University of Pennsylvania
WORKSHOP ON THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
(or WORKSHOP ON THE HISTORY OF MATERIAL TEXTS)

1. 14 January
   Round table
   "Wax Tablets, Slates, and Other Erasable Texts: From Plato to Freud's Magic Writing Pad" -- HF

2. 21 January -- NO MEETING -- MARTIN LUTHER KING BIRTHDAY

3. 28 January
   Jocelyn Penny Small(Rutgers University)
   "Wax Tablets, Scrolls, and Codices" -- HF

4. 4 February
   Ramie Targoff (Brandeis)
   "Seeing Herbert's Temple" -- LEA

5. 7 February -- OF RELATED INTEREST -- 5 PM
   Jordan Penkower (Bar-Ilan University)
   "The Importance of using Manuscripts in Research: The Case of Rashi" -- Gates Room, 1st floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

6. 11 February
   Dan Sheerin (Notre Dame)
   "Johann Oecolampadius' Index: A Paratext of Erasmus' Jerome" -- HF

7. 18 February
   Robert Kraft and Ann Matter (University of Pennsylvania)
   "Scripture Formation and Transmission in the Greco-Latin World into the Middle Ages" -- LEA

8. 25 February
   Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
   "Hamlet and the Tables of Memory: A Detective Story" -- NOTE LOCATION: -- Class of '55 Room, 2nd floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

9. 4 March
   Fernando Bouza
   "Scribal Publication in Spain, Portugal, and the Americas during the 16th and 17th Centuries" -- HF

10. 11 March -- NO MEETING -- SPRING BREAK

11. 18 March
    Trish Loughran (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
    "The Book's Two Bodies: Print-Capitalism and the Problem of the Founding of the U.S." -- HF

12. 25 March
    Ann Blair (Harvard)
    "Coping with Information Overload in Early Modern Europe" -- LEA

13. 1 April -- NO MEETING -- EASTER MONDAY

14. 8 April
    Michael Ryan, Lynne Farrington (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Canvassing Books: A Practicum in 19th-century American Book Selling" -- LEA

15. 9, 10, and 11 April
    NOTE CHANGED AND MULTIPLE DATES, STARTING TIMES, & LOCATION

    Nicholas Barker (Editor, The Book Collector) -- The 2002 Rosenbach Lectures
    

    "'Things Not Reveal'd:' The Mutual Impact of Form and Idea on the Transmission of Poetry, 1500-2002" -- the Class of '55 Room (second floor of Van Pelt), 5:30 PM

16. 15 April
    Megan Williams (Center for Advanced Judaic Studies)
    "The Technology of the Codex: From Origen to Jerome" -- LEA

17. 29 April 22
    Round table (continued)
    "Wax Tablets and Erasable Texts: From Plato to Freud's Magic Writing Pad" -- HF

    ---

    ---

    A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Fall 2001 semester follows:

    1. 10 September
       Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
       "The Materiality of Writing"

    2. 17 September
       Joseph Farrell (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Rolls versus Codices, Bodily versus Vegetable Form and Other Bookish Antitheses"

    3. 24 September
       Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College)
       "Early Modern Hand Work"

    4. 1 October
       Maurice Samuels (University of Pennsylvania)
       "The Spectacular Text: Wood Engraving and Illustrated Historiography in Nineteenth-Century France"

    5. 8 October
       Ann Moyer (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Texts, Artifacts, Inscriptions: A Renaissance Debate on Research Methods and Materials"

    6. 15 October
       Aditya Behl (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Poet of the Bazaars: Nazir Akbarabadi, 1735--1830"

    7. 22 October
       Ruth Luborsky(Philadelphia, PA)
       "Putting the Pictures Back in the Book: Looking at Holinshed's Illustrated Chronicles"

    8. 29 October
       Leah Price (Harvard University)
       "The Size of the Novel"

    9. 5 November
       Noam Flinker (University of Pennsylvania)
       "English Poems Made from Biblical Texts: William Baldwin's Canticles, or Balades of Salomon (1549)"

    10. 12 November
        Larry Scanlon (Rutgers University)
        
        "A Textual History of Sodom"

    11. 19 November
        Stefan Reif (Cambridge University)
        "The Cairo Geniza and Two of its 'Discoverers': Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, Two Women Orientalists in Victorian Times"

        This is the 16th Annual Joseph Alexander Colloquium, co-sponsored with Jewish Studies. NOTE CHANGED LOCATION: CAROLYN-HOFF LYNCH ROOM, FIRST FLOOR, CHEMISTRY BUILDING, 231 SOUTH 34TH STREET

    12. 26 November
        Jennifer Thompson (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
        "Peter of Poitiers' Genealogy of Christ: A Study Aid for Poor Students?"

