Annual Lecture, SUFE Print Culture Centre

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座信息 / Information 

Speaker: Prof. James Raven (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge)

Time: 23 November, 2021, 16:00-18:00

Format: Zoom meeting

Zoom ID: 823 222 86694

Zoom PW:  687841

 讲座摘要 / Abstract 

This lecture probes the possibility of writing a history of a book’s reception in very different parts of the world in order to contribute to the ‘global turn’ in book history. It follows from the author’s examination of the progress of book history in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford University Press, 2020) and What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 

Bishop Erik Pontoppidan published Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie in 1752-53. It was translated into German and published a year later. A year after that, the work was translated into English and published in two grand folio volumes in London as Natural History of Norway. The size and format of these richly illustrated editions are very different and together they offer a unique, multi-dimensional subject for a ‘book biography’ tracing on a global scale the many facets and legacies of its materially and linguistically different forms of production and its intellectually varying popularity and reception across the world. The book was sought by institutions and readers all round the globe. By examining archival notes, reviews, and annotated surviving copies, including those bought by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, by the Maharajah of Tangore in India, and by scholars, writers, clerics, and institutions in St Petersburg, Hesse, Kraków, Glasgow, Oxford, Westminster, Charleston, and many more, we can determine how Pontoppidan’s pioneering scientific and historical ‘verification’ methods were received and the part played by different languages, translations, typographies, engraved images, and material book forms. 

But there is also a significant twist to this history of writing, production, circulation, and reception. Pontoppidan, for all his insistence on verifiability included long sections on the sightings of kraken, or sea monsters, with notes on contemporary observations and images of the creatures (many drawn from earlier works on Scandinavian myth, such as Olaus Magnus and repeated by great early modern naturalists). As a result, this book biography also investigates why his observations of mermaids and mythic creatures gained credibility within Enlightenment natural science (even applauded a century later in Moby Dick and remembered, with direct reference to Pontoppidan in later sightings of sea monsters reported in newspapers, diaries and various publications in Ireland, Italy, the Unites States, India, Singapore, and many more besides).

 主讲人简介 / Biography 

Professor James Raven is a world-leading social and cultural historian best known for his pioneering contributions to the history of the book. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly, he was Professor of Modern History, University of Essex, Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford. Professor Raven has given numerous international lectures and lecture series, including The Karmiole Lecture, Los Angeles, 2008; The Panizzi Lectures, British Library, 2010; Mellon Lectures, Yale University (Macmillan Centre), 2010, The Connell Lecture, Dublin, 2014, and The J. R. de R. Jackson Lecture, University of Toronto, 2016. Of his 14 books, the most recent are The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford University Press, 2020) and What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

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