Early Modern Studies @ Newcastle
EARLY MODERN READING:
BOOKS, COMMUNITIES, CONVERSATIONS
Newcastle University, 10-12 April 2008
Registration | Accommodation | Bursaries | Getting Here | Conference Photos
- Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge)
- Cathy Shrank (Sheffield)
- Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge)
The history of reading has experienced an explosive growth in recent years. Scholars of early modern England have been at the forefront of research in this area, and studies of the reading practices of a number of notable figures, inlcuding Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson and Sir William Drake, have appeared over the last fifteen years. Historians have gleaned from notebooks and marginalia a model of information or turns of phrase and applied to the life or writings of the reader or their patron. Such work has offerned many important insights, but it has perhaps also narrowed our understanding of the practice of reading and its social and political import. It does not give us a model that is flexible enough to explain the relationship between reading and the development of 'literary' form, nor does it recognise the diverse practical, political and social interests which reading may have served.
This interdisciplinary conference aims to extend and complicate our understanding of early modern readers and reading practice, including the conversations - or indeed quarrels - which follow particular texts; the act of reading itself as dialogic; readings that ‘go against the grain’; the sense of literary writings as acts of reading; reading as information gathering and the organization of knowledge; and textual exchange as a form of association, or negotiation, between individuals, communities, and cultures.
To register for the conference, please follow the link at the top of the page. For further questions, contact Fred Schurink (fred.schurink@ncl.ac.uk) or Jennifer Richards (jennifer.richards@ncl.ac.uk).
The conference has been organized with the generous support of The Society for Renaissance Studies, The Bibliographical Society, and NIASSH.
Image reproduced by permission of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.