On 28 November 2017, the British Library is hosting a conference on Combined Methodological Approaches for Manuscripts and Printed Books (text and images; material evidence; historical bibliographical and documentary sources; sale and auction catalogues; etc.). The conference will be held in the Eliot and Dickens rooms of the British Library’s Knowledge Centre and is organised by Laura Carnelos (Marie Curie Fellow at CERL), Stephen Parkin (Curator, Printed Heritage, British Library), and Cristina Dondi (Lincoln College Oxford, CERL, Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI).

When Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (Paris, 1958; 9010.a.1/49) was first published, a new research field was opened up, launching an innovative approach to book history. Studies started to appear not only on the production, distribution and reading of books, but also more widely on the materiality, multiple uses, forms, meanings and influences of the book within a given society. Decades of systematic cataloguing, the integration of records into large databases, the development of digital tools and resources which can handle huge quantities of high-quality bibliographical data now make it possible to undertake new kinds of research.

The main question this one-day conference will try to address is: what sources and methodologies are now used by librarians, historians and other such users and what are the possible outcomes?

The day will consist of four main sessions will follow up during the day, dedicated respectively to manuscripts, blockbooks and 15th-century books, and early modern printed books (16th-19th centuries). The papers for each session are listed below (a copy of the full programme with timings can be found here).

Session 1 (9.15-10.45):
Ivan Boserup (The Royal Library, Copenhagen), Strategies for Separating Authentic and Forged Colonial Manuscripts of the Private Collezione Miccinelli in Naples.
Angéline Rais (University of Oxford), Sir Thomas Phillipps’s purchases of manuscripts in Switzerland: an analysis of sources.
Cristina Dondi (University of Oxford, CERL), From liturgical data to historical evidence in the study of books of hours.

Session 2 (11.15-13.00):
Bettina Wagner (Staatsbibliothek, Bamberg), Methodological approaches to 15th-century blockbooks.
Claire Bolton (Oxford), Measuring skeletons - discovering the printer.
Sabrina Minuzzi (University of Oxford), New tricks for provenance lost in miscellanies: documentary evidence, coloured edges and historical catalogues in MEI.

A calendar page for November from a 15th-century blockbook ([Leipzig, ca 1490?]) IA.11

Session 3:
Paolo Sachet (Università della Svizzera Italiana), Exploiting Antiquarian Sale Catalogues: Blueprint for the Study of Sixteenth-Century Books on Blue Paper.
Francesca Tancini (University of Bologna), New sources for dating illustrated Victorian popular books: illustrators’ diaries, printers’ ledgers, woodblocks and drawings.
Laura Carnelos (CERL), The study of rare popular books through PATRIMONiT: a combined methodological approach.
Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford), A hidden collection of Irish manuscripts.

In the fourth and last session posters relating to six international projects will be presented by Toby Burrows (University of Western Australia and of Oxford); Ilaria Andreoli (CNRS-ITEM, Paris; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice) and Ilenia Maschietto (Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice); Veronika Girininkaitė (University Library of Vilnius); William Stoneman (Houghton Library, Harvard); Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma, Juliette Reboul (Radboud University, The Netherlands); and Sofie Arneberg (National Library of Norway).

Other posters will be presented in the Dickens room by Irène Fabry-Tehranchi (British Library), Simona Inserra, Marco Palma and their group (Catania City Library), Cristiana Iommi (Biblioteca civica Romolo Spezioli di Fermo); Rosa Parlavecchia (Catania and Salerno Universities); Christian Scheidegger (Zentralbibliothek Zürich); Sonja Svoljšak and Urša Kocjan (National and University Library’s Early Prints Collection, Ljubljana).

The conference has been organized in collaboration with the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and the British Library. A live streaming of the conference will be available on the day in the Dickens Room to a limited number of participants and then on the CERL website to a wider audience.

With the aim of producing a coherent and methodologically innovative volume, subject to peer review, the proceedings will be published on open access and available via the CERL website by March 2018.

The conference and the publication are sponsored by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skolodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 659625. The main conference is already fully booked, but a few places are available in the Dickens room. If you are interested please contact Laura Carnelos: [email protected]

A printing workshop, from the title page of Bernardus Mallinckrodt, De ortu ac progressu artis typographicæ dissertatio historica ... (Cologne, 1640) 274.d.12.