2025
RGME Spring & Autumn Symposia
Agents and Agencies
in the Shaping
or Re-Shaping of Books
[Posted on 30 December 2024]
As in 2023 and 2024, for 2025 the RGME prepares an integrated pair of Spring and Autumn Symposia (as Parts 1 and 2 for the year). For those predecessors, see:
This year, they respond to our Theme for the Year, “Thresholds and Communities”.
First Steps
London, British Museum. Door-sill carved as a carpet. From Room I, door c, the North Palace of Ashurbanipal II at Nineveh. Photograph (2014) Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
First, in January 2025, to set the stage, our first Episode for the year for our online series “The Research Group Speaks” explores the theme of “Thresholds and Communities” and describes the year’s planned projects and activities. Their centerpiece is the pair of Spring and Autumn Symposia. For this episode and the theme, see:
This event and other activities through the year prepare the ground, follow-up, and follow-though for the Spring and Autumn Symposia.
The Interlinked Pair
of Symposia
British Library, Royal MS 14 E. v, vol. 1, fol. 3r. Image Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Following the momentum of activities and enthusiasm in our 2024 Anniversary Year, the pair will draw upon the customary informal, but structured, approach of our events, symposia included.
These Symposia will take place online (like both our 2023 Symposia and our 2024 Autumn Symposium). Perhaps parts of them will also occur in-person (like our three-day 2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar College in hybrid format and our 2025 Autumn Colloquium at the University of Waterloo planned for hybrid format).
The dates and titles for these Symposia have been set. Details of their Programs are taking shape, as we continue to make preparations.
Agents & Agencies
As principal focus, our 2025 Symposia consider the myriad aspects and impact of agents and agencies (human and other) in the creation, dissemination, use, abuse, re-creation, safe-guarding, and enjoyment of books across time and place.
I. Spring Symposium (Part I of 2)
“Makers, Producers, and Collectors of Books:
From Author/Artist/Artisan to Library”
Friday to Sunday
28–30 March 2025 by Zoom
We explore the genesis and gestation of books, from first thoughts to processes of production leading to the finished product, and then to their owners and users.
For example, for the first stages, we might consider the author alone in his or her study, putting pen to page or thought to written word. Around him might, naturally, whether close at hand or in his memory or imagination, stand other books as examples or sources of inspiration, imitation, or perhaps plagarism.
British Library, Royal MS 14 E. 1, vol. 1, fol. 3r. Image Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Note on the Image. Frontispiece/headpiece for the first volume of the Speculum Historiale (or Miroir historial) by Vincent of Beauvais (1184/1194 – c. 1264) in the Old French translation by Jean de Vignay (circa 1282/1285 – c. 1350). Bruges, circa c. 1478–1480, for Edward IV (1442–1483, king from 1461–1470 and again from 1471-1483). On this page, at the front of Vincent’s text, above its opening columns of script, the author sits as scribe in a book-furnished study, framed within an architectural arcade and set within an elaborate border containing the king’s arms below.
The work of composing, copying, revising, and producing draft, fair, or final copies of the texts (with images where and as indicated) could be undertaken by more than one author, artist, and/or artisan. If so, would they work in tandem, sequence, or competition? Well, that might depend.
Aachen, Schatzkammer, Aachen Gospels, fol. 13r. The Four Evangelists at Work. Circa 820. Image via Karolingischer Buchmaler um 820, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
As the work progresses, there arrive further stages which create the issue or publication of the book, which then may enter the world in processes of dissemination, instruction, and incorporation within an individual or collective collection — or, it might be, from collection to collection, in one shape or another. The changed shapes could, of course, pertain to the book itself and/or the ownership.
In the image below, we draw attention to the large, closed volume being held diagonally by a figure at far right, as he faces toward the king at the center. Given its context within the book and its historical setting, that very volume would contain as its frontispiece the image which we see here. Designed and engraved by Sébastien Le Clerc (1637—1714), the scene depicts an idealized visit by the king, Louis XIV of France (1638–1715, ruled from 1643), to the Académie Royale des Sciences founded in 1666.
Sébastien Leclerc I, Engraving on paper. King Louis XIV visits the Académie Royale des Sciences in an idealized view. Image Public Domain.
Note on the Image. Engraving on paper by Sébastien Leclerc I (1637–1714), 1671. Within a large room overlooking the gardens and containing a multitude of specimens, scientific apparatus, and other materials for study, Louis XIV (1638–1715, King of France from 1643) visits his Royal Academie des Sciences in an idealized view. Image Public Domain.
Various large-scale publications by this Academy employ Le Clerc’s image as their monumental frontispiece. Among them would be one held in this image by its author, as identifiable from images during his lifetime.
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II. Autumn Symposium (Part 2 of 2)
“Readers, Fakers, and Re-Creators of Books:
From Page to Marketplace and Beyond”
Friday to Sunday, 17–19 October 2025 by Zoom
In the Autumn Symposium, we follow up the explorations of the Spring Symposium as we turn to consider the ‘afterlives’ of books once they reach their audience, whether through the marketplace or other modes of presentation and distribution. Such conditions may acquire a life of their own, as readers, annotators, users, owners, thieves, despoilers, and others had or took a hand in shaping or reshaping their destinies — that is, of the books, those agents, and book history.
As examples, we may point to readers who would reshape the pages by placing their comments, revisions, scribbles, or sketches upon them. So, too, forgers as well as plagarists might appropriate others’ work as their own, say by reshaping its structure, grafting on other pieces, or extracting parts to re-assemble and redistribute in other forms for their own purposes. Such might occur, for example, as leaves or scraps were extracted, cut into further pieces, perhaps refolded, and reused as coverings or parts of bindings for other texts (manuscript or printed), or for other repurposed materials.
Budny Handlist 7: Medieval Leaf reused as Folder. seen from Back with Flap and Tie. Photograph by Mildred Budny.
A different form of reuse concerns the fragmentation of books for the purpose of extracting leaves or part-leaves to serve as specimens of script, decoration, illustration, and/or graphic design.
The 2025 RGME Autumn Colloquium at the University of Waterloo in November 2025 is designed, picking up the pieces, to showcase the legacy of such despoilers or ‘biblioclasts’ who dispersed the fragments of manuscripts and printed books far and wide. The 2025 RGME Autumn Symposium considers such phenomena within the larger context of the ‘afterlives’ of books in many other forms as well.
“A Long Shot”. New Acquisitions Exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in November 2016: View of Some Parts of “Otto Ege Manuscript 14”.
The rôles of forgers, fakers, and frauds as agents in the production, re-creation, and distribution of books looms large in the history of books, perhaps from time immemorial. Our Symposium sets their activities or accomplishments into the context of “Agents and Agencies” as we examine the broad setting of books overall.
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Watch this space as the plans take shape.
For our activities planned for 2025, see:
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Registration
To register for each symposium or both, please visit the RGME Registration Collection.
Registration is free. We encourage you to make a volunteer donation when you register, to help support our nonprofit educational corporation powered principally by volunteers.
After you register, the Zoom Link for the online event or the online functionality of a hybrid event will be sent to you before the event.
Eventbrite Registration
Thank you for joining us!
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Christine de Pizan, La cité des dames, in the copy in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 1179, folio 3 recto. Image Public Domain via gallica.bnf.fr.
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