Monthly Archives: July 2013

ANZAMEMS member news: Alexandra Barratt

Dear members, Alexandra Barratt (Professor Emeritus at the University of Waikato, NZ) has shared the following report on her research.

Thanks Alexandra!

In 2010 a grant of $73,000 from the ASB Community Trust to the Auckland Library Heritage Trust enabled the Auckland Libraries, Sir George Grey Special Collections, to re-catalogue 2000 books printed between 1468 and 1801. In particular, any manuscript waste (for instance wrappers, pastedowns, quire-guards, and spine liners) was noted. M. Manion, Vera F. Vines, and Christopher de Hamel, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections (Melbourne, London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), No. 45 (a)-(i), had already listed and partially identified nine binding fragments in the APL, and the new catalogue threw up an additional ten. At about the same time, Professor Alexandra Gillespie of the University of Toronto and I were working on the pre-1650 manuscript bindings in the Sir George Grey Special Collections, some of which also contained manuscript waste, so I was asked to examine and possibly identify the new finds.

This has proved a productive line of research. First, digital photography and the availability of so many Latin texts on-line helped enlarge our knowledge of the known fragments. Five were positively identified: for instance, No. 45 (a), ‘two small vellum strips’, we now know is from Book One of the ‘Ethica Nova’ or Translatio Antiquior of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and No. 45 (i), ‘Manuscript on plants’, from pseudo-Aristotle, Secreta Secretorum, translated by Philip Tripolitanus, Pars 3, Cap. 3 and Caps 7-8. In addition, No. 45 (b) (i) was tentatively re-identified as from a Psalter rather than a Missal, and more information gleaned about the remaining three. Of the new fragments, the most exciting were quire-guards cut from an early Carolingian Bible (c. 800AD), in three of the four volumes of a glossed Latin bible printed at Strasbourg by Adolf Rusch for Anton Koberger, c.1480, and which belonged to the Benedictine monastery of Benedictbeuern (see my blog post for 26 June 2013, http://medievalbookbindings.com). These match larger fragments held at the Bayerischestaatsbibliothek, Munich, and are probably from the women’s house of Köchel. In addition, fragments in a further five volumes were positively identified and some information acquired about a sixth, a leaf bound at the back of Priscian, Libri omnes, Basel, 1554, which is clearly from a homiliary but so far eludes precise identification. Fragments in three more volumes were too fragmentary to identify. As a bonus, the search threw up some printed binders’ waste, including a paper sheet of early 16th century papal indulgences, unfortunately past their expiry date.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Interpreting Historical Medical Texts – One-Day Study Day

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar: Interpreting Historical Medical Texts

Date: 24 September 2013,
Time: 8.45am – 5pm
Venue: Seminar Room 218, Fisher Library, University of Sydney

Instructors:

  • Assoc Prof Daniel Anlezark (Sydney)
  • Dr Judith Bonzol (Sydney)
  • Dr Rhodri Lewis (Oxford)
  • Dr Ursula Potter (Sydney, CHE)
  • Dr Anik Waldow (Sydney, CHE) 

Disease and psychological afflictions are not simply medical issues but have always had repercussions throughout social, cultural, political, religious, and intellectual spheres. This Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar is designed to help students develop skills at placing medieval and early modern medical texts within these broader contexts. For details on set texts and application forms visit: historyofemotions.org.au/events.

A small number of bursaries of up to $500 are available for students from outside of the Sydney area. For more information please contact Gabriel Watts.

Women, Scholarship and Collective Action: A Roundtable – Call For Papers

The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship/The Gender and Medieval Studies Group at Leeds 2014

Women, Scholarship and Collective Action: A Roundtable

This proposed roundtable event follows on from this July’s highly successful SMFS/GMS-sponsored roundtable discussion (‘Gender, Posts, Positions, Pay and Promotion’) at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2013, which concluded by positing a continued need for collective action by women academics as a countermeasure to the type of institutionalised sexism still experienced by many women in the profession. The 2014 roundtable, therefore, will focus on what we mean by ‘collective action’ and the ways in which it can be established and promoted to support women working within the academic environment. As usual, it will focus on both experiential and theoretical approaches, examining the ways in which women’s collaboration and cooperation within academic contexts carry the potential to form a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. It will also debate how collaborative action can effect mutual support as women help each other to succeed, progress and ultimately dismantle the glass-ceiling that the 2013 roundtable identified as still clearly operating within the profession.

