Lyell Lectures 2007-2008
Collecting incunabula: enlightenment, revolution and the market --
rediscovering and recreating the earliest printed books in the
eighteenth century
A series of five lectures by Kristian Jensen (The British Library)
At 17:00 at the Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford
22 April: Incunabula and freedom
24 April: 'May the god of Gold be with you'
29 April: Old books and new luxury - identifying incunabula in the
market
1 May: 'The superiority which books give better than horses' -
Incunabula and authority
6 May: 'Old books, very displeasing to the eye'. Re-creation and
oblivion
During the eighteenth century the past was radically reassessed in order
to understand and to influence changing political and social structures.
The consequences of the invention of printing, long celebrated as a
crucial event in European history, were rethought in the light of
contemporary concerns: as a result opinions were polarised. As books
from the earliest years of printing were increasingly investigated as
physical evidence of the invention, categories of books previously
neglected became very expensive indeed. This changed the relationship
between scholars, craftsmen, traders, collectors and institutions, who
all now had a claim to be taken seriously when speaking about books.
This new multipolarity was a challenge to the authority of those
institutions or groups which felt that it was their privilege to assess
books, to judge them good or bad.
The lectures explore and compare reactions in the two leading centres of
the market for early books, Paris and London. Although the market for a
new-found luxury was remarkably unified, different mechanisms for social
control in each centre meant that tensions were addressed differently.
The lectures discuss the political and commercial impact of the French
Revolution on these two centres, underlining the complex interplay
between politics, the marketplace, and cultural values. It was in this
period that books from the fifteenth century emerged as a coherent,
marketable commodity, as incunabula. This depended on a new, systematic
discipline, created outside universities and academies, which saw books
as physical, not textual, evidence of the past. The lectures investigate
parallels with the development of art history and the art market. As
fifteenth-century books became incunabula in the eighteenth century,
they were required to fulfil the expectations of their new owners, not
only as texts, but especially as objects whose fate was to be physically
transformed.
The lectures rely on unpublished evidence from archives in Britain and
France, correspondence between dealers, collectors, librarians, and
scholars, on extensive information about prices and price developments,
and on a wide range of eighteenth-century published works, from
political, philosophical and historical studies, to novels and drinking
songs. Visual information provided by the books themselves is located in
the broader context of eighteenth-century aesthetics.
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