The Centre for Material Texts hosted the Writing Britain 500-1500 Conference at the English Faculty over the summer. It was organised by one of the Medieval Research Group members, Dr Orietta da Rold, with Dr Richard Dance (University of Cambridge), Dr Aidan Conti (University of Bergen), and Dr Philip Shaw (University of Leicester). This is how the conference was described: 

Writing Britain is a biennial event which aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period. The 2014 iteration of the Writing Britain Conference will take place in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts. Some of the topics which we are keen to explore are literary and non-literary agencies and their significance and/or relevance in the medieval period across British medieval written culture in English, French, Latin, Norse and the Celtic languages. More broadly, we are interested in other questions such as: How did local writers, compilers and readers use writing to inscribe regional identity within broader conventions or, on the other hand, impress ‘universal’ practices and constructs on local populations? What were the different markets for books? Can we characterize their developments and differences? What new or existing methodologies can be employed to localise texts and books across Britain? What is the role of the Digital Humanities in the study of medieval book culture?

Amongst the speakers were two other members of this research group: Richard Beadle gave a plenary lecture on ‘Authorial Agency: Some Middle English First Drafts’, and Barry Windeatt spoke to the title ‘”Ne scryvenyssh … thow it write”: Not Writing Like a Scribe in the Troilus Manuscripts’. You can catch up with what happened at the conference and read responses to their talks here.