The Reformation of the Book: 1450-1700

NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers

John N. King and James K. Bracken of The Ohio State University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on continuity and change in the production, dissemination, and reading of Western European books during the 250 years following the advent of printing with movable type. In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the Protestant Reformation. This seminar will also explore the related problem of whether the impact of printing was revolutionary or evolutionary. Employing key methods of the still-emerging interdisciplinary field of the History of the Book, our investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and/or Reformation, the History of the Book, art history, women's studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including would-be rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 20 July 2007. During the first week of this program, we shall visit Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum. It preserves the world's only surviving early modern printing and publishing house. During four weeks in Oxford, where we shall reside at St. Edmund Hall, we plan to draw on the resources of the Bodleian Library and other institutions. In addition, we shall make an overnight trip to London in order to visit other rare book collections.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2007 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,600.

Full details and application information are available at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/king2/Reformationofthebook

For further information, please contact rankin.86@osu.edu. The application deadline is March 1, 2007.