Learning from Early Modern Books
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
This event invites experts in book history, manuscript studies and social history to investiagte what we can learn from the many kinds of text that might be conisdered 'books' in the period 1520-1720. A panel discusses the extraordinary John Emmerson Collection at the State Library of Victoria, in Melbourne and the nature of its material forms and digital interface. Bindings at the court of Charles I, almanacs, court records and local books are all explored as are pins and marginalia. Speakers include: Melissa Marsh, Hannah Robb, Rosalind Smith, Paul Salzman, Adam Smyth, Brodie Waddell, Anna Welch.
PROGRAMME
Learning from Early Modern Books
London Renaissance Seminar, Friday June 7
Birkbeck, University of London
What can the early modern book tell us about the lives and thoughts of those who made and remade them, as well as their readers and adapters? This day conference asks what we can learn from the early modern book. Participants take the ‘book’ in its narrowest and widest definition. The examine printed books but they also look beyond the codex to consider pins, bundles and storage. They examine the book in all its states from manuscript accounts from manuscript books to corrected printers sheets and unusual bindings. Investigating how readers interact with books leads them to consider the writing on them and how they have been adapted. They contrast reading and interacting with books in digital versus print formats, but also how technology can express books.
9am: Coffee
9.30: Welcome, Sue Wiseman and Trisha Pender
9.40-10.45 PANEL 1: Meet the Emmerson Collection, State Library Victoria
Chair: Trisha Pender, University of Newcastle
Popular Print in the Emmerson Collection
Paul Salzman, La Trobe University
The Emmerson collection has a range of popular printed material from pamphlets to newsbooks. I will focus on almanacs and prognostications and discuss how we can trace the use of this cheap but still treasured printed material through individual examples, but also by looking closely at a collection of compiled by one especially assiduous student of astrology.
Scribble: Errant marks in the Emmerson collection
Ros Smith, Australian National University
This paper introduces the marginalia by early modern subjects in John Emmerson’s collection at State Library Victoria. Its books are frequently marked but were not collected on the basis of those markings, and they offer an exciting new corpus of previously unstudied marginalia in myriad forms. What can the early modern marginalia in this collection tell us about marginalia as a practice, its forms, locations, and authors? Through a focus on scribble – inchoate, unformed and incomplete – I consider how this significant category of marks might be newly understood as a way of expanding what we consider to be marginalia and who might be thought to be marginalists.
From Inception to Interface: The Emmerson C What can the early modern book tell us about the lives and thoughts of those who made and remade them, as well as their readers and adapters? This day conference asks what we can learn from the early modern book. Participants take the ‘book’ in its narrowest and widest definition. The examine printed books but they also look beyond the codex to consider pins, bundles and storage. They examine the book in all its states from manuscript accounts from manuscript books to corrected printers sheets and unusual bindings. Investigating how readers interact with books leads them to consider the writing on them and how they have been adapted. They contrast reading and interacting with books in digital versus print formats, but also how technology can express books.ollection as Data
Julia Rodwell, Australian National University
Beyond the Book: A digital journey through the treasures of the Emmerson Collection is an online exhibition composed of several, interconnected parts – prose, images, photogrammetry and data. To create the site, we experimented with a new methodology for online exhibition-making: using the cultural heritage ontology, the CIDOC CRM, we modelled, created and published Linked Data related to the collection. As well as communicating context within the exhibition, this data encodes it a durable form, in a way that can be repurposed and integrated into collection catalogues. I will discuss the process of experimenting with this method for online-exhibition-making as well as the challenges of drawing on data to create an online exhibition from inception to interface.
10.45-11.15: Coffee
11.15-12.15: PANEL 2: Learning from early modern manuscripts
Chair: Sue Wiseman, Birkbeck, University of London
Alice Thornton’s Books: Meditation and Memory
Suzanne Trill, University of Edinburgh
In both their material form and generic diversity, Alice Thornton’s four autobiographical manuscript volumes offer a unique opportunity to reassess the complex and shifting relationship between meditation and memory in seventeenth-century life-writing.
Clothiers, chronicles and couplets from Colchester: Joseph Bufton’s Almanac
Brodie Waddell, Birkbeck, University of London
This presentation will explore the manuscript texts which Joseph Bufton (1651-1717), an Essex tradesman, added to a printed almanac of 1686. I will consider why and how he wrote around the printed text over an extended period and then passed it on to his kin. I will also survey the very miscellaneous nature of the material he wrote in the volume, including guild ordinances, occupational poetry, historical chronicles and personal financial accounts.
