Abstract of Adam Smyth’s paper

Knives and Scissors:
Cutting up Text in Early Modern England

Dr Adam Smyth
Department of English and Humanities
Birkbeck, University of London

In this paper I want to suggest that early modern readers often cut up printed and manuscript texts, and that they did this with no great sense of transgression. I’ll explore the archival evidence for this practice, and then think about the implications for early modern literary culture, and in particular for ideas of authorship. I’ll start with one spectacular instance of cutting and pasting: the remarkable Biblical Harmonies produced at Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. These Harmonies were lavish folio books constructed by cutting up printed texts of the four Gospels, and gluing the fragmented texts back into a new order. As well as cutting up and reordering printed text, members of Little Gidding included hundreds of prints to illustrate the text – prints which were themselves usually reworked with knives and scissors, and often conflated to produce something that would much later be called collage. This striking compositional method was, I suggest, oddly typical of a reading culture in which readers often consumed texts with knives and scissors. If this is the case – and I’ll provide evidence to suggest that it was – how does this enable us to rethink early modern writing, reading, and authorship? What challenges do these practices present to a history of the early modern book that is often organised around narratives linking print with fixity and the establishment of a stable literary canon? How different is the early modern book, and the early modern author, after cutting up?

Abstract of Jenna Ng's paper

Finders, Users, Up-enders; or, Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-ups, Crowd-sourcing, Machinima

Dr. Jenna Ng

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

University of Cambridge

Up-end the stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for.

~ Seamus Heaney, “The Rain Stick”

This paper discusses a specific vectorial approach to thinking about digital media authorship, which I summarise as “finders, users, up-enders.” The idiom “finders, keepers” relates to an ancient Roman law (uti possidetis) of finding something (finders) and claiming ownership (keepers) to it if it is unowned or abandoned. I adapt the rationale behind this adage to the case of authoring digital media today, whereby, as I will argue, one comes across (finds) a particular media artifact, consumes it per its intended purpose (uses), and then employs it for goals beyond those intents (upends). I call this approach vectorial because it sets out a path—a specific trajectory—for that authoring process. This approach also implies that, instead of laying claim in terms of physical possession of property (as is the current practice of copyright), with digital media one now “possesses” creatively—by making something visually, conceptually and/or aurally new out of the media artifact, by subverting its intended purpose and content, by recontextualising it and shifting it to new places in the mediascape; a claim of possession to creative intent rather than to title, if you will. If authoring is conventionally about a distinctive style, an unmistakable influence, a vision writ large (in the narrow sense of la politique des auteurs), then digital authoring in this particular “up-ending” approach is about collaborative creativity, subversive humour, and an evolution of tools which take on varying degrees of imaginative and artistic expressiveness. I illustrate my argument with three cinema-based media forms: the film mash-up; the digitally crowdsourced film; and machinima. Using various examples, I show how each media technology follows the “finders/users/up-enders” trajectory, and how each is first acquired, adopted and then transformed. In the process, I also discuss two issues:  the first is the changing and sometimes overlapping roles of the viewer in the digital age as passive consumer, as active and collaborative producer, and as up-ender of media. This can also be compared to the past practice of attributing genius, finality and ownership to the vision of a particular author/auteur. The second issue is the fluidity of the digital text, significant here in the sense of being in dialogue with previous works as the media consumer/producer/up-ender re-works the text. The mash-up is held in particular relief here qua film text because the edit—the cut—as its central digital practice is, in its digital form, stripped of materiality and, in turn, its finality and finitude (you can only cut a film strip once; you can edit a digital text endlessly). I argue that the transformative authorship inherent in up-ending is thus also about a posthuman turn, a constantly changing, constantly resurrecting entity transcending a bodily materiality, as compared to the analogue text of a humanist paradigm, of materiality and of imperfection, wearing its marks, grains, cuts and scratches  on a body which bears all too clearly every scar and trace. Whether this is the music we would never have known to listen for or the rush of apocalyptic thunder is debatable. 

Abstract of Feike Dietz' paper

Reading by Writing: Early Modern Reading Practices in Manuscript and Print Culture

Feike Dietz MA

Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature 

Research Institute for History and Culture

Utrecht University

My paper discusses the relationship between manuscript culture and print culture in early modern religious practices, and in particular the way authors and readers reused printed texts in new meditative manuscripts. Contrary to earlier scholars, I do not consider the manuscript as a 'not yet printed text', but as a 'rewriting' of a printed product. I will focus on a seventeenth century illustrated manuscript based on the popular religious emblem book Pia desideria (1624). By reconstructing the relationship between the manuscript and its printed sources, I argue that the Pia desideria formed the starting point for a meditative reading and writing process in which fragments from different printed sources were creatively combined in a new meditation text.