Contributions for 5-7 minute papers are sought from academics from all levels of the profession, particularly from those who have experience of collective/collaborative /cooperative actions devised specifically for the promotion of gender equality. Inquiries and/or offers to contribute should be sent to Liz Herbert McAvoy (e.mcavoy@swan.ac.uk) by September 15, 2014.

Medieval Romance in Britain – Call For Papers

Medieval Romance in Britain
Clifton Hill House, University of Bristol
12-14 April, 2014

Papers are invited on all aspects of medieval romance. The conference marks the conclusion of an AHRC-sponsored research project on the verse forms of Middle English Romance, and papers that address questions of verse form are particularly welcome.

To propose a paper, please send a brief abstract to one of the conference organizers, before 31 September 2013: Dr Judith Jefferson: j.jefferson@bristol.ac.uk>, Professor Ad Putter: a.d.putter@bristol.ac.uk

Further information about the conference will be made available at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/medievalcentre/events/conferences

Lost Books – Call For Papers

Lost Books
St Andrews Book Conference for 2014
19-21 June, 2014

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others are very scarce, and many have disappeared altogether. We can infer this from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, and it is confirmed by the many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be identified in surviving book collections.

This conference will address the issue of how far this corpus of lost books can be reconstructed from contemporary documentation, and how this emerging perception of the actual production of the early book trade – rather than those books that are known from modern library collections – should impact on our understanding of the industry and contemporary reading practice.

Papers are invited on any aspects of this subject: particular texts, classes of texts or authors particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. Attention will also be given to ground-breaking recent attempts to estimate statistically the whole corpus of production in the first centuries of print by calculating rates of survival.

The papers given at this conference will form the basis of a volume in the Library of the Written Word.

The call for papers is now open and also available online on the USTC website at the page: http://www.ustc.ac.uk/?p=1119. Those interested in giving a paper should contact Dr Flavia Bruni (fb323@st-andrews.ac.uk) at St Andrews, offering a brief description of their likely contribution.

The call for papers will close on 30 November 2013.

Professor Patricia Fumerton – Masterclass and Public Lecture at USyd

Masterclass with Professor Patricia Fumerton (University of California, Santa Barbara)
“The Digital Recovery of Moving Media: EBBA and the Early English Broadside Ballad”

Date: 30 July
Time: 10:30am-12:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney

In this presentation, Patricia Fumerton places the creation of the online English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.ucsb.edu, within the history of scholarly criticism of broadside ballads. It explores the impact of digital media on the understanding of early modern broadside ballads as experienced in their own time.

This masterclass is presented by “Putting Periodization to Use: Testing the Limits of Early Modernity”, an interdisciplinary research group funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Collaborative Research Scheme. It is open to all, but places are limited so prior registration is required. Please contact Nicola Parsons (nicola.parsons@sydney.edu.au) to register your interest in attending, or for any further information.


Public Lecture: “Broadside Ballads and Tactical Publics, ‘The Lady and the Blackamoor’, 1570-1789”, Professor Patricia Fumerton (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Date: 29 July
Time: 5.00-6.30pm
Venue:Woolley Common Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney

In this lecture, Patricia Fumerton tracks the multiple media (text, art, and tune) that made up one of the early modern period’s most popular and most violent broadside ballads. She follows the ballad’s media over 200 years, two continents, and several genres. In the process, she demonstrates how the broadside ballad can only be understood as an interdisciplinary, lived experience which spoke compellingly and multifariously to different historical social groups.

