Manicular from 13th Century English Bible

Project Directors: Graham Allen, Siobhán Collins, Carrie Griffin, Mary O' Connell.

Making Books, Shaping Readers  is a research unit focusing on the materiality of the text, and how the physical appearance of the text shapes and informs both authors and readers. Our concerns include the transmission (and alteration) of texts; the permanence and/or transience of the book; organisational principles such as library catalogues, canon, anthologies, miscellanies and variorum; patronisation and the marketplace; the influence of the publisher; editorial practices; marginalia; paratexts; context; notions of ontology/books as body/locus/memory; censorship; authorial and reader rhetorical devices; authorship/authority, or lack of; codicology and book production; the relationship between image and text and the book as artefact.

Aims

- To establish an annual international conference to promote scholarly research in this area;

- To offer undergraduate modules that promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the materiality of the book, its historical evolution, and its cultural impact;

- To publish an annotated bibliography, a textbook for students, and a book of scholarly essays in this emerging field;

- To establish a network of excellence in this area which will attract postgraduate scholarship and promote teaching expertise and further research.

 

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
-- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

 

 

 

Permission to use the manicular as a logo is kindly granted by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu