CALL FOR PAPERS: The Early Modern Line: A Symposium

Friday 18th September 2015 - Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

The Early Modern Lines Research Network is hosting a discursive symposium with keynote presentations from Dr Matthew Eddy (Durham University), Matthias Garn, Master Mason, and carver Kibby Schaefer, alongside an exhibition of items from the Library’s Special Collections.

We invite proposals for 10-minute lightning papers on any topic considering the ‘early modern line’, conceived of in the broadest possible sense. Papers should be designed to provoke discussion, raise problems, puzzle out ideas and ask questions rather than provide answers, and should present work in progress rather than polished research.

Abstracts should be 150–200 words, outlining some of the main points you wish to discuss. Please email them - or any queries you might have - to earlymodernlines@york.ac.uk by Monday 10th August 2015. Travel bursaries, generously provided by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities, are available to all postgraduate students attending the symposium. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for a bursary .

Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• Lines as organisational technologies; e.g. tables, diagrams and brackets
• The importance of the line in scientific, philosophical and mathematical disciplines
• Architectural and artistic lines
• Poetic lines
• Framing devices in early modern books
• Conceptual, metaphorical or figural lines
• Genealogical lines
• The line in three dimensions
• Cartography, trade and travel routes
• The line in military strategy
• Chronological lines and histories
• Decorative lines and pattern
• Folds, cuts, tears and creases
• Typography
• Plotlines
• Weaving, stitching and knitting
• Lines of influence
• Applying modern theories to early modern lines

Symposium on the History of Newspapers and Serials during the 17th and 18th Centuries

The editors of the journal Media History are holding a one day symposium at which issues relating to the history of newspapers and other serials, during the 17th and 18th centuries, will be discussed. The event will be held on Tuesday 9th September at King’s College, London and will provide an opportunity for specialists in a range of areas to discuss ideas and strategies with an invited audience of not more about twenty-five people who themselves have some relevant research experience.

The papers, with their provisional titles will be given by:

• Dr Michael Harris, Birkbeck College, University of London: ‘A structure for research in London newspapers ca. 1680-1720’.
• Dr Jason McElligott, Marsh’s Library, Dublin: ‘The poor relation? Writing the history of the Irish newspaper in the long eighteenth century.'
• Dr Noah Moxham, University of St Andrews: ‘Science in 17th century serials’.
• Professor Joad Raymond, Queen Mary College, University of London: ‘17th-century news networks’

The purpose of the day is to encourage discussion about the subject in a group of specialists small enough for the exchanges to be detailed and productive.

There is no registration fee for the event, and tea and coffee will be provided. Registration will be from 9.30 and the papers will start at 10.am. The day will be finished by 4.30pm. The venue is:
Kings College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6NR. The room details will be forwarded nearer the date.

If you can attend, please email Tom O’Malley, at tpo@aber.ac.uk. by 18th of August.

We would very much like to have your input at the event. We would be grateful if you could let us know whether you can attend.

Organised by the Media History Journal - http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13688804.asp

Creativity and Commerce in the Age of Print

Registration is now open for the Edinburgh Centre for the History of the Book's one-day conference titled "Creativity and Commerce in the Age of Print"!

Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh
Saturday, 26 July 2014 from 09:00 to 19:00 (BST)
Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The programme includes a range of papers from a very diverse group of postgraduates and early-career researchers on topics including authorship, publishing, and professionalisation from the Early Modern period to today, as well as keynotes by Dr. Jason Scott-Warren (Director of the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge) and Professor Iain Stevenson (Centre for Publishing, UCL).

Full programme information can be found at our Eventbrite page, where you can register to attend:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creativity-and-commerce-in-the-age-of-print-tickets-12040963847

Thanks to generous funding, attendance is free (including lunch and wine reception), but spaces are limited.

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Creativity and Commerce in the Age of Print"

University of Edinburgh (26 July 2014)

‘What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support!... 

To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.’

- George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

Hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, this interdisciplinary conference will explore the sometimes-fraught connections between the ‘art’ and ‘trade’ of books from the Western invention of printing to today. Are the interests of authors and publishers always opposed, or can they lead to productive forms of collaboration? Does work undertaken for the marketplace necessarily compromise its moral and cultural standing? How does literature become property, and how has authorship evolved between the starving writer of ‘Grub Street’ and the modern book festival circuit? Can the requirements of the printing and bookselling industries constitute a form of de-facto censorship, determining the types of work that are published and circulated?

We are currently seeking papers from postgraduate and early career researchers interested in questions such as these, with potential topics including (but not limited to):

• Authorship and other creative professions
• The printing and bookselling industries
• Author-publishers relationships
• Dissemination networks
• Subscription and patronage
• Book advertising, illustration
• Serial publication
• ‘Tie-ins’, merchandise, and material culture
• Libraries and book collecting
• Commerce and censorship
• Originality, copyright, and intellectual property
• Book piracy and its national boundaries
• Creative work and gender
• The impact of new technologies for production and dissemination
• The ‘rise’ or ‘death’ of print.

Proposals in all relevant subject areas and historical periods post-1450 are welcome. Please send a 200-word abstract to Natasha by 5 May 2014. Limited travel bursaries may be available; indicate if you would require one to attend. The conference will take place in Edinburgh on 26 July 2014, with registration opening in June.

