Patrons and Illustrations: 17th-Century British Books and the Coming of Enlightenment
Michael F. Suarez
| Date: | 02-23-2012 |
| Time: | 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm |
| Location: | Kelvin Smith Library, Dampeer Room |
| Registration: | Registration is Closed. |
From the mid-seventeenth century, English antiquaries, cartographers, classicists, and scientists increasingly sought to produce large folios with elaborate illustrations. But how to pay for the enormous production costs of such works? Engravings by the leading practitioners of the day—whether depicting the beauties of the great cathedrals, the epic glories of classical antiquity, or the finer points of natural history—required significant investments in both men and materials. This lecture will consider the commercial and cultural expedients that self-publishing authors, learned societies, and projecting booksellers developed to finance their books, many of exceeding beauty and genuine importance. Examining these "books for looking" produced for cultural elites and chiefly underwritten by their intended readerships in England, we encounter narratives of fiscal irresponsibility, signal innovation, shameless advertising, remarkable networking, outright deception, outstanding loyalty, and brazen vanity. Reading these lavish images and the stories of their making—in botanical books and star atlases, deluxe classical translations and county histories—compels us to consider the traffic between culture and commerce, to contemplate the exchanges between text and trade in new and illuminating ways. Understanding materiality and meaning as mutually informing, we will attend to questions of patronage and capitalization, consumption, monumentality, and ideologies both political and religious as they bear on cultural and intellectual life.
Michael J. Suarez S.J. is University Professor and Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. The holder of research fellowships from The American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, he is also Honorary Curator of the University of Virginia's special collections and Professor of English. Michael's most recent publication is The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a million-word reference work on the history of books and manuscripts from the invention of writing to the present day. The Sunday Telegraph in London called it "colossal" and "a paradise for book lovers;" while The Wall Street Journal praised it as "a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine." A Jesuit priest, Michael is currently co-General Editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO), perhaps the largest digital humanities projects extant today. In 2014—15, he will hold the J. R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford University.
