Useful Knowledges and Vernacularity

Here's a call for papers for an interesting-looking conference in gorgeous Hobart in November...

Knowledge Networks and Communities of Reading (KNOW) and the ARC Network for Early European Research are pleased to invite papers for a symposium titled

'Useful Knowledges and Vernacularity: Manuscripts, Readers and Information in Late Medieval England'


This symposium is designed to interest a broad range of researchers working on the nature of knowledge networks in the late medieval England and the reading communities consequent on and sustained by those networks. Topics might include the reworking of tradition and the dissemination of new knowledge and ideas, not least through the translation of classical and non-English texts; the production of vernacular works of instruction; institutional settings and contexts for the transmission of vernacular learning; developments in codicology and manuscript dissemination; the rise of vernacularity; the effects of early printing and distribution; and the kinds of textual environments theorised through a range of historical and literary methodologies.

International guests include Linne Mooney (York), George Keiser (Arizona) and Alexandra Gillespie (Toronto)

The symposium will follow the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Conference in Hobart: 'Spaces of Print: Exploring the History of Books'. It will begin with a joint event, a public lecture on the history of books in the middle ages by Rodney M. Thomson (Tasmania)

9-11 Nov 2007

University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

Abstracts to Professor Michael Bennett, School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania (Michael.Bennett@utas.edu.au) or Dr Jenna Mead, School of English, Journalism and European Languages (jenna.mead@utas.edu.au) by 31 Aug 2007