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2014 Michaelmas Term Seminars

Thursday 30th October
PAUL WHITE (Leeds), 'Marginalia and other marks of use in early printed editions of the classics'

In 1794 Count Károly Reviczky, who collected classical incunables for the bibliomaniac Spencer, expressed the view that the manuscript annotations commonly found in early printed editions of the classics were 'most disagreeable to the eye': Reviczky made strenuous efforts to remove such annotations by washing or bleaching. Mercifully, not all collectors followed this example. And despite the attitude of Reviczky and others, a good number of the classical incunables in the Spencer collection, now housed in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, bear marks of use: some have been washed; many have not. More generally it has been estimated that up to 70 percent of all incunables, and perhaps half of all sixteenth-century printed editions, bear contemporary handwritten annotations. In this paper, taking as my central focus editions of Horace held in the Rylands Spencer and Christie collections, I will pass over in review the different kinds of marginalia and marks of use most frequently seen in early printed editions of the classics, and attempt to set them in contexts furnished by recent research on early modern note-taking.

TUESDAY 11th November
FLORIS VERHAART (Trinity College, Oxford) 'Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns: the Opposition between Philologia and Philosophia at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century'

 

Thursday 27th November.
Wren Library, Trinity College at 5.00pm

NICK HARDY (Trinity College, Cambridge) 'Neo-Latin in Manuscript and Print'

This session will use items from the Wren Library's collections to explore some aspects of how Latin books were produced and used during the Renaissance. Authors covered will include canonical poets, such as John Milton; humanists, such as Isaac Casaubon; and writers who are hors catégorie, such as Francis Bacon. Topics considered will include clandestine publication, piracy and censorship; practices of marginal annotation and other forms of reading, collaborative as well as solitary; the academic contexts of neo-Latin composition and performance; and the history of personal and institutional libraries and archives. The class is intended for undergraduates and graduate students taking papers or doing research on neo-Latin texts.