Week 1

Circumstances may dictate changes to this program. In particular, the final selection of rare books for display at our workshops is at the discretion of librarians and/or curators. Depending on public-health guidelines related to COVID-19, plans for a residential offering are subject to change.

Topics for daily discussion in the following program description suggest points of departure for seminar sessions. They are not prescriptive, but open to development within the Seminar’s broad focus on printing and the book during the roughly two centuries under investigation. Discussion sessions will evolve organically in response to participant interest. In general, the seminar will consist of two three-hour-long discussion sessions plus one book-oriented workshop each week. Each session will frame scholarly debates surrounding our readings in ways designed to produce meaningful dialogue. Seminar participants will collaborate in defining and pursuing the seminar’s agenda and exhibition lists. 

Participants are requested to prepare for this program through advance reading of Philip Gaskell’s discussion of the technology of printing during the era of the hand press in A New Introduction to Bibliography (pp. 1-185). This reading provides essential background for this program.

This seminar is designed to appeal to teacher-scholars of the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and Reformation, and to specialists in art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), historians of mass communication, historians of literacy, and more.

Group activities will provide a backdrop to individual study projects, which may emphasize enhancement of teaching and/or research and take the form of a written paper or annotated bibliography. Participants will be asked to volunteer presentations concerning research and/or teaching and to make a fifteen-minute presentation on their individual study project at an appropriate point in our program.

Following orientation to collections at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (RBML) at Ohio State, we shall devote our opening week to placement of the technology of the hand-press within the History of the Book. Our first discussion meeting will assess the casting of type, different type styles, and the material construction of early printed books, and will conclude with a hands-on workshop allowing participants to measure type and watermarks and examine the physical construction of books. Our second session will evaluate seminal theories concerning the History of the Book during the era of the hand-press (circa 1455-1825). This investigation will enhance our understanding of the vast scale of Continental publication as opposed to England’s small, insular, and conservative book trade, which relied heavily on the importation of books and innovative Continental production practices. Professor Guido Latré will join the seminar during this second session, where he will speak about the Low Countries’ role in early English printing. He will also be available to assist seminar participants with their individual study projects.

Our first week will conclude with a rare-book exhibition and workshop which Professor Latré will co-curate. It will consider printed Bibles in Hebrew and Greek; the fourth-century Latin Vulgate translation attributed to St. Jerome; Desiderius Erasmus’s epochal Greek-Latin New Testament (1516), and broadly influential translations that descend from it, including those by Martin Luther and William Tyndale; and the many versions of Bibles printed in English up to and including the King James Bible (1611), which remains influential to the present day. Our investigation will include two extraordinary Bibles on loan from the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, Ohio, the Complutensian Polyglot (1514-17) and Biblia Regia (1568-73), published respectively under the patronage of the Cardinal of Toledo and King Phillip II of Spain. These outsized scholars’ Bibles employ complicated layouts to display Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin texts, commentaries, and notes in different compartments on the same page. Also included is the Great Bible (1539), whose dramatic title-page woodcut displays Henry VIII distributing the text to clergy and lay officials in a manner that presaged official sponsorship of the English Bible under his offspring, Edward VI and Elizabeth I.

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