complain more about the costs of reproducing images, and suggested that if more of them did so, the costs would soon come down or evaporate).

Noel’s concluding lecture was a survey of the ways in which digital tools can be used to understand the physical structure of books, with a shout-out to ‘VisColl’, which allows you to take manuscripts apart and see how they would have looked to their producers. Much of the lecture was taken up with a whistlestop tour through the different sizes of paper that were used in the production of late medieval manuscripts (imperial, royal, median, chancery and their variants), with an introduction to a gizmo called the ‘Needham calculator’ that Noel has invented to turn page measurements into a statement of book format and paper-size (taken together, these constitute what he calls the ‘flavour’ of the manuscript). Noel concluded with the hypothesis that the metal engravings of the period were specifically designed to fit onto particular sizes of paper, but that a tradition also developed in which (like the one shown in Georg Gärtner’s 1618 painting of St John the Evangelist) prints came with lavish margins, which tend not to survive today. All in all it was a fascinating recovery of the rules of a game that have been lost to us, achieved by combining cutting-edge digital technologies with a deep investment in the materials of textual production.

The CMT Annual Report for the academic year 2017-18 is another epic, which includes perhaps the longest account of a conference ever penned (for our ‘Paper-Stuff’ event back in September). It also offers an opportunity to reminisce about David Pearson’s bookbinding workshops, the latest series of Medieval Palaeography Seminars, and the launch of some significant publications, including Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. You can download it here.

I zoomed up to the Faculty of English at Oxford the other day, to take part in a research day focused on the seventeenth-century medic Nicholas Crouch. Crouch was born in 1634 and died in 1690, having spent fifty-six years as a student and fellow at Balliol, where he built up an impressive personal library that he left to the college. A team of expert conservators has spent a year repairing 133 books from his collection, many of them Sammelbände (volumes comprising many smaller books or pamphlets). The research day aimed to bring scholars together to start thinking about the potential of the collection.

While the speakers were agreed on the value of the collection, several of the contributions delved into Crouch’s manuscripts and raised questions about his status and the seriousness of his many and varied intellectual pursuits. Adam Smyth commented on his diary and the associated collection of almanacs, drawing some telling clues out of what have often been seen as unyielding documents. Olivia Smith looked at the marginalia in his copies of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and speculated that Crouch was constantly engaged in small-scale scientific work in his college, in manuscripts as seemingly mundane as one in which he notes the capacity of the fellows’ drinking-vessels. John-Paul Ghobrial voiced his suspicion that Crouch was not really plugged in to the global renaissance, noting the absence of international newsbooks from his collections, and Benjamin Wardhaugh and Kathleen Walker-Meikle worried at the limits of Crouch’s dabblings in mathematics and pharmacology. Will Poole kicked off his paper with the suggestion that Crouch might be the archetype of the second-rate academic sucked into a lifetime of University administration. (That really put the ‘ouch’ back into ‘Crouch’).

But as Poole pointed out, regardless of the fact that Crouch himself may not have been an intellectual pioneer, his books remain richly interesting. The register of his bookbuying and lending can tell us much about the  intellectual circles of Restoration Oxford, and his collections of ephemera raise questions about changing attitudes to books in the period. And thanks to his decision to note the binders of many of his volumes, it is now possible to tie tiny physical details (such as the blind-tooled fleurons stamped in the corners of the binding) to particular Oxford binderies, as Nikki Tomkins of the Oxford Conservation Consortium showed. A lot of books scattered across the University and beyond will need to be reconsidered in the light of such discoveries.

The organisers provided thought-for-food as well as food-for-thought; the event was fuelled by venison pasties and custard tarts from seventeenth-century recipes. The Balliol librarians have put together an exhibition and a colourful catalogue to celebrate their project; the latter can be downloaded as a pdf.

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

Twenty years after the publication of the first of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy who went to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the British Library is celebrating with a major exhibition which brings together an impressive array of objects and texts to explore some of the folklore, traditions, and magical histories in the world of Harry Potter.

There are mandrakes and bezoar stones, dragon eggs, mermaids, and mirrors. From the British Library’s own chamber of secrets, treasures brought out for the exhibition include a seventeenth-century manuscript that once belonged to Gabriel Harvey, which outlines ‘Howe experyments to be invysible must bee preparedd’. There is also the thirteenth-century Liber Medicinalis, containing the first documented use of ‘Abracadabra’, with an explanation of how to write the word repeatedly on successive lines, omitting one more letter each time, to create a cone-shaped amulet that could be worn around the neck to drive out fever. Readers of the Potter series will recall that magical books in Hogwarts are often emphatically material – perhaps furry, or noisy, or even violent things which might leak ink, require stroking, or at least must be handled with care. They would not be out of place alongside these intriguing testaments to ancient magical traditions chosen from the British Library’s collections.

But in some ways the most absorbing exhibits are the personal contributions from J.K. Rowling herself. There are handwritten drafts of chapters in biro on very ordinary A4 paper; typed pages of drafts with revisions by Rowling and her editor; and incredibly detailed charts that were part of her planning, showing how she managed the challenging task of weaving together very complex plots over seven books. There is a first edition paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone annotated by Rowling, again in biro pen, with a mixture of charming illustrations and reflections on her experience of writing and rewriting. After Hermione’s encounter with a troll, for example, Rowling fills the blank space at the end of the chapter with a picture of some scissors and an unfurling ribbon, commenting: ‘This was the cut I refused to make – my editor wanted to lose the whole troll-fighting scene. I’m glad I resisted’. These material traces offer a magical glimpse into the processes involved in one of the biggest publication successes of the twentieth century.

