Upcoming Events:
EDITION SPRING LECTURE 2025
16:00-17:30, Fri 21 March, Project Room (1.06), 50 George Square
Katherine Halsey (Professor of English Studies, University of Stirling) and Matthew Sangster (Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History, University of Glasgow): ‘Towards a True History of Reading Lives: Borrowing in Scotland, 1747-1837’
Chair: Professor Penny Fielding
Followed by a drinks reception
Abstract: ‘Histories of reading have often relied by necessity on anecdotal accounts by relatively elite readers. However, the affordances of digital technologies allow us to interpret previously intractable institutional manuscripts to provide a far richer evidentiary basis. Structuring their lecture around two key reading concepts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘instruction’ and ‘amusement’, Professors Halsey and Sangster will explore how readers in Scotland engaged with library books as pupils, students, professionals, members of communities and leisure readers. They will demonstrate how library borrowing records reveal rich, complex, idiosyncratic readers, liberated rather than bound by the libraries with which they interacted, ranging far beyond the ostensible purposes of their institutions in their diverse engagements with print.’
Profs Halsey and Sangster will also be giving a smaller workshop earlier in the day:
14:00-15:00, Fri 21 March, Centre for Research Collections, 6th Floor, Main Library, George Square
EDITION WORKSHOP
Prof. Katherine Halsey (Stirling) and Prof. Matthew Sangster (Glasgow): ‘Edinburgh University Library’s Borrowing Registers’
Description: ‘This workshop will introduce participants to the borrowing registers of Edinburgh University Library, one of the largest surviving collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century borrowing records in Scotland. It will explore the borrowings of the students, professors and townspeople who used the library for a wide range of intellectual (and less intellectual) purposes.
During the workshop, attendees will examine the content and material form of the registers, discussing the ways in which ideological assumptions are encoded in the institutional practices represented. They will also trace some of the rich reading lives revealed in the registers’ pages.’
Past Events:
Autumn Lecture 2024
Professor Dirk Van Hulle (Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford) – ‘Writers’ Libraries’
Every writer is also a reader. A work of literature often starts in the margins of another book. Knowing what and how a writer read can help us understand the origins of their work. This lecture considers modernist authors as readers and examines how they read, how their reading translated into their own writings, and how we can map this process in a digital edition.
Fri, 8 November 2024 16:00 – 17:30 GMT, 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square. Chair: Dr Hannah Simpson. Followed by a drinks reception.
Prof Van Hulle will also be giving a smaller workshop earlier in the day, in which he’ll give us a hands-on look at a major digital scholarly edition:
Annual Lecture 2024
Professor Emma Smith (University of Oxford) – ‘Following the Money: Book Collecting in the Age of Slavery’
Fri, 16 Feb 2024 16:00 – 17:30 GMT, 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square. Chair: Professor James Loxley.
For the inaugural Edition event, we welcomed Professor Emma Smith to Edinburgh from the University of Oxford to give our 2024 Annual Lecture.
Emma is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. In April 2023, she published an opinion piece in The Guardian noting that ‘as we reckon with the UK’s colonial past, we need to examine the history behind valuable books – even our beloved Shakespeare’. Emma’s lecture for Edition developed her ongoing work on connections between rare books and wealth derived from the slave trade.
A recording of the lecture is available to watch here:
The Scottish Novel in 1824
Mon, 1 July 2024 13:00 – 18:00 GMT, Centre for Research Collections and 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square
This one-day symposium marks the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet. More generally, this was a moment of ascendancy for ‘Scotch novels’, with the instability wrought by the financial crash of 1825/6 yet to materialise, and with the Edinburgh milieu at the heart of anglophone literary culture.
This event features a keynote lecture from Professor Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley), and is hosted by Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) at the University of Edinburgh. It is supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities.
EDITION is involved with the workshop element of the day, taking place in the Centre for Research Collections.
For more information see this page.