    13. 3 December
        Nigel Smith (Princeton University)
        "Creating a Bad Impression: Books and Radicalism in Early Modern England"

    14. 10 December
        Emma Dillon (University of Pennsylvania)
        "The Sense of Sound: Devotional Designs in the Montpellier Codex"

    ---

    ---

    A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Spring 2001 semester follows:

    1. 23 January
       David Szewczyk (Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts)
       "Problems in 16th-Century Mexican Printing and Book History"

    2. 29 January
       Moustafa Bayoumi (Department of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY)
       "Faithful to the Text: Africans in the Americas and New World Arabic Writing"

    3. 5 February
       Cristle Judd (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Hearing with the Eyes, Seeing with the Ears: Musical Composition, Theory, and Print Culture in the Sixteenth Century"

    4. 12 February
       Robert Perelman (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Pound's Legibility: Pedagogy and/or Initiation"

    5. 19 February
       Roger Chartier (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Don Quixote in the Printshop"

    6. 26 February
       Stephen Campbell (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Bronzino and Counter-Reformation Comedy"

    7. 5 March -- SNOW CANCELLATION
       Shane Butler (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Dhuoda and Medusa"

    8. 12 March -- SPRING BREAK -- NO MEETING

    9. 19 March
       Sean Keilen (University of Pennsylvania)
       ""The Coinage of the Brain: Numismatic Books in the 16th Century"

    10. 26 March
        Paul Saenger (The Newberry Library)
        "The Origins of the Modern Mode of Citation"

    11. 2 April
        Max Cavitch (University of Pennsylvania)
        "Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Early America"

    12. 9 April
        Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (University of Michigan, emerita)
        "The Two-Faced Printer: Some Representations of the Craft and its Practitioners"

    13. 16 April
        Jim Kearney (University of Pennsylvania)
        "The Cut of the Letter: Donne's 1633 Poems and the Hermeneutics of Circumcision"

    14. 23 April
        Marvin Taylor (Bobst Library, New York University)
        "'I'll Be Your Mirror, Reflect What You Are': Postmodern Documentation and the NYC Avant-garde 1975-1995"

    15. 30 April
        Emma Dillon (University of Pennsylvania)
        "Designing Devotion: Reading and Hearing the Old French Motet"

    ---

    ---

    A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Fall 2000 semester follows:

    1. 11 September
       Emily Steiner (University of Pennsylvania)
       "Medieval Allegory and the Material Text: The Case of the Legal Document"

    2. 18 September
       Talia Schaffer (Queens College-CUNY)
       "The’'Industrious Fair': Reading the Victorian Domestic Handicraft"

    3. 25 September
       Jacob Soll (Rutgers-Camden)
       "Textual Subversion: Amelot de La Houssaie and the Print Practices of Criticism in France 1670-1700"

    4. 2 October
       Steve McCaffery (York, Canada) -- NOTE ROOM CHANGE: Bennett Hall 222
       on two Yorkshiremen's rescenscions of one canonical text, Paradise Lost

    5. 3 October -- NOTE DAY CHANGE: TUESDAY
       Bruce Holsinger (University of Colorado)
       "The Singing Bull: Liturgical Cultures and Vernacular Writing in Premodern England"

    6. 9 October
       Cannon Schmitt (Duke University)
       "The Anachronistic Geographies of Greater Britain: Charles Kingsley's At Last"

    7. 16 October
       Rebecca Zorach (Mellon Fellow, Penn)
       "Ink"

    ROSENBACH LECTURES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY
    NOTE DAY CHANGES AND ROOM CHANGE: Class of '55 Room, second floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

