The History of the Book
Course Organiser: Dr. Crawford Gribben
Weighting: 10 ECTS
Teaching Staff: Dr Crawford Gribben, Professor Brian McGing, Dr Anne Fitzpatrick
This module provides participating students with an introduction to a rapidly growing and increasingly interdisciplinary field of enquiry. The content of this course draws on methodologies and theories from the disciplines of history, art history, bibliography, classical languages, cultural theory, gender studies, literary criticism, musicology, religious studies, translation studies and visual studies. Its principal emphases will include: the evolution of the book as material object; the changing technologies of publication; the development of literacy and habits of reading; the relationships between text, image and other forms of cultural production; and the networks of dissemination between authors, publishers, commentators, critics and other receivers of texts.
The course will adopt this methodological approach in a series of case studies, which will focus initially on European Bibles before moving to their reception in a wide and multi-disciplinary range of para-textual cultures in the early modern period. The course will draw on the wealth of relevant material in Trinity College Library (including the Book of Kells and TCD MS 30, a crucial text in Erasmus’s critical edition of the Greek New Testament) and other Dublin institutions, including the Chester Beatty Library (which houses some of the most important New Testament manuscripts) and Marsh’s Library (an important repository of a huge range of early modern responses to Biblical texts, including historical, mathematical and medical studies). Students will access these texts by means of the Texts, Contexts, Cultures audio-visual link. Students will also draw on resources for ephemera provided by EEBO and ECCO.