Register for a CSMC lecture
Monday, 9 May 2022, 4:15 pm - 6:00 pm (CEST)
Geographies of Handwriting in Early Modern Europe
Dr Noah Millstone (University of Birmingham)
Over the last five years, historians of early modern European (c. 1500-1750) manuscript culture has taken several unexpected turns. (At least, they were unexpected by me!) Scholarship has traditionally emphasised the sociable dimension of manuscript sharing, and used manuscript circulation to map out early modern social networks – of poets, anxious clergymen, or antiquarians. More recent work has approached manuscript production as a form of practice and labour, and tried to identify the social dynamics that helped create a reserve army of underemployed copyists in certain early modern cities. The maturity of these two approaches have begun to raise serious questions of comparison: of understanding how far handwriting practices belonged to or flourished in particular places – the monastery, the lawyer’s office, the prison – and how far the particular economies of manuscript production varied across Europe itself. This talk tries to map out some ways forward for a transnational approach to early modern manuscript studies.