Renaissance
LENT 2026
Tuesday 3rd February, 5.15 in GR06/07
Michelle O'Callaghan, University of Reading (Chair: Jenny Richards)
Title: 'Scribal Handiwork: John Lilliat's Liber Lilliati'
Handiwork denotes working with the hand and the product of such creative and manual labour. John Lilliat’s remarkable work, Liber Lilliati, is best known for its grafting of his own lyrics into a copy of Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia. Arguably, what has taken precedence in this discussion of Liber Lilliati is the printed book as a model for pragmatic imitation. My question is what happens to our understanding of compositional and communicative practices if we shift the focus to the work of the hand. In this paper, I will be exploring Lilliat’s work as a clerk to think about how this scribe inhabited the book he made when he was at leisure. How might we think about the disciplined, skilful, pleasurable, and creative work of the hand in early modern scribal cultures.