A snap from the second of David Pearson’s masterclasses on early modern bookbindings, held last week in the Cambridge University Library. The classes were a reminder that a rare books library is an extraordinary collection of dead animal skins, a mausoleum for the thousands of pigs, sheep, cows and goats that gave their lives in part to make words on paper more durable. The sessions were also an encounter with the mystery of design, as they traced the changing decorative fashions that allow a trained eye to date a binding quite precisely to a particular period.

Somewhere inside me I still have a logocentric self that thinks bindings don’t matter–they are just there to serve the words. Perhaps that is reinforced by the fact that the vast majority of bindings are distinctly plain and functional, turning the book into something sturdy and everyday. But to face up to the scale of the premodern binding trade, and of the extraordinary price-differentiation of the products that it produced, is to realise that books were once choice objects, things to flash around as evidence of wealth, taste and social status. Our thanks to David for making this sometimes arcane world accessible once more.

UCLA, October 5th-6th 2018

Organizers:

Sean Gurd, Professor of Classics, University of Missouri

Francesca Martelli, Assistant Professor of Classics, UCLA

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: January 15, 2018

Distributed authorship is a familiar concept in many fields of cultural production. Long associated with pre-modern cultures, it still serves as a mainstay for the study of Classical antiquity, which takes ‘Homer’ as its foundational point of orientation, and which, like many other disciplines in the humanities, has extended its insights into the open-endedness of oral and performance traditions into its study of textual dynamics as well. The rise of genetic criticism within textual studies bears witness to this urge to fray perceptions of the hermetic closure of the written, and to expose the multiple strands of collaboration and revision that a text may contain. And the increasingly widespread use of the multitext in literary editions of authors from Homer to Joyce offers a material manifestation of this impulse to display the multiple different levels and modes of distribution at work in the authorial process. In many areas of the humanities that rely on traditional textual media, then, the distributed author is alive and well, and remains a current object of study.

In recent years, however, the dynamic possibilities of distributed authorship have accelerated most rapidly in media associated with the virtual domain, where modes of communication have rendered artistic creation increasingly collaborative, multi-local and open-ended. These developments have prompted important questions on the part of scholars who study these new media about the ontological status of the artistic, musical and literary objects that such modes of distribution (re)create. In musicology, for example, musical modes such as jazz improvisation and digital experimentation are shown to exploit the complex relay of creativity within and between the ever-expanding networks of artists and audiences involved in their production and reception, and construct themselves in ways that invite others to continue the process of their ongoing distribution. The impact of such artistic developments on the identity of ‘the author’ may be measured by developments in copyright law, such as the emergence of the Creative Commons, an organization that enables artists and authors to waive copyright restrictions on co-creators in order to facilitate their collaborative participation. And this mode of distribution has in turn prompted important questions about the orientation of knowledge and power in the collectives and publics that it creates.

This conference seeks to deepen and expand the theorising of authorial distribution in the virtual domain, and to explore the insights that its operations in this sphere might lend into the mechanisms of authorial distribution at work in older (and, indeed, ancient) media. To this end, it will bring together scholars working in the fields of communication and information technology with scholars working across the humanities, in order to explore what kind of dialogue we might generate on the question of distributed authorship across these disciplinary (and other) divisions. Ultimately, our aim is to develop and refine a set of conceptual tools that will bring distributed authorship into a wider remit of familiarity; and to explore whether these tools are, in fact, unique to the new media that have inspired their most recent discursive formulation, or whether they have a range of application that extends beyond the virtual domain.

We invite contributions from those who are engaged directly with the processes and media that are pushing and complicating ideas of distributed authorship in the world today, and also from those who are actively drawing on insights derived from these contemporary developments in their interpretation of the textual and artistic processes of the past, on the following topics (among others):

• The distinctive features of the new artistic genres and objects generated by modes of authorial distribution, from musical mashups to literary centones.
• The impact that authorial distribution has on the temporality of its objects, as the multiple agents that form part of the distribution of those objects spread the processes of their decomposition/re-composition over time.
• The re-orienting of power relations that arises from the distribution of authorship among networks of senders and receivers, as also from the collapsing of ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ functions into one another.
• The modes of ‘self’-regulation that authorial collectives develop in order to sustain their identity.
• Fandom and participatory culture, in both virtual and traditional textual media.
• The operational dynamics of ‘multitexts’ and ‘text networks’, and their influence by and on virtual networks.

Paper proposals will be selected for their potential to open up questions that transcend the idiom of any single medium and/or discipline. Please send a proposal of approximately 500 words to gurds@missouri.edu by January 15, 2018.

Confirmed participants include:

Mario Biagioli, Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies, and director of the Centre for Science and Innovation Studies, UC Davis (author of Galileo Courtier, Chicago 1993; and editor, with Peter Galison, of Scientific Authorship, Routledge 2003).

Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology, Oxford University (director of Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies, or MusDig: http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk).

Christopher Kelty, Professor of Anthropology, Information Studies, and at the Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA (author of Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke 2008).

Scott McGill, Professor of Classics, Rice University (author of Virgil Recomposed: the Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity, Oxford 2005; and Plagiarism in Latin Literature, Cambridge 2012)

Daniel Selden, Professor of Literature, UC Santa Cruz (author of numerous articles, and a forthcoming book, on the phenomenon of ‘text networks’ in the long Hellenistic period)