Bibles, Knives and Scissors at Little Gidding

CREMS Seminar

Refreshments available 15 minutes before the start

Dr Adam Smyth

BA (Oxon) MA, PhD (Reading)
Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London

My research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I’ve published books and articles on autobiographical writing; the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication; the idea of popularity in literature; editorial theory and the history of the book; the history of reading; early modern poetry; and the cultures of manuscript and print.

I’ve recently become very interested in the inventive materiality of early modern texts, and the remarkable things readers did to books in the name of reading (cutting, pasting, annotating, burning …). This research has been helped by events organised under the Material Texts Network, including conferences on ‘Book Destruction’ and ‘Missing Texts.’

Adam Smyth's blog: http://earlymodern-lit.blogspot.co.uk/

Recent book publications:

• a monograph, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which examines hitherto neglected forms of life-writing (almanac annotations; parish registers; commonplace books; financial records) in which individuals constructed accounts of their lives. Research for this book was funded by the British Academy; a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship; and a Long Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.
• a monograph, Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-82 (Wayne State University Press, 2004), which explores the transmission of previously elite, manuscript texts to readers of cheap, popular printed books
• an edited collection of essays, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
• Series co-editor of Ashgate’s Material Readings in Early Modern Culture

Forthcoming:

I'm now working on a new book tentatively titled ‘Material Creativity’, which explores how early modern readers cut up, annotated, burnt, buried, lost, and variously reworked their books. I’m interested in these apparently destructive acts which were often not destructive at all, and I’m interested in the links between cutting and creativity. Much of this thinking came out of my work on the fascinating cut-up gospel Harmonies, made at Little Gidding in the 1630s.

I also have a long-term interest in laughter in early modern England: I’ve written a couple of chapters on this, and I hope – one day soon – to write a book on literature and laughter.

I’m currently co-editing, with Gill Partington, a collection of essays, Book Destruction, which examines the history of book destruction from the medieval to the contemporary; and I’m co-editing, with Juliet Fleming and William Sherman, a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on ‘Renaissance Collage’, exploring knives, scissors and glue as tools of reading.

Tea/coffee available 15 minutes before start