Konferenz Paperwork: Writing (in) Books 1650-1850

Organized by Isabelle Charmantier (Exeter), Cornelia Ortlieb (Berlin) and Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter) in cooperation with the Research Initiative »Knowledge in the Making.« Funded by the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust., Berlin 17.06.2010, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Conference Room, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin

It is a well-known paradox that the printing revolution produced more manuscripts then ever before: notes in the margins of printed works, commonplace books, and other forms of compiling notes and excerpts, letters communicating thoughts on readily available works, all of these and more contributed to an explosion not only of handwritten material derived from new publications, but, in turn, also of printed material issued from these collections of manuscript notes. The fluctuating frontiers between manuscript and print bring to mind the physics of connected vessels, and in the case of early modern Europe, of ever larger vessels. What has been described as information overload by Ann Blair and Brian Ogilvie was in fact the consequence of this growing interaction between print and manuscript. The techniques of »paperwork«
(Latour) that were developed to deal with growing amounts of information were after all the same techniques that nurtured further growth.

This workshop aims to explore the many ways in which writing was done in early modern Europe. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines such as the history of the book, of information technologies, of print culture, or history of natural history, we hope to extract some interesting and challenging conclusions about the act of writing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.



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Thursday June 17, 2010

9:30 Welcome address

10:00-11:30
James Delbourgo (Rutgers University):
Master of Scraps: Hans Sloane's Paper Empire

Isabelle Charmantier/Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter):
Carl Linnaeus' Literary Assembly Line

Chair: Christoph Hoffmann/Barbara Wittmann

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-13:30
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet (Paris):
Seeing/Writing the World: Naturalist Travellers at Work (18th-19th
Centuries)

Ursula Klein (Berlin): Comment

Chair: Staffan Müller-Wille

13:30-14:30 Lunch break

14:30-16:00
Christine Haug (München):
Books in the Trade around 1800: Aspects of Production, Equipment, and Sale

Elisabeth Décultot (Paris):
Winckelmann's Manuscript Library: A Collection of Excerpts between Reading and Writing

Chair: Cornelia Ortlieb

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-18:00
Davide Giuriato (Frankfurt am Main):
Marginalia and Note-Taking: Two Different Techniques of Reading?

Jeffrey Schwegman (Berlin): Comment

Chair: Isabelle Charmantier

18:00-18:30 Final discussion

19:30 Dinner


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Barbara Wittmann

Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Boltzmannstraße 22,
14195 Berlin



wittmann@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

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