    Malachi Beit-Arié (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

    "Unveiled Faces of Medieval Hebrew Books: The Evolution of Manuscript Production"
    1. 18 October [WEDNESDAY]: "Technical Evolution: Ruling Manuscripts"
    2. 19 October [THURSDAY]: "Copying Dynamics: Line Management"
    3. 23 October [MONDAY]: "Structural Transparency of Copied Texts

    25 October -- NOTE DAY CHANGE: WEDNESDAY;
    ROOM CHANGE: History Lounge, Room 329-A, 3401 Walnut Street;
    TIME CHANGE: 4:30 P.M.
    Carla Hesse (University of California, Berkeley)

    "Women into Print: 1750-1820"

    30 October
    David Halperin (University of Michigan)

    "Gay Identity and Its Discontents"

    6 November
    William Germano (Routledge)

    on publishing academic books

    13 November
    Patrick Cheney (Pennsylvania State University)

    "Shakespeare's Material History of the Spenserian Book: Sonnet 106"

    20 November
    Lauren Shohet (Villanova University)

    "The Irish Masque at Court and in Print"

    27 November
    Susan Lanser (University of Maryland)

    "Sapphic Subjects and the Engendering of Enlightenment"

    4 December
    David Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania)

    "Biblical Authority, Political Dissent, and the Formation of Modern Jewish Culture in 18th Century England"

    11 December
    SPEAKER TBA

    TITLE TBA

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Spring 2000 semester follows:

1. 17 January
   Roger Chartier
   Title?

2. 24 January
   Rebecca Bushnell, Michael Ryan, Brett Wilson (University of Pennsylvania)
   on SCETI's Shakespeare project

3. 31 January -- NO MEETING

4. 7 February
   Michael L. Wilson (University of Texas, Dallas)
   "Desperately Seeking Fortune: Newspapers and Bohemian Identity in fin-de-siècle Paris"

5. 14 February
   Drew Faust (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying"

6. 21 February
   Ora Limor (Open University, Israel)
   "Places of Desire: Christianity and the Mapping of the Holy Land"

7. 28 February
   Galit Hasan-Rokem (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
   "Shared Cultural Goods: Women Neighbors in Late Antique Jewish Narratives"

8. 6 March
   Paula McDowell (University of Maryland)
   "'Fugitive Papers': The 76 (and Counting) Works of London Printer-Author Elinor James"

9. 13 March -- SPRING BREAK -- NO MEETING

10. 20 March
    Farah Griffin (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Beloved Sisters, Loving Friends"

11. 27 March
    Fiona Kisby
    "Books in London Parish Churches, ca. 1350-1603"

12. 3 April
    Michael Phillips (University of York, England)
    "William Blake, the Terror and Illuminated Book Production"

13. 10 April
    Penny Marcus (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Material Boy: An Italian Rock Video as Cultural Studies Text"

14. 17 April -- NO MEETING

15. 24 April
    Jessie Owens (Brandeis University)
    "Erasable Tablets as Tools for Musical Composition"

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Fall 1999 semester follows:

1. 13 September
   David Espey (University of Pennsylvania)
   "Maps, Guides, Palimpsests, and Travel Writing"

2. 20 September
   
   YOM KIPPUR -- NO MEETING

3. 27 September
   James P. Dankey (State Historical Society of Wisconsin; University of Wisconsin-Madison)
   "The Black Press and White Institutions: The Making of African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography"
   Rescheduled from last February 22nd.

4. 4 October
   Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The English Bible and Discontinuous Reading"

5. 11 October
   Benjamin Elman (Mellon Visiting Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton)
   "Cultural Prisons or Impartial Testing Sites: New Answers to Old Questions on the Late Imperial Chinese Civil Service Examinations"

6. 18 October
   
   FALL BREAK -- NO MEETING

7. 25, 26, 27, 28 October
   Randall McLeod (University of Toronto)
   Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: "Material Narratives: The Printing of Two Sixteenth-Century Books"
   • the printing of the first edition of Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, by Andrea D'Asola, at the Aldine Press, Venice, 1528
   • the printing of the first Hebrew Bible in France by Robert Estienne, Paris, 1539-1544

8. 1 November
   Tim Powell (University of Pennsylvania)
   on uses of the American flag among the Lakota people in the nineteenth century

