The Word on the Street
How ordinary Scots in bygone days found out what was happening

In the centuries before there were newspapers and 24-hour news channels, the general public had to rely on street literature to find out what was going on. The most popular form of this for nearly 300 years was 'broadsides' - the tabloids of their day. Sometimes pinned up on walls in houses and ale-houses, these single sheets carried public notices, news, speeches and songs that could be read (or sung) aloud. The National Library of Scotland's online collection of nearly 1,800 broadsides lets you see for yourself what 'the word on the street' was in Scotland between 1650 and 1910. Crime, politics, romance, emigration, humour, tragedy, royalty and superstitions - all these and more are here.

Tenth Biennial Conference of the Early Book Society
Codices and Communities: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550

The tenth biennial EBS conference is hosted by Sue Powell, University of Salford, with visits and sessions to be held at Chetham's Library and the John Ryland's Library, Manchester, and a day out to Stonyhurst College. Proposals may consider any aspect of the history of manuscripts and printed books from 1350-1550, including the copying and circulation of models and exemplars, style, illustration, and/or the influence of readers and patrons, artists, scribes, printers. Special consideration will be given to proposals considering the circulation of MSS and early printed books within and/or beyond specific communities of readers or makers, as well as on transitions from MS to print or print to MS.

For more information, click here

Rare Book School
Rare Book School (RBS) is an independent, non-profit and tax-exempt institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects, governed by its own board of directors. Founded in 1983, it moved to its present home at the University of Virginia in 1992. At various times during the year, RBS offers about 30 five-day, non-credit courses for adults on topics concerning old and rare books, manuscripts, and special collections. The majority of courses take place in Charlottesville, but courses are also offered in New York City, Baltimore, and Washington DC. The educational and professional prerequisites for RBS courses vary. Some courses are broadly directed toward antiquarian booksellers, book collectors, bookbinders, conservators, teachers, and professional and avocational students of the history of books and printing. Others are primarily intended for archivists and for research and rare book librarians and curators.

For information on funding opportunities for upcoming courses, click here

Save the Collection of the French Imprimerie Nationale
The collection of the Imprimerie Nationale, one of the world's richest archives of print history, ranging from the 16th century to the present, is under threat of dissolution. Help save the collection by signing the petition here.

London: A Life in Maps
An Exhibition at the British Library
24 November - 4 March, 2007

Take a look at London as you have never seen it before. This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition brings to life London’s lost lanes and landmarks, parks and palaces, riots and railways, towers and temptations.
(More information here)

Collectors and Collecting:
Private Collections and their Role in Libraries
Proposals are invited for papers for a conference to be held at Chawton House Library on 19 and 20 July 2007. The event is jointly organised by Chawton House Library, the University of Southampton English Department, and Goucher College, Baltimore. This conference will focus on individual collectors of books and manuscripts and their collections. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* The role of such collections within the context of the libraries where they may now be accommodated
* The way in which libraries manage an individual's collection
* The act and process of private collecting
* The motivation of the individual collector
* The book or manuscript as artifact in the context of private collections

For more information click here

The Clergy of the Church of England Database
The Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCEd) is a collaborative project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and bringing together scholars from King's College London, the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Reading. Its objective is to create a relational database documenting the careers of all Church of England clergymen between 1540 and 1835.

View the website here

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME)
LEME searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1702.

More information available here

Early Modern English Women, 1500-1750:
Contemporary Editions (Ashgate)
Susan B. Iwanisziw, ed., Oroonoko:Adaptations and Offshoots (2006)
Suzanne Trill, ed., Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings (2007)
Nicky Hallet, ed., Lives of Spirit: An Editions of English Camelite Auto/Biographies of the Early Modern Period (2007)
Nicky Hallet, ed., Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent (2007)
More information available here

The Early English Booktrade Database

The last one hundred years of scholarship in the history of the English book trade have been dominated by catalogues: of books, of watermarks, of printer's ornaments and title-page borders. At the same time considerable effort has gone into the transcription and publication of primary documents such as those found in company archives and government repositories. Little research has been carried out, however, in support of the tools of quantitative analysis developed by historians and social scientists. The paucity of quantitative-based research is due primarily to the lack of hard data upon which to work. As a result, while we know for the most part what books were published and something about the official lives of the men and women who worked in the printing houses and bookshops, we know very little about the measurable physical, economic and material circumstances of the trade itself. The Early English Booktrade Database (EEBD) will be the first networked electronic resource devoted to the organization and dissemination of physical and descriptive bibliographical statistics.

