Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
HMT | About | Search | Events | Impact |
---|
Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On October 28, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Alan B. Farmer (Ohio State University) will present: “Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction.”
Scholars have long recognized the reality of lost books in early modern England, in particular works that no longer survive in even a single printed copy. This talk will focus on the distinct methodological challenges that come with attempting to identify lost editions in various print genres because, it turns out, different types of literature have become lost at different rates. I will address the larger significance of these lost books for our understanding of the workings of the early modern English book trade, the literary history of Renaissance England, and, more generally, the cultural history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Alan B. Farmer is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the co-creator, with Zachary Lesser, of DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, published this September in a revised edition. He publishes most often on book history, widow stationers, Shakespeare in print, and Renaissance English drama. This talk comes out of his current project on lost books in the early modern English book trade.The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.
The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.
Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.