CALL FOR PAPERS: Towards a History of Error

The Forschungszentrum Gotha and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin invite submission of paper abstracts for a workshop to be held in Berlin, 10-11 December 2015: Towards a History of Error.

The aim of the workshop is to identify key topics and episodes in European intellectual history of error in theology, philosophy, medicine, scholarship, and the sciences, from the late Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century. Themes include not only concepts but also methods for avoiding and eliminating error, as well as reflections on the causes and consequences of error.

Paper abstracts should be no more than 750 words long, and may be submitted in French, German, or English. Applicants are also asked to submit a curriculum vitae (including publications); applications from younger scholars are especially welcomed.

Organizers:
Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Fabian Krämer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Martin Mulsow (Gotha Research Center of the University of Erfurt)

Please submit all materials to Ms. Tanja Neuendorf by no later than October 1, 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by November 1, 2014.

Error and Print Culture, 1500-1800

A one-day conference at the Centre for the Study of the Book, Oxford University
Saturday 5 July 2014

'Pag. 8. lin. 7. for laughing, reade, languishing.'

Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1624), ‘Errata’

Recent histories of the book have replaced earlier narratives of technological triumph and revolutionary change with a more tentative story of continuities with manuscript culture and the instability of print. An abstract sense of technological agency has given way to a messier world of collaboration, muddle, money, and imperfection. Less a confident stride towards modernity, the early modern book now looks stranger: not quite yet a thing of our world.

What role might error have in these new histories of the hand-press book? What kinds of error are characteristic of print, and what can error tell us about print culture? Are particular forms of publication prone to particular mistakes? How effective were mechanisms of correction (cancel-slips; errata lists; over-printing; and so on), and what roles did the printing house corrector perform? Did readers care about mistakes? Did authors have a sense of print as an error-prone, fallen medium, and if so, how did this inform their writing? What links might we draw between representations of error in literary works (like Spenser's Faerie Queene), and the presence of error in print? How might we think about error and retouching or correcting rolling-press plates? What is the relationship between engraving historians' continuum of difference, and letter-press bibliographers' binary of variant/invariant? Was there a relationship between bibliographical error and sin, particularly in the context of the Reformation? How might modern editors of early modern texts respond to errors: are errors things to correct, or to dutifully transcribe? Is the history of the book a story of the gradual elimination of error, or might we propose a more productive role for slips and blunders?

Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome on any aspect of error and print, in Anglophone or non-Anglophone cultures. Please email a 300-word abstract and a short CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014.