Inaugural Annual History of the Book Lecture | Material Histories of the Book

What do sixteenth and seventeenth century books have to tell us about matter: the mutable, malleable stuff that makes up the universe? In this lecture, Professor Helen Smith shows how authors and printers tested the limits of print and the book as they got to grips with the structures and substance of the world. Her talk asks how the resources and technologies of the book shaped ideas about materiality both physically and intellectually. It explores too how early moderns understood the book as an instance of matter, subject to everything from bookworms to atomic dissolution, and how even thought and writing came to be seen as techniques of handling and manipulation, as much as invention.

This inaugural joint lecture in the History of the Book will highlight the collaboration of the Institute of English Studies and the Warburg Institute in this dynamic and relatively new field of academic research. This interdisciplinary lecture will be of interest to both students and academics across the many disciplines which Book History incorporates in its research approaches including English Literature and Language, History and Social History, Gender Studies and the History of Art. 

This event has been generously funded by the John Coffin Lecture Fund. 

About the speaker:

Helen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She is author of Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012), and co-editor of Renaissance Paratexts (2011), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (2015), and Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (2017). Helen has published numerous articles and chapters on early modern literature and culture. Her current book project explores the liveliness of matter in the English Renaissance and beyond. She is also Director of Thin Ice Press, a major new Centre for traditional print techniques.

Chair for lecture: Professor Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of Cultural History in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. Before moving to the Warburg, he served as Director of Research and Collections at the V&A and as Director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies at the University of York. A committed crosser of disciplines, periods and professional sectors, Sherman has published widely on Renaissance books, modern art and many things in-between.