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Tuesday, March 11th at 5:00pm in LCLB 1080 (Lucy Ellis Lounge)
Medieval Colloquium with Professor James Clark (University of Exeter, UK): The Lost Books of Medieval England
Eighty years ago, the legendary bibliographer Neil Ker estimated that, for every manuscript book now surviving from medieval England, another twenty had been lost. Given what we have learned since about medieval book production, authorship, institutional libraries, and diverse patterns of independent reading, the scale of the loss may be nearer twice that figure. In fact, the conventional view of the learned and literary culture of medieval communities has been established based upon an unrepresentative minority of volumes that were saved by accident or an individual’s design. How might it change if, instead, we looked to the lost?
Professor Clark is the author, most recently, of a magisterial history of The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History -- a riveting and comprehensive account of the pillaging of England's 1000-year-old monastic patrimony during the reign of Henry VIII, especially the dispersion and loss of monastic libraries.