Announcements

“Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century”
A Conference organised by the Early English Text Society
20-22 May 2010, St Anne’s College Oxford

Registration is now open for this meeting, which features plenary lectures by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, H. Leith Spencer, and Thorlac Turville-Petre. Panels include From Script to Print to HTML: Electronic Editions; Editing British Texts in Latin, Anglo-Norman, Celtic and Scots; Old English; Major Middle English Authors; In Praise of the Variant. Why Edit Critically?; Palaeography, Dialectology and the Editorial Process; Desiderata: What still needs doing?; Middle English Scientific Prose; Practices, Habits, Methodologies.

Proposals are also now invited from graduate students for poster displays at the conference. Please contact vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk
For a full programme, practical details, and registration forms, go to http://www.eeets.org.uk

Call for Papers
Writing England: Books 1000-1400
University of Leicester
28-30 April 2010

The production and use of books in Medieval England reveal much about the complex matrix of competing and collaborating religious and intellectual movements, linguistic encounters, and literary and cultural developments. After the success of the Writing England Conference in 2007, we have expanded the temporal remit of the conference to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes at the heart of the medieval period. Drawing upon different approaches and perspectives, this conference aims to investigate the writers, compilers, manufacture and reception of books in England between c. 1000 and 1400. ‘Writing England’ will open up the debate for an interdisciplinary study of book cultures in the Middle Ages, and allow for cross-fertilization of ideas and research interests across the period. 

Confirmed speakers: Elaine Treharne (Florida State University), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (University of York) and Tony Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester). 

We welcome paper proposals from scholars working on writers, book production and use of, and responses to texts in Latin, Insular French and English from the eleventh to the fourteenth-century. Please send a title and abstract (maximum 150 words) for a 20-minute paper, by 30 October 2009, with your contact details, to Dr Orietta Da Rold, School of English, The University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH odr1@leicester.ac.uk, Tel 0116 252 2778.  

Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ
Queen's University Belfast, June 10-13, 2010

The culmination of the AHRC-funded "Geographies of Orthodoxy" project, the "Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ" conference invites papers on any aspect of late medieval Christological piety, with a particular emphasis on the cultural manifestations of the pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition, in all European contexts. Topics might include: The production and reception of late medieval lives of Christ Lives of Christ in visual and material culture Political and theological controversies Lives of Christ, Latin and vernacular Lives of Christ across the Reformations Lives of Christ and histories of the book Lay access and pastoral care Proposals for 20 minute papers should be sent to Dr Ryan Perry (r.perry@qub.ac.uk) by September 30th, 2009. http:/www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy

Press Release from Friends of Cardiff Heritage:
Secret Destruction of Cardiff Heritage Collection
A last ditch attempt has been launched to stop Cardiff City Council from breaking up and selling off a national heritage collection of Cardiff Public Library's rare books dating from the 15th century. Sales lists are now being drafted by the auctioneers Bonhams in London and the first sales will probably take place before the end of the year.

A new action group, "Cardiff Heritage Friends," which includes local Cardiff residents, academics, solicitors, historians and librarians, is calling for world-wide support from specialists in this field, demanding that the Council stop the sale of some of the greatest treasures in one of Wales' great libraries. The group will also be seeking legal advice on the Council's actions and exploring the case for stopping the sale.

It is thought insufficient funding has been earmarked by the Council to complete the new public library building in Cardiff, and that a decision has been made to sell at auction their most important British and European historical research collections in order to plug the financial gap.

There has been no consultation with local people, academics or other libraries, to discuss the wider value of the collection for Cardiff, Wales and beyond. It's believed many new Councillors on the City Council are not aware that Cardiff's heritage is being sold in their name!

Academics at Cardiff University have estimated that they could recruit between 15 to 20 postgraduates per year to the city if they had access to the collections for teaching and research; this would bring in around £150,000 to £200,000 per year in student fees and related spending to the city, not to mention the spending by people coming to Cardiff to consult these rare collections.

One Cardiff resident, Mr Sion Tudur, said on behalf of the action group: "The idea of selling a heritage collection such as this is a national scandal, and brings shame to the City and its Councillors. In short, this is a classic example of cultural incompetence."

Dr E. Wyn James, Secretary of the Cardiff Welsh Bibliographical Society, added: "It is ironic that the City Council intends selling this collection of international significance now, in the year Cardiff had aspired to be the cultural capital of Europe! The Council appears to be ignorant of the cultural and heritage importance of this unique collection, and of its prestige and potential use. Selling the Public Library's rare books would be a disaster to Cardiff and Wales comparable to the National Museum selling its French Impressionist art collection."

For an open letter by Dr James to Cardiff City Councillors and to the Assembly Members and Members of Parliament for Cardiff click here; for the rest of this press relief, including a photo of one of the sale items, click here.

British Library Petition
Dr. Michael Hammond sends the following message about possible changes at the British Library: "You may have seen the reports concerning the projected 7% cut in the British Library's annual budget which, if put into effect, are likely to lead to charging readers for admission, reductions in opening hours and the closure of the Colindale Newspaper Library.

Anyone who has been there recently will know that the BL is already struggling to meet the demands on its resources. It needs extra funding, not further cuts."

