Date/Time
Date(s) - 24 Apr 2017
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us Monday, April 24th, for this semester’s next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts <https://www.english.upenn.edu/graduate/working-groups/materialtexts>. We will convene at our usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
We will be welcoming Michael Suarez (University of Virginia, Rare Books School), for a talk entitled: “Lapidary Collections: The Museum Florentinum (1731ff) and the Material Texts of Antiquity”
Michael writes:
> This talk, part of a larger investigation into The Book as Museum in Eighteenth-Century Europe, considers volumes depicting collections of engraved gems from Antiquity and the Renaissance. This significant but largely neglected genre of deluxe publication was of no small consequence for the cultures of collecting, the Grand Tour, and antiquarian studies. The Museum Florentinum, representing the magnificent collection of the Medici, gave a new impetus to gem collecting, to the production of sumptuous volumes with plates portraying engraved gems, and to the revival of gem engraving in Italy, France, and England. The dactyliogic vogue among cultural elites also created a market for the reproduction of engraved gems (in paste, resin, or plaster) that were collected, studied, and displayed in the libraries of Grand Tourists such as Goethe. Seeking to understand the book as a cultural artifact that may productively be read in relation to other artifacts both old and new, this st!
udy attempts to re-situate the production, circulation, and consumption of texts among other social practices—and to understand those practices in relation to the word of print.
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is University Professor at the University of Virginia and Director of Rare Book School, a non-profit educational institute which has a widespread reputation as the world’s premier school for teaching the history of manuscripts, books, and digital materials. He is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and was nominated by President He sits on the Literacy Awards Advisory Board at the Library of Congress. The holder of research fellowships from The American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). His 2015 series of Lyell Lectures in Bibliography and Book History at Oxford University will be published by the Oxford University Press.