MEMS is delighted to be able to invite you to this year’s Renaissance Lecture. We are very honoured to be hosting Prof. Ann Blair, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University as our Renaissance Lecturer for 2023. She is one of the world’s leading scholars of the intellectual life of the Renaissance world. Her work, for instance Too Much to Know (2010), often has striking contemporary resonances. At 5:30pm on Friday 26^th May in the University of Kent’s Templeman Lecture Theatre, she will be sharing with us her new research on ‘The appeal of composite books for learned printers and authors in the Renaissance’.

Prof. Ann Blair, MEMS’s Renaissance Lecturer for 2023.

Prof. Blair explains her topic:

A number of learned books in the Renaissance were composite, by which I mean that they comprised multiple texts, by one or more authors. Famous works like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly or Thomas More’s Utopia for example were not first published in standalone editions as we encounter them today, but rather in composite volumes, alongside other unrelated texts. In this talk I’ll ponder some of the reasons for the appeal of publishing multiple texts together in composite volumes. My main case study will focus on Conrad Gessner of Zurich (1516-1565), who published more than sixty books, among them his well-known folio volumes of natural history and bibliography. I draw on the printing histories and abundant paratexts in this corpus to suggest some of the reasons why he and his printers favored composite volumes, notably: to justify a new edition of a text already published by other printers, to add name recognition, to produce a book of sufficient heft, to avoid leaving pages blank at the end of a quire. I propose that these findings could apply to other author-printer relationships, in cases where we do not have good evidence for what motivated composite volumes.

You are welcome to join us in person but if you cannot travel to the campus, please contact the Co-Directors of MEMS, Drs Rory Loughnane and David Rundle, for a Zoom link.

Maidstone: Kent Archives, U269/O342 – the rights of the Constable of Dover

MEMS is delighted be collaborating with Kent Archives in organising an exciting event on 22nd and 23rd May 2023 to welcome significant new additions to the Archives’ collections.

In 2022, Kent Archives received some ‘new’ medieval material with shared early modern provenance, reflecting on the history of Kent and of its study in the seventeenth century. This mini-conference is the first time these items will be on display in their new home and that they will have received scholarly discussion. On Monday 22^nd May, from noon, we will be in Maidstone and on the morning of Tuesday 23^rd May in Canterbury when we will also be seeing related material in both our own Special Collections and in Canterbury Cathedral Archives.

Speakers will include MEMS’s own Prof. Kenneth Fincham, Dr Ryan Perry and Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh.

The event is free and open to all but spaces are limited so do reserve yours by contacting the email addresses listed on the flyer.