Date/Time
Date(s) - 17 Sep 2012
5:15 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Dear friends and colleagues,
Please join us this Monday, September 17, for the next meeting of the weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will meet, as usual, at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
This week, we welcome Jana Dambrogio and Heather Wolfe, who will be speaking about “Early Modern Letter Locking Techniques in Theory and Practice: Silk Floss, Seals and Folds”. They write:
“The workshop will begin with a brief discussion of the development of a letter-locking fad (with silk floss) that began with Elizabeth I, and an overview of other contemporary methods of folding and sealing letters. We will then practice folding letters as a group, to better enable us to interpret the various fold marks on flattened early modern letters, and what information those folds might convey about a letter’s intentions and afterlife.”
Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library and teaches paleography for the Folger Institute, Rare Book School, and the Mellon Summer Institute in English Paleography. She has written various essays on early modern manuscript culture and has most recently edited a collection of essays, The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680 (2007), and The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007).
Jana Dambrogio works as a rare book and manuscript conservator for the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. She earned a BA from the University of Pittsburgh, PA, in 1994, her MA in Conservation from SUNY Buffalo State College, and her bookbinding certificate from the Canadian Bookbinders Book Artist Guild in 2000. She continues her study on 14th-17th c. Italian archival records she conserved at the Vatican Secret Archives in 2000. Support from a Kittredge Scholarship, 2002, and a Booth Family Rome Prize, American Academy, 2008, have allowed her to advance her research. At the National Archives she has also been studying the physical evidence found in late 18th c. American bindings. She lectures and teaches workshops internationally on how to look at, make models of, and develop approaches to conserving archival binding and letter-locking structures.
- September 24: Bernard Cooperman (University of Maryland), “The Zohar – and a Bit of Hebrew Grammar On the Side: The Business of Hebrew Printing in the Italian Renaissance”
- October 1: Mary E. Fissell (Johns Hopkins), “When a Masterpiece Becomes a Chameleon: Re-Making a Popular Medical Book in the 1830s and 40s”
- October 8: Consuela Metzger (Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library), “Conservation and the Material Text”
- October 15: Joseph Rezek (Boston University), “Furious Booksellers: the Transatlantic Publication of the Waverley Novels and the Language of the Book Trade”
- October 22: Fall Break, no meeting
Peter Stallybrass
Annenberg Professor in the Humanities
Simran Thadani
Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts