Manuscript and Print Cultures
The Manuscript and Print Cultures (MaPC) Research Group is hosted in English and Comparative Literary Studies but invites scholars to join from across the Faculty and beyond who work amidst full historical, conceptual, and global scope of manuscript, print cultures, the history of the book and other ephemera. Recent research of MaPC members focuses on medieval manuscript tradition (Wood, Jiang), early modern travel writings (Din-Kariuki, Leonard), the printing and publishing of early modern playtexts (Grant, Hosington), early modern print cultures (De Smet); nineteenth-century theatre ephemera (Coates); material objects and their accompanying print (Webb); correspondence and translation (Botley); classical learning (Verhaart); pamphlets and revolutionary propaganda (West, Wardaugh); bilingual and transatlantic literary culture of the Caribbean (Gilmore); periodicals, illustration, and the Gothic (Baker); small press publishing and poetry (Skinner); literary and cultural production and publication in early twentieth century New York (Kelly).
As well as publishing with leading journals and presses, working on Leverhulme funded projects, our staff have written for outlets such as the Times Literary Supplement, and appeared on BBC radio.
Convened by Prof Teresa Grant t.grant@warwick.ac.uk and Dr Jen Baker J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk
If you would like to be added to the list of research group members below, please email J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk with your contact details, any webpages, and a brief blurb of your research interests in this area.
Upcoming Events
To see our past events, please click on the tab above.
Term 3 2024-5
Wednesday 11th June 4.15pm (FAB 5.49)
Thursday 1st May, 5.15pm (FAB 5.49)
A collection of 10 min talks from PhD researchers across the Faculty.
Emma Naylor-Lovell (History of Art) “Circulating illicit secrets: recipes for imitation and adjusted gemstones in Girolamo Ruscelli’s De Secreti del Reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese 1557”. The making and adjusting of gemstones in mid-sixteenth century Venice was a serious crime, yet artisanal handbooks and stock inventories reveal that artificial and falsified gemstones were rife. Girolamo Ruscelli, an alchemist operating under the pen name Alessio Piemontese, was the first to launch the methods of this illicit craft into the public eye through the publication of his ‘book of secrets’. His instructions for counterfeiting gemstones are remarkably detailed indicating a first-hand knowledge of the craft. A fundamental question is, why did Ruscelli expose the details of this clandestine activity? In this paper, I argue that Ruscelli desired to heighten public awareness in order to garner wider appreciation for practices of material mimesis and to re-brand artificial gems from deceitful fakes to innovative simulants.
Kristi Flake (History) – The Book of Homilies in the Seventeenth Century. The Anglican Book of Homilies was a foundational text of the English Reformation. It is an official doctrinal formulary of the Church of England and was in regular use by Anglican clergy for three centuries after its first publication in 1547. In the seventeenth century, the Homilies were key texts in the contest for control of the English Church, yet scholars have largely neglected the role of the Homilies in the political and religious conflicts of the period. One of the more intriguing aspects of this history is how the publication pattern of the Homilies changed over time. Under the Stuarts, there were nine new English-language editions published, each of which appeared at a moment of significant change or acute crisis in Church and state, but there is frustratingly little evidence to link the publication dates with those events. My paper considers the circumstantial evidence surrounding these publication dates and why the publication history is potentially significant to our interpretation of this neglected but important text.
Shankara Angadi (History) - The Materiality of Manuscripts: early nineteenth-century Madras in the Munro Papers. A photograph of a page from the Munro Papers shows a bill from a pharmacist in Madras for medications prepared for Jane, the new wife of Thomas Munro. She had recently arrived in Madras, having been yanked from her home in the Highlands of Scotland, and deposited in the heat and rain of South India. There are visible clues about the depression and stomach illnesses she was suffering from, and also hints of the tensions of being married to man more than twice her age, who kept a very tight rein on her spending.
Smriti Dutt (History of Art) - Traditional art and textile traditions from South Asia, particularly in present-day northern India. My research focuses on sacred art inspired by some of the oldest epics, such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It is fascinating to examine how painters and embroiderers have drawn from these ancient manuscripts to create remarkable works of art.
Wednesday 11th June, 4pm (FAB 5.49)
Dr Anne Toner (Cambridge), 'Jane Austen's Punctuation'.
Research Group Members
Prof Teresa Grant is Professor of Renaissance Theatre and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She teaches on the degree programmes in English and History, English and English and Theatre and on the MA in English and Drama (of which she is the convenor). She is General Editor (with Eugene Giddens and Barbara Ravelhofer) of the Oxford University Press 15 volume The Complete Works of James Shirley.
Dr Jen BakerLink opens in a new window (ECLS) researches nineteenth-century Anglophone death cultures and the Gothic - particularly relating to the child - and more broadly on the novel form, the short form, gothic illustration and gothic publishing, paratexts and epitexts, and more contemporary considerations of "the book" such as Gothic pop-up and other movable ephemera.
Dr Sarah Wood is Associate Professor in Middle English in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. She has published extensively on the manuscripts and textual tradition of Piers Plowman.
Professor Ingrid De Smet Link opens in a new window(SMLC) regularly works with manuscripts and rare books in her research on the intellectual culture of early modern France, the Low Countries, and Italy; She has taught postgraduate classes on working with manuscripts and rare books, and early modern print culture; and supervise PhD students working with manuscripts and print. Among my current (co-)supervisees in this area is work on Sergei (Zotov) (alchemical manuscripts) and Karin (Sprang) (alba amicorum).
Dr John West (ECLS) My research interests include seventeenth-century literature, especially of the Civil Wars and Restoration; early modern literature and politics; and early modern literature and religion. My first book was about enthusiasm in the works of the Restoration poet, dramatist and literary critic John Dryden. I am continuing my work on Dryden with an essay about his role as Poet Laureate.
Prof. Ralph Hanna is Professor Emeritus of Palaeography at the University of Oxford. His books include Introducing Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers (Liverpool, 2013) and Looking at Medieval Books: Learning to See (Liverpool, 2023)
Prof. John Gilmore (ECLS)
Dr David Coates Link opens in a new window(TPS) is a cultural historian working on British theatre, amateur theatre, performance and entertainment histories of the long nineteenth century. He is interested in the material traces of theatre from the period, including playbills, published plays, acting editions, newspapers, illustrated news, theatre guidebooks and scrapbooks.
Dr Anna LanfranchiLink opens in a new window (SMLC) is a teaching fellow in Translation and transcultural studies and Italian. Her research focuses on transnational publishing history, history of copyright and literary agents, book programmes and cultural diplomacy.
Dr Nancy Haijing Jiang (ECLS)
Prof. Brenda HosingtonLink opens in a new window is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Renaissance Studies. Her major area of research is translation history and theory, with a particular focus on the relationship between translation and print in early modern England (Editor in chief of one online catalogue of printed translations (1473-1640) and Co-editor of another (1641-1660) forthcoming). She also publishes on women translators, many of whom produced translations in manuscript, and on Neo-Latin translations and their print history.
Dr Jack Bowman is a current tutor in the History department and recently finished his PhD at Warwick. His research focuses on anti-colonial print networks and political thought in the twentieth-century, with a current focus on Pan-Africanism. He has a recent article upon Indian independence activist V. K. Krishna Menon and his role as an editor in Britain (during which he, among other things, helped found Pelican Books!) now out in The Historical Journal.
Dr Ania Crowther is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Renaissance Studies and completed her PhD at Warwick in 2018 on James Shirley and the Restoration Stage with a particular focus on the relationship between the manuscript and print versions of Shirley’s The Court Secret. Her work is largely on promptbooks and manuscript edits to Seventeenth-century drama and she is currently editing Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet for the Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish project.
Dr Jessica Wardhaugh (SMLC) is a Reader in French Studies, and works on the relationship between politics and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. She has published books on street politics and political theatre, as well as on ideas of community and democracy. Her current book project explores political play in its verbal, visual, and physical forms, and she is particularly interested in the material and print cultures of popular politics, including posters, flyers, graffiti, and political ephemera.
Madeleine BraceyLink opens in a new window is a PhD student at Coventry University working on the long lost Coventry Grammar School Library. She is supervised by Dr Alice Leonard (Coventry) and mentored by Prof. Paul Botley (Warwick).
Dr Alice LeonardLink opens in a new window is a specialist in the culture and history of error in early modern England. She is interested in how perceptions of error manifested and changed during this period, in epistemological contexts such as natural philosophy, travel and navigation. In 2023, she will be a British Library Eccles Fellow to conduct archival research for my second monograph in this area. She is co-editor on the Notebooks volume of The Complete Works of Thomas BrowneLink opens in a new window (OUP) and is also working on a short book entitled Early Modern Bookspace, under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Dr William Rupp is assistant professor in Liberal Arts. After completing his doctoral studies in history at Warwick, William has worked in outreach and as an academic developer. His research is focused mainly on travel and national identity creation in eighteenth-century Britain but he has also worked technology adoption and social control in the latter part of the nineteenth century.