Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Further to the CFP, you can now book for the one-day conference The Permissive Archive (UCL, Friday 9 November 2012). Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, the fascinating-sounding event will ‘present a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories’. Rescuing repositories from their persistent but wildly misleading association with neutrality, inertia, and ‘settled dust’, archival research will be ‘championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field’. Flying the flag for Cultures of Knowledge will be our former doctoral student Kelsey Jackson Williams (who will present on John Aubrey’s donations to the Ashmolean Museum) and Anna Marie Roos (who, on the same panel, will offer a case study of the complex archival trajectory of four boxes of Martin Lister ephemera [pictured] serendipitously discovered among the holdings of the Sackler Library earlier this year). Other epistolary papers abound.

The deadline for registrations is 1 November 2012. For further details, the schedule, and to book online, head along to the conference website.