| 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.)
We meet each Monday on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also live-stream our events via Zoom. For updates and Zoom links, please sign up for our listserv; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On March 17, 2025 at 5:15 PM, Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) will present: “Printers’ Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.”
This workshop is a tribute to Jim Green, who first got me interested in what the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) now catalogues as “overmarbled printers’ waste.” These waste sheets were printed but never published. I want to explore the very different reasons for why such sheets were remaindered, focusing mainly on waste from Fanny Hill and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that was recycled in the bindings of later books. A surprising number of books with boards covered in marbled sheets from Fanny Hill were owned by Isaiah Thomas himself, the founder of the AAS. Among them are the manuscript sermon notes of Cotton Mather—with the lesbian masturbation scene from Fanny Hill pasted down on the top and bottom boards. One main question (that Jim Green raised and helped to answer) is why the waste from Fanny Hill is from the first sheets of an unpublished edition while the waste from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is from the last sheets of a published edition.
Finally, I will look at Thomas’s financial records to explore what I now believe to be the main reason from Gutenberg onwards for the existence of printed waste, often from best-sellers (like psalm-books) and from a variety of ephemera.
Peter Stallybrass is retired and living in rural idiocy in the Connecticut Valley, tending his garden. On his occasional excursions, he has tried to keep his hand in by co-teaching with friends and former colleagues (including Lynne Farrington at Rare Book School, David Stern at Harvard, and Kathryn James and David Kastan at Yale). He is also working on BASIRA at Penn (with Barbara Ellerston and Nicholas Herman) and on erasable notebooks for the “Prize Papers Project” at the National Archives in England. Despite retirement, he continues to learn from his brilliant former colleagues in Philadelphia (especially Roger Chartier, Lynne Farrington, Margreta de Grazia, Jim Green, Zack Lesser, John Pollack, David Ruderman, Jerry Singerman, and David Stern).
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.
