Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper

September 25, 2008-January 31, 2009
Folger Shakespeare Library; Washington, DC

The first newspaper arrived in England from an Amsterdam publisher on December 2, 1620. Containing the latest foreign news, this publication immediately sparked a huge demand for up-to-the-minute reports on domestic and world events. From stories of war to lurid accounts of celebrity scandals among the royal families of Europe, journalism exploded into the world of Renaissance England. Gossip in the taverns and conversations among the political classes gave way to the phenomenon of a wide cross-section of the populace reading the events of the days and weeks in cheaply-printed serial publications.

The early English newspaper has left an indelible mark upon modern news culture. Even in its earliest manifestation, we see the emergence of the dramatic headline and the editorial, the development of tabloids and advertising, and the advent of attempts at state censorship and control over the presses. The content of the newspapers on exhibit reflects not only politics but the wider cultural, social and economic life of the times they covered.

This exhibition traces the development of journalism and the newspaper in England, from the manuscript antecedents of the coranto form to the introduction of newspapers in America in the late seventeenth century, and the birth of the first daily newspaper in England in 1702.

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Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century

May 23–Sept. 20, 2009
The Huntington; San Marino, CA

Legendary as a writer, moralist, and conversationalist during his lifetime, Samuel Johnson (1709–84) achieved fame with the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. In honor of the 300th anniversary of his birth, “Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century,” will explore how this boy from Lichfield, a small provincial town in the English Midlands, became eminent as an authority on the English language, and became distinguished as the “great moralist.” The story of Johnson’s life and achievements will be told through books, manuscripts, and portraits drawn from The Huntington collections and the Loren and Frances Rothschild collection.

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NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

The Reformation of the Book: 1450-1650

John N. King and James K. Bracken of The Ohio State University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on continuity and change in the production, dissemination, and reading of Western European books during the 200 years following the advent of printing with movable type. In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the Protestant Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which adherents of different religious faiths shared common ground in exploiting elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries) in order to inspire reading, but also to restrict interpretation. Employing key methods of the History of the Book, our investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and/or Reformation, the History of the Book, art history, women's studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including would-be rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 22 June until 24 July 2009. During the first week of this program, we shall visit 1) Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the world's only surviving early modern printing and publishing house) and 2) London, England, in order to attend a rare-book workshop and consider treasures at the British Library. During four weeks at Oxford, where we shall reside at St. Edmund Hall, we plan to draw on the rare book and manuscript holdings of the Bodleian Library and other institutions.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2009 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,800.

Full details and application information are available here. For further information, please contact rankinmc@jmu.edu. The application deadline is March 1, 2009.

New book history series from Ashgate Publishing

Ashgate Studies in Publishing History

Offering publishing histories of well-known works of literature, this series is intended as a resource for book historians and for other specialists whose scholarship and teaching are enhanced by access to a work's publication and reception history. Features include but are not limited to sections on the text's composition, production and marketing, contemporary reception, textual issues, subsequent editions, and archival resources. The series is designed to allow for flexibility in presentation, to accommodate differences in each work's history. Proposals on works whose publishing histories are particularly significant for what they reveal about a writer, a cultural milieu, or the history of print culture are especially welcome.

Proposals should take the form of either
1. a preliminary letter of inquiry, briefly describing the project; or
2. a formal prospectus including abstract, table of contents, chapter summaries, sample chapter, estimate of length, estimate of the number & type of illustrations to be included, and c.v.

Please send a copy of either type of proposal to the publisher at the following addresses:

Ann Donahue
Senior Editor
Ashgate Publishing
101 Cherry Street, Suite 420
Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA
email: adonahue@ashgate.com

Artifacts of Childhood
700 Years of Children's Books
September 27, 2008 – January 17, 2009

Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children's Books explores the Newberry's little-known collection of books and manuscripts created for and by children. The exhibition showcases aspects of the interaction between children and books and includes approximately 65 works, drawn from the Library's collection of thousands of children's books in more than 100 languages, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Artifacts of Childhood features such treasures as: the first illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables (1485); the first edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865); a nineteenth-century collectible story, La Fille de L'Exile, that is similar in format to Pokemon cards; and ABCs from 1544 to 1992.

These and other materials allow exhibit visitors to traverse time, space, and cultures to trace continuity and change within the history of children's books, to examine changing attitudes towards children and childhood, and to understand the importance of the study of the history of childhood through children's books.

More information here.