Dr. Natasha Simonova
4.03, 18 Buccleuch Place
Career Development Fellow
Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh

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.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Printing Mathematics in the Early Modern World

Monday 16 December 2013
All Souls College, Oxford

The early modern period saw the printing, in large numbers, of mathematical tables, primers, textbooks and practical manuals, as well as the incorporation of mathematical notation into a wide range of works
on other subjects. Algebraic notation, diagrams and even printed mathematical instruments all raised unusual problems for print. The development of appropriate layouts and conventions, the establishment of workable print-shop procedures, and the detection and management of error all potentially required distinctive solutions where the printing of mathematics was concerned. Those problems and their solutions are the subject of this one-day workshop, to be held in All Souls College, Oxford.

Confirmed speakers:

Katherine Hunt, Birkbeck
Alexander Marr, Cambridge
Robin Rider, Wisconsin
Leo Rogers, Oxford
Benjamin Wardhaugh, Oxford

Proposals for papers are invited on, but not confined to, the following subject areas:

• Print shop practice in relation to mathematical works 
• Mathematical page layouts and their evolution 
• The design and printing of mathematical diagrams 
• Mathematical authorship and its display 
• Error and accuracy in printed mathematics

Proposals for papers should include an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief CV, and should be emailed to benjamin.wardhaugh@all-souls.ox.ac.uk by 16 September 2013. The conference can contribute to travel costs for speakers.

ESRA Shakespeare Conference 2013 | Shakespeare and Myth [Call for Papers]

MONTPELLIER (France)
Wednesday 26– Saturday 29 June 2013

LIST OF SEMINARS

1. Early Modern Nature: Shakespeare, Science and Myth
2. The Early Modern Reception of Shakespeare in Print and Manuscript: The Rise of Shakespearean Cultural Capital?
3. Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance
4. “Myth” in Relation to Truth, fable, history, legend, folklore
5. Myth, Romance and Historiography
6. Mythical Performance and its Afterlife
7. Mythologies of Childhood
8. Protean Shakespeare: Adapting, Tradapting, Performing Early Modern Plays
9. Shakespeare and Classical Mythology: European Perspectives
10. Shakespeare, Myth and Asia
11. Shakespeare and the Myth of the Feminine
12. The Shakespeare Myth Reloaded: Demythologizing and Re-mythologizing Shakespeare Today
13. Staging the Shakespeare Myths, 2000-2012
14. Translating Myths and Mythologizing Translations

Deadlines for all seminars

Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief bio (150 words) by 1 October 2012 to the convenors of the seminar you choose. Full details are on the website.

All participants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals by 1 November 2012.  The deadline for accepted seminar participants to send their completed paper is 1 April 2013.  Information about plenaries, registration costs and other practical aspects will be given in due
course.

http://www.um.es/shakespeare/esra/index.php
www.ircl.cnrs.fr
email: esraircl@univ-montp3.fr

Worlds of Paper Writing Natural History from Gessner to Darwin

A Linnean Society of London meeting supported by the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy

This international conference aims to bring scholars together to discuss how practices of processing written information have shaped conceptions of the natural world in the past. From the sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, naturalists strove to collect, observe and classify animals, plants and minerals, often with their medical and economical use in mind. The printing “revolution” and the discovery of America profoundly transformed literacy and scholarly practices of reading and writing. The day‐to‐day practices of assembling information on natural objects and their medical properties can be glimpsed through the numerous marginalia, commonplace books, notebooks, files and index cards that naturalists, physicians, and apothecaries have left to us. The conference will investigate how these practices acted as powerful tools which changed conceptions of the order of nature. Early modern writing practices ultimately influenced taxonomical procedures, the developing idea of relationships within nature, and, in the long run, concepts of biodiversity and bioprospecting.

For more information about the conference, details of accommodation and directions to the Linnean Society, please contact:

Events, The Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BF Tel.: +44 (0)20 7434 4479 Fax: +44 (0)20 7287 9364 Email: events@linnean.org

For registration please visit www.linnean.org and visit our upcoming events page to download your registration form.

Charity Reference No. 220509

NEH Seminar: Tudor Books and Readers

John N. King of The Ohio State University and Mark Rankin of James Madison University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on the manufacture and dissemination of printed books and the nature of reading during the era of the Tudor monarchs (1485-1603).

In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the emergence of new reading practices associated with the Renaissance and Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which readers responded to elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries). Employing key methods of the history of the book and the history of reading, this investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the English Renaissance and/or Reformation, the history of the book, the history of reading, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 20 July 2012. During the first week of this program, we shall visit 1) Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the world’s only surviving Renaissance printing and publishing house) and 2) London, England, in order to attend a rare-book workshop and consider treasures at the British Library. During four ensuing weeks at Oxford, participants will reside at St. Edmund Hall as they draw on the rare book and manuscript holdings of the Bodleian Library and other institutions.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level, graduate students, and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2012 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,900.

Full details and application information are available at http://www.jmu.edu/english/Tudor_Books_and_Readers. For further information, please contact Mark Rankin (rankinmc@jmu.edu). The application deadline is March 1, 2012.