Scribal culture in Italy, 1450-1650

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Over the last generation, a revolution has changed our understanding of the transmission of culture in the early modern period. It began with the development of new approaches to the history of the printed book, but has now moved beyond the press to show the continued importance of manuscripts well into the so-called 'Age of Gutenberg'. Italian studies have played a leading part in this research.Yet, while we have fine studies of individual aspects of scribal culture, there is no sense that all were part of a larger phenomenon. By contrast, our project has three interconnecting aims. 1) To understand and analyse professional and amateur scribal activities - the production, distribution, reception and uses of handwritten texts at different social levels - as part of a phenomenon that can be termed scribal culture, and to shed light on its relationship to print and oral culture. 2) To recreate a sense of the experiences of writing and reading manuscripts, by fostering reflection on the material nature of textual culture. 3) To seek the contacts and continuities between the production of such different documents as poetry, treatises and newsletters.This project brings together international scholars from different disciplines (including literary history, cultural history and bibliography) together with librarians, palaeographers and curators. Another objective is to stimulate dialogue and collaboration between British and Italian scholarship.The project consists of six workshops covering a wide range of fields: 1) the material production of manuscripts and its domestic or public settings; 2) poetry, theatre and music; 3) science, medicine and philosophy; 4) the social impact and diffusion of manuscripts; 5) the relationship between manuscript and print; 6) the online cataloguing of manuscripts. All workshops are intended for academics, librarians, curators and postgraduates with interests in Renaissance culture in a broad sense.We also intend to display practical examples of manuscripts or artefacts. For this reason, each workshop includes academics and librarians/curators and is staged in a collection or library. The workshops will be co-ordinated, advertised and fully described through a website. It is planned to publish articles based on selected papers in the journal Italian Studies.The project will act as the springboard for a larger project whose aims include: the organization of an international conference; one or more publications of essays based on conference papers; the development of an online resource for the study of Italian manuscripts; the cataloguing of political manuscripts in the British Library. To help us to plan for these objectives, we have included in the workshops presentations from two research centres, both currently funded by the AHRC for the study of English manuscripts: the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (Queen Mary, University of London), and Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online (University of Cambridge). We include a scoping project for the BL catalogue; results are to be presented at workshop 6.The workshops will be held in six centres in four cities. They will be hosted by museums and libraries so that they are partly focused around the exploration of material evidence relating to the production or circulation of manuscripts, ranging from authorial to secretarially reproduced documents and to instruments for writing.Workshop 1: Material culture and the production of manuscriptsVictoria & Albert Museum, LondonWorkshop 2: Poetry, theatre and musicWren Library, Trinity College, CambridgeWorkshop 3: Science, medicine and philosophyWellcome Library, LondonWorkshop 4: The impact and diffusion of manuscriptsCentre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Library, OxfordWorkshop 5: Manuscript and printJohn Rylands University Library, Manchester Workshop 6: Cataloguing political and other manuscripts British Library, London.