Day: May 2, 2012

Adrian Johns at Wilson Library: The Invention of Scientific Reading

The Rare Book Collection partnered with our friends in the Department of English and Comparative Literature to bring Prof. Adrian Johns to speak on Tuesday April 10. Johns, one of the most provocative thinkers and writers on the history of the book, delivered a lecture in the English Department’s Critical Speaker Series, “The Invention of Scientific Reading.”

It was a fascinating and nuanced presentation that looked at three scientific revolutions and specific moments in which an act of reading “made” a critical piece of knowledge or unmade forms of knowledge. Johns discussed Galileo and the Copernican revolution; Isaac Newton and rational mechanics; James Clerk Maxwell and modern field theory; and concluded with remarks on contemporary efforts to automate reading, “an altogether terrifying prospect.” But don’t let us muddle all the details, access the podcast. Well worth the listening!

An Evening of Enchantment

BF840 .P7 1586 Giovanni Della Porta, De humana phisiognomonia (1586) Hanes Foundation for the Study of the Origin and Development of the Book

On Thursday evening March 29th, the Rare Book Collection celebrated its new exhibition Nature and the Unnatural in Shakespeare’s Age with a reception and lecture by Prof. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Maidens Call It Love-in-Idleness”: Potions, Passion, and Fairy Knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The exhibition, curated by RBC research assistant and UNC Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Park, is a rich exploration of early modern understandings of nature and the unnatural in Shakespeare’s time. Its fascinating selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Continental books connects astronomy, alchemy, animal husbandry, agricultural practice, and more to the language and themes of Shakespeare’s plays. Also included in the show are the RBC’s copies of the second, third, and fourth Shakespeare folios.

In her splendid lecture Prof. Floyd-Wilson conjured up a world of customs and concerns which translated into the Bard’s perennially popular play in wondrous and inventive ways. Few present will forget her discussion of the cunning woman/man, a fixture of English village life, or, for that matter, the sale of human fat by the local apothecary.

The well-attended lecture was a fine start to the graduate student conference, Shakespeare and the Natural World, jointly sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and King’s College London.