Dr. Michael Hammond
Senior Lecturer
English
School of Humanities
University of Southampton
tel: +44 (0)2380 596708
email:mkh@soton.ac.uk

For our UK members who wish to register their opposition to these cuts, there is now a petition on the No.10 website: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ library/. US members and members elsewhere are welcome to write the library directly.

"Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase"
This website (http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu /mednar/), produced through the Studio for Digital Projects and Research at New York University, offers resources for scholars, teachers, students, and performers to explore the performance of medieval narrative. Our purpose is to see how medieval stories can be brought to life in performance for modern audiences, and how performance can be used to teach medieval literature in the classroom. We hope as well to promote a better understanding of ways in which medieval narratives may have been performed for their original audiences.

Video clips constitute the primary resource on the website. The clips feature a variety of actors, storytellers, singers, musicians, mimes, puppeteers, and dancers, among them professionals, teachers, and students. They perform scenes drawn from a range of medieval narrative genres, including epics, romances, lais, tales, fabliaux, and others. Some performances of narratives from analogous traditions (such as the Egyptian Hilali epic) are also represented.

In the future, we plan to expand the site's holdings and add other resources to the site, including further information bearing on pedagogical uses of performance, and videoed interviews with performers and with faculty and students who work with performance.

We hope you will visit, and use, the website. We welcome your feedback, which may be sent to perf-med-narr@forums.nyu.edu

Timmie (E.B.) Vitz, New York University ­ ebv1@nyu.edu
Marilyn Lawrence, New York University ­ lawrence@alumni.princeton. edu
Project Directors

"Hand Bookbindings From Special Collections in the Princeton University Library:
Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious"
A new online exhibition will allow viewers to closely examine historic bookbindings from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library. "Hand Bookbindings From Special Collections in the Princeton University Library: Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious" includes more than 200 books. Two major themes are illustrated. First, many of the books offer examples of the elements that make up a book's binding, such as sewing, endleaves, cover attachment, clasps and tooling. Readers learn not only what these elements are but also see specimens dating from different eras and locales. Second, numerous examples highlight historic national technical styles and "bespoke" bindings for famous collectors, as well as specialty styles such as those with fully silk-embroidered covers.  Examples date from as early as the 12th century and come down to the end of the 20th. The entire show is arranged in virtual cases, represented by 26 thumbnail images on the Web site's opening page.

To view the online exhibition, visit http://www. princeton.edu/rbsc/exhibitions/online.html and click on the entry for "Hand Bookbindings from Special Collections."

For further information, contact the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at (609) 258 3184 or e-mail rbsc@princeton.edu.

Imprimerie Nationale Collections Under Threat
The resources of the Imprimerie nationale, France's state-owned centre of printing and typographical expertise, are under threat of dispersal. The collections reach back to 1539 and include punches, presses, engravings and over 30,000 books.

You can read up about the action being taken to save these resources and sign the petition here: http://www. garamonpatrimoine.org/petition.html. (Click on the Union flag to read the English language translation.)

Announcing the Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Cultures research hub: http://www.medievalmanuscripts .net
The Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Cultures research hub was conceived at a meeting of Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) research grant fund holders at the University of Glasgow in spring 2003. The Glasgow meeting was one of several hosted by fund holders designed to share experiences with regard to conducting collaborative research in medieval studies.

The hub was primarily developed to be a one-stop forum for the discussion of research issues pertaining to scholars of medieval manuscripts. Ideally, it will be used to share information about manuscripts and books in a way which facilitates ongoing research on medieval textual cultures.

How might you use the forum?

If you are working on a medieval manuscript and would like to share or seek palaeographical descriptions or other information relevant to your research, you might use the 'Help with a specific manuscript or manuscripts' forum. If you have a manuscript description you would like to make available to other scholars, you might want to post in the 'Manuscript descriptions' forum. If you are interested in ongoing research projects, or are thinking of developing an application for research funding, there are discussion forums where you may find, or post, relevant information.

If you are interested in participating in the hub, please visit the site: http://www.medievalmanuscripts .net.

Pierpont Morgan Library Offers Manuscript Descriptions Online
One of the most frequently consulted resources in the Reading Room of The Pierpont Morgan Library is a set of binders containing detailed descriptions of the collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.The descriptions, compiled by several generations of curators, often contain information not available elsewhere, such as complete lists of texts and illustrations within individual manuscripts, long discursive notes on provenance, binding, etc., and lengthy bibliographies. Books and articles that have come to the curators' attention since 1989 are cited in separate bibliographies, which are updated regularly.

For many years, this documentation was accessible only in paper form. Now, as part of a six-year, three-million-dollar project to make scholarly information on all the Library's holdings freely available on the Web, users of CORSAIR, the Library's comprehensive online collections catalog, can view and print electronic versions of the descriptions and bibliographies. The material, which is linked to CORSAIR records for individual manuscripts, has been scanned and converted into PDF files to preserve the historical layers of scholarship evident in the annotations and additions.

To view a sample description, visit the URL below and follow the links:
http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/BBM0069.htm

For more information on this resource, visit: http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/msdescriptions.htm

Additional online research resources, including guides to the collections for researchers, finding aids for archival collections, and descriptions and images of individual folios (a joint project of the Index of Christian Art and the Library) will soon become available through CORSAIR.