Patricia Lockhart Fleming (University of Toronto)
“Doing National Book History: From Ambition to Archive in Canada”
Tuesday, 23 January
Abstract: Although Canada's project was a late enry into the national histories of the book community, it will be among the first completed with three volumes published in French and English editions in 2004, 2005, and early 2007. Patricia Fleming, Professor Emerita at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, and principal investigator and a general editor of the "History of the Book in Canada / Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada" will discuss the concept and realization of national book history
Paul Nelles (Carleton University, Ottawa)
“The Invention of the Universal Library: Conrad Gesner and Renaissance Print Culture”
Thursday, 8 February
Abstract: Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis (1545) is usually regarded as the first modern bibliography of printed books. Yet the Bibliotheca is much more than a guide to books in print. Gesner in fact coined the term "universal library" - but nowhere explains what he meant by it. This paper seeks to elucidate the resonances the term might have had for Gesner and his contemporaries by following in Gesner's footsteps as he went about the business of assembling his vast encyclopedia of all books ever written. Gesner is seen to inhabit a number of different worlds: the printer's workshop, the Zurich lecture-hall, the museum of the botanist, and the library of the medical humanist. He furnishes an ideal vantage point from which to view the world of books and libraries at the tail end of the first century of print, forcing us to revisit modern conceptualizations of Renaissance print culture.
Jacob Soll (Rutgers University, Camden)
“Of Princes and Paperwork: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Files, or How to Manage a State Information System”
Thursday, 8 March
Jacob Soll is a professor of History at Rutgers, Camden. His work focuses on early modern political culture, information culture, and the history of the book. His first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan, 2005), examines how humanist political culture–the ideas of “prudence” and “reason of state,” and the traditions surrounding Tacitus and Machiavelli–emerged as tools of monarchical absolutism, but evolved into arms of radical, Enlightened political criticism. He is now writing a book entitled, Of Princes and Paperwork: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s State Information System, which studies the rise of the modern knowledgeable state, the origins of modern information culture and the idea of a “grand system” as opposed to a “grand strategy.” In addition, he and Professor Anthony Grafton are currently co-editing a collective study on royal libraries.
Abby E. Zanger (Tufts University, Medford)
“What is a Book? Repetition and its Compulsions in Sixteenth-Century French Book Illustration”
Thursday, 22 March
Abstract: This talk concerns the reuse or reiteration of images across the "corpus" of one prolific and influential early 16th century Parisian printer-bookseller, Denis Janot. Active in Paris in the first half of the 16th century, Janot's career spanned a transitional moment for the early modern book in general, and for the Parisian book more specifically, where the period of the incunable has been extended into the 1530's. He produced books in a time when the material object we recognize today as a printed book was not yet fully developed. Janot played a crucial role in the evolution of this emerging object. As a follower of Geoffroy Tory, the renowned innovator of graphic design for print, Janot was a proponent of innovations such as Roman lettering and of "modern" spelling. He was also known for his development of the illustrated title page and for pioneering the extensive use of the woodblock vignette, a fixed decorative formula that distinguished the illustration of the printed book from that of the manuscript. Janot's books are known for their use of illustration and indeed he had a store of over 900 woodcuts he both inherited and commissioned. In this talk I will trace how these images got shifted both within and among books published by Janot. For example, often, the same woodcut might shift from a romance novel to an emblem book and then a work of political theory. I will choose three or four such examples of repetition and analyze their implications for how early modern readers might have read not just individual books within Janot's popular "corpus," but across that group of books with which they would have been familiar. The central thesis of the paper is that, followed to its logical consequences, Janot's extensive recycling of images requires us to rethink how we understand the book as an emerging object in the early years of the 16th century, unsettling our modern notion of the book object as a discrete and autonomous unit.
Olaf Simons (Oldenburg University, Germany)
“Why Literature is Called literature. Learning, Fiction, and the Power of Review Writing”
Thursday, 12 April
Abstract: The paper will lead back to an article Rainer Rosenberg published in1990 on the same question - speaking then of "a confused history": There is on the one hand the word "literature", standing originally for the sciences, now basically the term for poetical and fictional texts. There is on the other hand literature itself as it developed from Homer's 'Iliad' to James Joyce's 'Ulysses' - a production which attracted a number of words from "poetry" to the "belles lettres" before we began to speak of "literature" in the modern sense of the word. The confusion decreases if one focuses on the discussion of literature as the stable agent. The shift of focus raises, however, new questions, questions touching our present histories of literature.