View the EEBD here

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen
View new and forthcoming titles for 2006/7 here

Newberry Library Fellowships
The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, invites applications for its 2007-08 Fellowships in the Humanities. Newberry Library fellowships support research in residence at the Library. All proposed research must be appropriate to the collections of the Newberry Library. Our fellowship program rests on the belief that all projects funded by the Newberry benefit from engagement both with the materials in the Newberry's collections and with the lively community of researchers that gathers around those collections. Long-term residential fellowships are available to postdoctoral scholars for periods of six to eleven months. Applicants for postdoctoral awards must hold the Ph.D. at the time of application. The stipend for these fellowships is up to $40,000. Short-term residential fellowships are intended for postdoctoral scholars or Ph.D. candidates from outside of the Chicago area who have a specific need for Newberry collections. Scholars whose principal residence or place of employment is within the Chicago area are not eligible. The tenure of short-term fellowships varies from one week to two months. The amount of the award is generally $1200 per month. Applications for long-term fellowships are due January 10, 2007; applications for most short-term fellowships are due March 1, 2007.
http://www.newberry.org/research/felshp/fellowshome.html

English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800
UCSB Early Modern Center

Dedicated to mounting online extant ballads published in English from 1500-1800, the English Department's Early Modern Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara has begun by archiving the 1,857 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection.
(read more here)

Technologies of Writing in the Age of Print
An Exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library
Washington, D.C.
Sept. 28, 2006 - Feb. 17, 2007

Curators: Peter Stallybrass, Michael Mendle, and Heather Wolfe
for details, click here

Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama
Elza C. Tiner

University of Toronto Press, 2006

Samuel Jonson, The Lives of the Poets
Edited by Roger Lonsdale

Oxford English Texts
Oxford University Press, 2006
for more information, click here

Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London's French Libellistes, 1758-92
Simon Borrows

Manchester University Press, 2006

Call for Papers

SHARP 2007 Conference: Open the Book, Open the Mind

The fifteenth annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) will be held in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota on July 11-15, 2007.

For more information, click here

Call for Papers

Archives: From Memory to Event

UCL English Postgraduate Conference
March 9th 2007
Institute of English Studies
Senate House
London

Keynote Speakers:
Helen Freshwater (Birkbeck), Dorothea McEwan (Warburg Archive)

We welcome contibutions from the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

. discussions of specific archives and their relation to individual or
collective memory and commemorative acts
. the (literary) text as archive and monument
. self-narration and autobiography as a way of constructing archived
and archivable memory
. the archiving and remembering of traumatic events
. questions of power with regard to the archive and
memory/commemoration
. literature on mourning and its structuring of memory and
commemoration
. self-censorship and confession in texts which stage the archiving of
memory
. memory and the possibility of the archive in 'unfinishing' texts

Proposal submission deadline: November 1st 2006; 250 word limit. Papers will be expected to be 15 minutes in length. They may be published in the online journal of the UCL English Postgraduate Society 'Movable Type'.
Please send proposals to sandeep.parmar_at_ucl.ac.uk.
(Full call for papers can be viewed here)

New Editions from Broadview Press

Anne Clifford, The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-19
Edited by Katharine O. Acheson
Forthcoming, November 2006

The Autobiography of Ashley Brown
Daniel Vickers
2006

Mellon Summer Institutes in Paleography

Supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these summer institutes provide intensive practical training in reading late medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in European vernacular hands: English, French, Italian, and Spanish. The institutes emphasize the skills needed for the accurate reading and transcription of vernacular texts, but attention may also be given to the instruments of research, codicology, analytical bibliography, and textual editing, depending on the expertise of the instructors and the nature of the historical documents under consideration.

The institutes are hosted by the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

For details, click here

Internet Shakespeare Editions gets a site-design overhaul. See ISE's new look here.

Call for Papers

"Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800"


An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 9-10. 2007

What were early modern publics? How were they formed? What needs did they serve for those
who participated in them? And how did they relate to the emergence of a cultural formation that we recognize as distinctly early modern? These are among the questions we seek to address in this conference.

We invite paper proposals from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives that either examine
particular instances of publics and their formation or address the broader, more theoretical issues raised by this wide-spread and under-studied phenomenon. If new media and the markets through which their products were made available led to new forms of voluntary association and identity, as they surely did, how can we best describe the workings of that process and what significance should we ascribe to it? How, in short, did the publics for playgoing, for natural history, for madrigal singing, for antiquarian scholarship, for amateur drawing, for geographical learning, and for dozens of other voluntary activities come into being? And what does it mean for a society when such groups grow and proliferate?

This conference is being organized in conjunction with the collaborative and interdisciplinary "Making Publics" project centered at McGill University and funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (www.makingpublics.mcgill.ca). The limit dates of the McGill project are 1500-1700. Given the mission of the Early Modern Center at UC Santa Barbara, we are extending the second of those dates to 1800. This not only opens the way for the inclusion of specifically eighteenth-century publics, but also invites consideration of the relation between the multiple publics we examine and the Habermasian "public sphere" that has long been a focus of intense attention in eighteenth-century studies. Is the existence of multiple publics a precondition for the emergence of a public sphere? Or have they some more complex relation to one another?

Keynote speakers currently include David Harris Sacks, History, Reed College.

Abstracts and c.v.'s should be sent to EMCConference2007@gmail.com by November 8,
2006.We hope to complete the program and notify applicants no later than December 1, 2006.
Proposals for fifteen to twenty-minute papers should be 300 words or less.

'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversey and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor

Cambridge University Press, 2006