‘The jorney of Sr. Edward Unton and his company into Italy’, 1563–4
Richard Ansell, Birkbeck, University of London
This tiny manuscript journal was kept by an English servant, Richard Smith, who travelled with his employer, Sir Edward Unton, through the Low Countries and Germany to Italy. As such, it helps us to recognise that non-elite travellers were there from the very start of a quintessentially aristocratic phenomenon, the Italian Grand Tour, and that travel writing could be a dimension of their employment. Yet the title page of the journal also invites us to consider the relationships between travel, social mobility and memory, when a seventeenth-century hand notes that the text ‘was written by Richard Smith gentleman, some time servaunt to Sr. Edward Unton’.
12.15/30-1.45: LUNCH own arrangements: tea and coffee supplied
Local options include: kiosk Gordon Square; Byng place takeaway; Wellcome café; Quaker café; Honey Store Street; Pret Tavistock Square.
1.45-2.50 PANEL 3: Materiality and early modern women’s books
Chair: Ros Smith, Australian National University
Sarah Cooke’s material book
Laura Seymour, Birkbeck College, University of London
My short presentation is about the materiality of Sarah Cooke's manuscript essay collection, dated 1718 - particularly this text's involvement with a trunk and a pin. I am interested in prompting discussion of how the use of domestic objects in manuscript production links to the pinning-down of women's writing in terms of genre, status, and relationships to their networks. Critical points of contact include work by Lucy Razzall, Jenny Tiramani, and Wendy Wall.
Iconography and Ideology: Embroidered Bindings at the Court of Charles I
Anna Welch, State Library Victoria
In this paper I'll examine the iconography of Peace and Prosperity as allegorical figures of special significance in the Stuart court. From the frescoed ceiling of the Banqueting Hall to a select group of embroidered bookbindings associated with Henrietta Maria, the repeated appearance of these two female virtues offers insights into the political and religious disputes of Charles I's reign and of the peculiar position of Henrietta Maria, a Catholic queen married to the head of the Church of England.
Marginalia and Early Modern Women’s Education
Hannah Upton, Australian National University
This paper will use evidence of women’s marginalia from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to examine early modern women’s education, and what literacy looked like among this demographic. I will use a reciprocal method of analysis that demonstrates both how understanding of women’s educational practices inform our reading of marginalia, and how marginalia can inform our understanding of education.
2.50-3.20: Coffee
3.20-4.30: PANEL 4: Learning from early modern textual practices
Chair: tbc.
Court Records in Books: Recounting court trials
Hannah Robb, Birkbeck
This paper looks at the ways in which court documents were created, stored and duplicated through a close study of two key texts in the Cheshire Archives. In the first instance a book of depositions relating a single tithe dispute in the north west of England in Rotherham. The book contains three separate folios with distinct sections from different parties subsequently bound in a large single volume. The second text is a large book containing 116 depositions from a murder trial in the Chester Assize records. The text was produced for a relative of a family member accused in the affray, a member of a prominent local gentry family, some time after the case was heard at court. The book was kept by the family in their personal archives for over 400 years and was annotated with subsequent diary entries reflecting on the law and the importance of the case for the family and local elite. The presentation considers how and why these books of depositions were produced and how they were used by their creators and subsequent owners.
Process and Production in Thomas Bowrey's Malay-English Dictionary
Michael Powell-Davis, Birkbeck, University of London
Among the many papers of Thomas Bowrey, recovered from a forgotten travelling chest in 1913, survive two intriguing copies of his Dictionary English and Malayo, Malayo and English (1701). Disordered and difficult to navigate, these copies of Bowrey’s dictionary consist of folded sheets, uncut, unbound, and delivered straight to the writer from the printing house. Marked by manuscript corrections and pasted-in notes, these sheets provide evidence of one stage in the process of textual production. The receipts held alongside these gatherings, which record payments to an engraver, a compositor for Arabic, a printer, a porter, a binder, and a bookseller, provide a further window into the production of printed books in England, c. 1700. After briefly surveying these textual agents, this paper will consider Bowrey’s printed sheets alongside a manuscript draft and a “finished” version of his book, teasing out problems relating to authority and the reconstruction of “ideal” versions of early modern texts.
"...How each verse doth shine": processes of scriptural reference in the Early Modern book.’
Mellissa Marsh, Birkbeck, University of London
Biblical language is inscribed and imprinted into Early Modern books, incorporated by processes such as citation, quotation, paraphrase, collage and echo. With a focus on the Psalms, this paper will examine some examples, starting to answer such questions such as where, why, what, and how.
21st century researchers learn from Early Modern books, their reading channelled through available tools: databases, digitised copies, and searches. The paper will go on to look briefly at the implications of contemporary ways of reading and ask, are we missing something?
4.30-4.45PM: Comfort Break
4.45--6PM Title tbc
Adam Smyth
6PM: Drinks & Nibbles
Contact name:
Sue Wiseman