This public lecture is presented by the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions. For any enquiries please contact Cassie Charlton (cassie.charlton@sydney.edu.au). All welcome.

——–

Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of UCSB’s award-winning English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). In addition to numerous articles, she is author of the monographs, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991). She is also editor of Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2012) as well as co-editor of Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate, 2010) and Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Pennsylvania, 1999). She is currently working on her new book, Moving Media, 1679-1789: Broadside Ballads, Cultural History, and Protean Publics.

British Library – Master List of Digitised Manuscripts

The British Library has released a master list of all of the manuscripts from their Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts collections that have been uploaded, including hyperlinks to the digitised versions.

You can download an Excel version of the file here:

For more information about this master list, visit the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/fancy-a-giant-list-of-digitised-manuscript-hyperlinks.html.

Early Modern Studies Symposium and Launch of Parergon (Special Issue)

Early Modern Studies Symposium
Hosted by the Early Modern Women’s Research Network (EMWRN) and the University of Newcastle

Date: Friday September 6, 2013
Time: 11:00am-5:00pm
Venue: Newton Boardroom, Novotel Newcastle Beach

Featuring Keynote Speakers:

Stephen Orgel (Stanford University)
“What Was an Audience?”

Michael Wyatt (Stanford University)
“John Florio’s Montaigne and the end of Renaissance Humanism”

Followed by:

Book Launch of the Parergon Special Issue:
Early Modern Women and the Apparatus of Authorship
(edited by Sarah C. E. Ross, Patricia Pender, and Rosalind Smith)

Time: 5:30-7:00pm
Venue: Morrow II Room, Novotel Newcastle Beach

Registration is free but places are limited.

For inquires and reservations please contact:

Wendy Alexander
EMWRN Project Manager
Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au

Shakespeare Bulletin, Special Issue: Beyond Shakespeare on the Small Screen – Call For Papers

Shakespeare Bulletin
Special issue: Beyond Shakespeare on the Small Screen (Fall 2015).

The issue will consider a wide range of adaptations of early modern drama by authors other than Shakespeare produced for media forms that were not primarily conceived for cinema distribution. We are interested in critical and analytical discussions of plays from medieval literature through to the 1630s that have been adapted for broadcast television in Britain or elsewhere, for DVD distribution in either a commercial and/or an educational context, and for other forms of digital or online dissemination.

Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to the guest editor, John Wyver, at john@illuminationsmedia.co.uk, by 31 March 2014.

Digitizing the Medieval Archive – Call For Papers

Digitizing the Medieval Archive 2014
Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies
March 27-29, 2014

Keynote speakers:

  • David Greetham (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
  • Stephen G. Nichols (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Caroline Macé (KU Leuven)
  • Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia University Library)

Discussion about the digitization of archival fonds and library holdings pertaining to the Middle Ages boasts a wide profusion both in online settings and in real time. As the question of how medievalists may work within this digital environment becomes an increasingly more widely discussed topic, we invite scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences to convene in Toronto to consider and discuss the possibilities of the digitized medieval archive.

There has been and continues to be considerable variation in the introduction, evaluation and continuation of digital storage. Digital technology has expanded and complicated the idea of the medieval archive. In bringing together the two concepts, digitization and archivization, we aim to address questions about the dissemination of and access to materials and research, but also such long-standing questions relating to the methodological and practical ways we carry out research and think about our material – thinking digitally about the Middle Ages.

This conference sets out to explore ways in which medievalists might harness the vast, digital possibilities for a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary medieval archive. Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:

  • Implications of digital archives for the editing of medieval texts
  • Methodologies and/or ideologies behind archivization
  • The archivization of already existing digital databases
  • Digitized archives/collections as enabling or limiting research
  • The digital (re)construction of medieval collections
  • Compilation and order of medieval texts
  • Textual forms / reading methods
  • Fluidity of the medieval text and the Internet
  • Digital visualization of medieval documents, art and literature

Please submit a short C.V. and abstracts of 250 words to digitizingmedievalarchive@gmail.com by October 1, 2013 for consideration.