9. 8 November
   Peter DeCherney (New York University)
   on the collecting of films in the early twentieth century

10. 15 November
    Alexandra Halasz (Dartmouth College)
    on Renaissance print culture

11. NOTE CHANGE
    22 November
    David Katz (Tel Aviv University)
    "Aestheticizing Scripture, Anaesthetizing Revolution: Biblical Interpretation and the Damping Down of Millennarianism in Eighteenth-Century England"

12. 29 November
    Elaine Freedgood (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Private Circulation: Secrecy, Scarcity and the Endurance of Victorian Homoerotica"

13. 6 December
    Laurie Shannon (Duke University)
    "The Book of Friendship: 1481-1611"

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Spring 1999 semester follows:

1. 11 January
   James J. O'Donnell (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The Odious Ennodius: The Fate of a Minor Classic"

2. 18 January
   Terry P. Dolan (University College, Dublin)
   "The Making of a Dictionary"

3. 25 January
   Charles Bernstein (SUNY-Buffalo) and Susan Bee (illustrator)
   "Little Orphan Anagram Learns to Read" ("about a series of book collaborations we have done together: The Occurrence of Tune (Segue, 1981); Fool's Gold (Chax Press, 1991); The Nude Formalism (Sun & Moon, 1989); Little Orphan Anagram (Granary Books, 1987); and Log Rhythms (Granary Books, 1998).
   • For images of this book, click here.
   • For a related syllabus, go to Textual Conditions.
   • Click here for related graphics: related graphics (click on the image to continue).
   • Click here for Visual Works and other material)

4. 1 February
   Janet Sorenson (Indiana University)
   "The Grammar of Empire: Language, Literacy, and Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Writing"

5. 8 February
   Christopher Baswell (Barnard College)
   "The Book of the World Split Open: Reception, Codicology, and Georgics I as Mappae Mundi"

6. 15 February
   Martha Woodmansee (Case Western Reserve University)
   "Beyond Authorship: Intellectual Property in Global Perspective"

7. 22 February
   James P. Danky (Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Co-director, Center for the History of Print Culture, University of Wisconsin, Madison)
   "The Black Press and White Institutions: the Making of African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography
   This talk was CANCELLED.

8. 1 March
   Trish Loughran (University of Chicago and Fellow, McNeil Center for American Studies)
   "Federal Fictions: Making and Remembering The Federalist"

9. 8 March
   
   SPRING BREAK -- NO MEETING

10. 15 March
    Michael Gamer (Penn)
    "From Editor to Author: Collecting (and Rejecting) the Della Cruscans"

11. 22 March
    
    ROSENBACH LECTURES -- NO MEETING

12. 29 March
    Margaret Bent (All Souls College, University of Oxford)
    "The Making and Remaking of a 15th-century Book: Codicological Evidence for Changing Tastes"

13. 5 April
    Neil Saccamano (Columbia University)
    "Recollecting Defoe and the Hazards of Print"

14. 12 April
    Jay Fliegelman (Stanford University)
    "Belongings: Dramas of American Book Ownership, 1660-1860"

15. 19 April
    Barbara Harlow (University of Texas at Austin)
    "Truth and Reconciliation, the Imperial Archive, and the Destruction of Documents"

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Fall 1998 semester follows:

1. September 14
   Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The Gardener and the Book"

2. September 21
   Mark Bland (University of Oxford/Stanford University)
   "Fear, Myth, and the Archive: Ben Jonson's Manuscripts and Library"

3. September 28
   Jeff Nunokawa (Princeton University)
   "Textuality and Oscar Wilde"

4. October 5
   Kathy Eden (Columbia University)
   "Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus"

5. October 12
   Jeffrey Freedman (Yeshiva University)
   "Translating the Enlightenment: The Bookseller as Cultural Intermediary"

6. October 19
   FALL BREAK -- NO MEETING

7. October 26
   Armando Maggi (University of Pennsylvania)
   Renaissance Florentine Imprese

8. November 2
   Stephen Nichols (The Johns Hopkins University)
   "Codex or Orality: The Myth of the Early Troubadors"

9. November 9
   Eileen Reeves (Princeton University)
   "Safe from Cockroaches and Bookworms: Early Modern Manuscript Newsletters"

