Early Book Collections and Modern Audiences: Harnessing the Identity/ies of Book Collections as Collective Resources

Leah Tether; Laura Chuhan Campbell

doi:10.5860/rbm.21.1.26

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage is the Association of College and Research Libraries' journal covering issues pertaining to special collections libraries and cultural heritage institutions.

About The Authors

Leah Tether is Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing at the University of Bristol, where she is also the Graduate Dean of Arts. Her core research interests include book history, publishing studies and medieval literature. Currently, she is working on a project looking at medieval literature that was not selected for publication in the early-modern print revolution, which will eventually be published by DeGruyter under the title Unpublished: Medieval Literature and the Early-Modern Publisher. She is the author of The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending (D. S. Brewer, 2012), Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France (D. S. Brewer, 2017), The General Reader and the Academy: Medieval French and Penguin Classics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and co-author of the forthcoming The Bristol Merlin: Text and Context (ARC Humanities Press, 2021).

Laura Chuhan Campbell is Assistant Professor of French at Durham University. She has published on medieval French and Italian, Arthurian literature, and Translation Studies. Her first monograph, The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translation (D. S. Brewer, 2017), examined translation between French and Italian in the Middle Ages, focusing on the transmission of texts surrounding the medieval figure of Merlin. Her current project analyses medieval French translations of the bible in relation to Ecocritical theory and New Materialisms. She is currently collaborating on an edition and translation of a newly-discovered fragment of the Vulgate Cycle, which will be published under the title The Bristol Merlin: Text and Context (ARC Humanities Press, 2021).

Article Tools

Print this article

Indexing metadata

How to cite item

Advertising Information

Early Book Collections and Modern Audiences: Harnessing the Identity/ies of Book Collections as Collective Resources

Leah Tether, Laura Chuhan Campbell

Abstract

This article summarizes and contextualizes the discussions of a workshop held at Durham University in November 2018. In this workshop, participants (including academics, students, independent scholars, special and rare books librarians, and archivists) discussed the notion of the collection (that is, the identity of collection as a whole, rather than just its constituent parts), and its potential to serve as a means of engaging both scholarly and public audiences with early book cultures. This study sets out a series of considerations and questions that might be used when tackling such special collections engagement projects, including ones involving more modern collections than the case studies examined here.