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

A symposium on Early Modern Data Delivery will take place in the English Faculty of the University of Oxford on Monday 28 February 2011. The event will focus on letters as a manifestation of seventeenth-century information exchange, and will feature the following contributions:

• Johanna Harris (University of Exeter), ‘Obstinate Letters: Lady Brilliana Harley’s Defence of Brampton Bryan’
• Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Information Delivery in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth: A Habermasian Reading’
• Katherine Duncan-Jones (University of Oxford), ‘A ‘Tragicall’ Letter (c. 1604): Writer, Recipient, Bearer’

The symposium will be held in Lecture Room 2 from 5pm.

The Humanities Division of the University of Oxford is currently advertising a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (£29,099 – £30,870). This is a two-year research and teaching appointment in Digital Humanities from October 2011 for an outstanding academic at an early stage of his or her career. The fellowships are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of a wider Oxford University initiative which is designed: to provide an intensive and supported career development opportunity for outstanding academics at an early stage of their career; and to promote equality of opportunity by helping to create a more diverse pool of potential candidates for future academic posts at Oxford.

Applicants must have obtained their doctorates by 1 October 2011, and should not normally have completed it earlier than 1 October 2007. Applications are welcome from all whose research is in the digital humanities, involving the innovative and productive application of digital tools or resources to research questions in any subject under the Humanities Division. The Fellow will be employed by the Faculty closest to his/her academic interests. A college association will be arranged for this post, and he/she will also become a Research Associate at the OeRC. For further details, information about how to apply and an application form, please visit the university jobsite. Applications must be received by noon on Wednesday 23 March 2011.

In 1663, Martin Lister left his parents’ house in Burwell, Lincolnshire to study medicine in Montpellier. Whilst in France, he kept a journal in an almanac entitled Every Man’s Companion: Or, An useful Pocket-Book (MS Lister 19, Bodleian Library).

Month by month, Lister noted the medical texts he consulted (and the French romances and comedies he read) in this thin octavo, and annotated the recipes given to him when he lodged with an apothecary. He described the personalities and works of luminaries he met in France including William Croone, Nicolas Steno, and John Ray. Lister performed a series of dissections with Steno, as well as going on natural history expeditions with Ray. Lister also attended the salon of Sir Thomas Crew to discuss ornithology, medicine, and literature, mixing with other fellows of Cambridge and English expatriates. As his time in Montpellier was part of his education as a gentleman, Lister made detailed notes about his visits to gardens and libraries in Paris, manufacturing methods, viniculture, literature and drama, and rules of politesse and art connoisseurship.

Dr Anna Marie Roos, our Lister Research Fellow, has recently been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to create a textual edition of the pocketbook with appropriate apparatus. To annotate the edition, she will also utilize 25 pages of memoirs of Lister’s time in Montpellier and 43 pieces of Lister’s French correspondence in the Bodleian Library and in France. As the account of Lister’s journey is so detailed, his grand tour and memoirs will also be recreated as an interactive website using maps, images, and texts, providing a virtual introduction to an early modern medical education.

The Edward Worth Library, Dublin, is offering a single one-month fellowship to be held in 2011, to encourage research relevant to its collections. The Worth Library is a collection of 4,500 books, left to Dr Steevens’ Hospital by Edward Worth (1678-1733), an early eighteenth-century Dublin physician. The collection is particularly strong in three areas: early modern medicine, early modern history of science and, given that Worth was a connoisseur book collector interested in fine bindings and rare printing, the History of the Book. Research does not, however, have to be restricted to these three key areas. Further information about the collection and our catalogues may be found on the library’s website. The closing date for applications is 14 April 2011. For further details and application procedures please contact: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian, The Edward Worth Library, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin 8, Ireland (elizabethanne.boran[at]hse.ie). You can download the advertisement here (doc).

Further to the CFP (which is now closed), full details are now available for the conference The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450-1700, which will take place at Birkbeck, University of London on 24–25 June 2011. The conference will investigate the impact of European exploration and travel on the structures, contents and sources of authority of European knowledge c.1450-1700, seeking to explore connections between the making of knowledge and a broad range of intellectual, political, cultural, religious and mercantile encounters between Europe and the wider world. For keynotes, panels, abstracts, and speaker biographies, please visit the conference website.

Testing the interface.

Discussing improvements.

With the front-end prototype of the Project’s union catalogue (introduced at our 2010 conference) now at an advanced stage of development – 39,225 letter records and counting! – Friday 4 February provided us with an opportunity to test its existing features and solicit additional suggestions from a range of end users from both within and outside the Project. Under the auspices of Dr Kim McLean-Fiander, a group of librarians, scholars, systems developers, web designers, and user experience specialists spent the morning working their way through a series of key tasks developed to test the catalogue’s function and design, and then recording their experiences, both positive and negative, on specially created feedback forms. Testers regrouped in the afternoon to discuss necessary refinements and to make additional suggestions to the catalogue on a screen-by-screen basis. The feedback we received was invaluable, and we would like to thank all of our participants for giving up their time to help us improve the catalogue, the public version of which will be launched in autumn 2011.