10. November 16
    Julie Fairman (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Paper Work: Creating a History of Nurses' Work at Pennsylvania Hospital, 1950-70"

11. November 23
    Pete Donaldson (MIT)
    Shakespearean Materiality, Digital Representation: Some Lessons from the Shakespeare Electronic Archive"

12. November 30
    Derick Dreher (Rosenbach Museum & Library)
    "Humanism and the Book in Renaissance Nuremburg"

13. December 7
    Larry Silver (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Back to the Future: Old Tales and New Technologies for Emperor Maximilian's Romance, Teuerdank"

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Sping 1998 semester follows:

1. January 19
   David Stern (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The First Jewish Readers of the Bible"

2. January 26
   Dan Raff (University of Pennsylvania)
   "The Book Trade"

3. February 2
   Rita Barnard (University of Pennsylvania)
   " BITTERKOMIX: Notes from the Post-Apartheid Underground"

4. February 9
   Londa Schiebinger (Pennsylvania State University)
   "Lost Knowledge, Bodies of Ignorance, and the Poverty of Taxonomy as Illustrated by the Curious Fate of Flos Pavonis, an Abortifacient"

5. February 16
   Meredith McGill (Rutgers University)
   "Thinking Reprinting"

6. February 23
   Randall McLeod (Erindale College, University of Toronto)
   "Material Differences"

7. March 2
   Deborah Sanford and Greg Schirm(House of Our Own Bookstore, Philadelphia)
   "The Past and Future of the Independent Bookstore"

8. March 9
   SPRING BREAK--NO MEETING

9. March 16
   Matthew Rowlinson (Dartmouth College)
   "Fiction and Accomodation: Walter Scott's Bills"

10. March 23
    Armando Maggi (University of Pennsylvania)
    POSTPONED (memorial service for Professor Charles Bernheimer); to be rescheduled for fall semester 1998.

11. March 30
    Nancy Hoffman (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Textualizing Travel in the 18th Century"

12. April 6
    Seth Cotlar (Northwestern University)
    "Newspaper Reading and Trans-Atlantic Radicalism in the 1790s"

13. April 13
    Greg Nagy (Harvard University)
    "The Library of Pergamon"

14. April 20
    
    Ralph Rosen (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Callias' Letter Show and Greek Concepts of Literacy"

15. April 21
    
    TUESDAY -- ADDITIONAL SESSION
    Roger Chartier (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
    

16. April 27
    Jonathan Dollimore (Sussex University)
    

A record of the Seminar's meetings during the Fall 1997 semester follows:

1. September 8
   Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
   [on speech prefixes in early editions of Shakespeare's plays and what they tell us about the period's dramatic concept of character/personality]

2. September 15
   Dan White (University of Pennsylvania)
   "Godwin's Politics and Print Culture during the 1790s"

3. September 22
   Ann Kuttner (University of Pennsylvania)
   "Text as Image: Transformations in Late Roman Art"

4. September 29
   Jeffrey Masten (Harvard University)
   "The Interpretation of Dreams, ca. 1610"

5. October 6
   David Scott Kastan (Columbia University)
   "The Vehemence of Novelty: The English Bible in Henrician England"

6. October 13
   FALL BREAK--NO MEETING
   

7. October 20
   Harry Mathews (Paris and New York)
   . . . talking informally about his work and about the OULIPO

8. October 27
   Ruth Luborsky (Philadelphia)
   "The Illustrations to the Tudor Editions of Foxe's Actes and Monuments: Flux and Consistency"

9. November 3
   G. Thomas Tanselle (John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation)
   "The Bibliographical Analysis of Book Design"

10. November 10
    Nancy Vickers (Bryn Mawr College)
    [images of body parts]

11. November 17
    Cristle Judd (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Reading Theorists Reading (Music): Thoughts on 16th-Century Music Print Culture"

12. November 24
    James N. Green (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
    "Circulating Books"

13. December 1
    Paul J. Korshin (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Toward A Cultural History of the Recipe"

14. December 8
    Jay Grossman (Amherst College/Harvard University)
    "Whitman's Little Blue Book"