CELL: Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives

Centre for Editing Lives & Letters (CELL)
University College London
June 6th-8th 2019
Venue: University College London, IAS Common Ground

This symposium brings together a group of UK-based academics and librarians, as well as key Continental scholars, in an attempt to consolidate current research, for the first time, on seventeenth-century libraries and book collecting. Much research has been done, but it remains scattered across disciplinary divides. Until separate findings have been amalgamated, we will not be able to establish the patterns of book acquisition and library formation for this important period.

Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives will address questions of topography and typology, networks of library activity, administration, visual identity, dispersal, owners and content, and definitions of public and private. The symposium will also confront current topics of cultural and intellectual history – especially heritage and antiquarianism, the circulation and management of knowledge, and the rise of consumerism and the culture of collecting, as presented in such books as Arthur MacGregor’s Curiosity and Enlightenment (2007), Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know (2010), and Linda Levy Peck’s Consuming Splendor (2005).

CALL FOR PAPERS: Cultures of Collecting, 1500-1750

Cultures of Collecting, 1500-1750: a one-day conference organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford University

Wednesday 14 June 2017, Corpus Christi College, Oxford


On the 400th anniversary of the birth of Elias Ashmole, we invite proposals that address any aspect of the cultures of collecting in England and Europe, ca. 1500-1750, from any disciplinary perspective, including material culture, art history, visual studies, museum studies, social history, and literary scholarship. 

Papers might focus on major early modern collectors (Hans Sloane, Elias Ashmole, John Tradescant Jr and Sr), but also lesser-known figures. 

• What were the motives and mechanics of collecting? 
• How did early moderns understand curiosity and preservation; wonder and taxonomy; variety and system?
• What was the relationship between utility and display? 
• How did Wunderkammern shape and transmit new categories of knowledge? 
• What were the links between cabinets of curiosities and book collections and libraries? 
• How did the practices of collecting shape broader cultural trends? 
• How do literary texts respond to collecting? 
• Is there a connection between collecting objects and the circulation and gathering of commonplaces; between gathering things and gatherings words (or literary invention)? 
• What were the relationships between collecting, biography, and self-expression? 
• How ideological were collections, and how was the politics of collecting expressed and understood? What are the methodological challenges of reconstructing collections today? 
• How can we read catalogues and textual records of now-dispersed collections?

Please send 300-word proposals for a 20-minute paper, and a brief CV, to Dr Natasha Simonova (natasha.simonova@ell.ox.ac.uk) by 10 April 2017.

Library and Information History Group Conference 2015: Libraries and the Development of Professional Knowledge

Pusey House Oxford on Saturday 19 September.

This conference will consider the various ways in which libraries have served as generators of professional knowledge, and examine how they succeeded in doing so. A student bursary is being offered to attend the conference which covers conference fees and refreshments and up to £100 towards travel expenses. The deadline for the bursary is 31st August 2015. Applications can be made by emailing a short paragraph explaining why you would like to attend the conference, together with a one page CV, to the Chair, Renae Satterley, r.satterley@middletemple.org.uk.

9.45 – Registration and Welcome

10.20 – Libraries and professional knowledge in the Early Modern age
Lucy Gwynn: Folios, hedgehogs, sketches and pickles: the traffic of books, specimens and drawings between physicians in Restoration England

Helen Kemp: The role of manuscripts in the acquisition of professional knowledge for the seventeenth century clergy

11.00 Questions and Refreshments

11.30 – Libraries and the growth of technical knowledge during the nineteenth century 

Jennifer Hillyard: The Library of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers

John Tiernan: A Pioneer Regional Professional Association for Librarians in the UK 

Martyn Walker: ‘For the last many years in England everybody has been educating the people, but they have forgotten to find them any books’. The Mechanics’ Institute in Britain

12.45 – Lunch

13.45 – Keynote Address by Anthony Watkinson, Honorary Lecturer (UCL) and Principal Consultant (CIBER Research)
The growth in numbers, cost and importance of journals in the later twentieth century and how this has impacted on the role of academic libraries

14.30 – Refreshments

15.00 – Founding professional libraries in the 20th century 

Kristine Chapman: Building a natural history library: the collection of Willoughby Gardner

Daniel Gooding: Mind, Body, and Spiritualism: a case study of the personal collections of Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome and Harry Houdini

Julie Mathias: The National Library of Wales’s Duplicates Section 

Full details on the conference, including the programme, are available at: http://www.cilip.org.uk/library-information-history-group/events/library-information-history-group-conference-2015


Middle Temple Library, Ashley Building, Middle Temple Lane, London EC4Y 9BT
T: 020 7427 4830 I F: 020 7427 4831
www.middletemple.org.uk/library