Inaugural Lecture: The Book as Museum in Eighteenth-Century Europe
The Book as Museum in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Presenter: Acclaimed Scholar Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
February 24, 2022
6 to 7:30 p.m.
Inaugural Paleography and the Book Lecture
David Rubenstein Forum, University A
Collections of antiquities depicted in richly illustrated books, many calling themselves museums, flourish in the eighteenth century when the public museum becomes a significant cultural institution in western Europe. These beautiful books mobilize the museum, bringing new forms of knowledge organization to readers far and wide. The books display cultural capital and, often, political power as well. Using case studies from Florence, Paris, and Naples, book historian Michael F. Suarez, S.J., examines this fascinating chapter in cultural and intellectual history.
The University of Chicago Visiting Scholar Program in Paleography and the Book aims to bring to campus an outstanding guest professor for a quarter each year who specializes in one or more areas, which may include manuscript history and reception, paleography, epigraphy, philology, codicology, the history of the book and readers, and the evolution of print culture.
The University of Chicago and the Division of the Humanities have long been committed to the proposition that a thorough understanding of original sources, the languages in which they were communicated, the means through which they were presented, and the contexts in which they arose are the indispensable tools of humanistic inquiry. This commitment is reflected throughout the division and its history—in its production of outstanding critical editions, its belief in the importance of studying and preserving languages from across history and the globe, and its insistence that scholars and students must have deep command of and respect for the primary sources and the conditions in which they were created.
Understanding the history of what is called the “visible world” in all its forms is integral to this conception of humanistic learning and research. Unfortunately, nowadays these aspects of study are often downplayed in the university curriculum. This history encompasses scholarly fields such as manuscript studies of the Bible and its reception, papyri in ancient Mediterranean civilizations, illuminated manuscripts of the medieval era, the development of printing and the flowering of print culture, and the practices of readers, among many others.
Studying this history enriches human beings’ understanding of a wide range of humanistic themes, including how ideas take shape and are transmitted over time, the development and circulation of religious beliefs and practices, and the social conditions in which science develops.
Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
University of Chicago Visiting Scholar Michael F. Suarez, S.J., is the Director of Rare Book School, professor of English, and University professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia. He writes extensively on a variety of eighteenth-century English literary authors and genres, bibliography, and book history, and has held research fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Since 2010, Suarez has served as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. His recent books include The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V, 1695–1830, co-edited with Michael Turner, and The Oxford Companion to the Book, a million-word reference work co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: A Global History, also co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen, first appeared in 2013. Oxford University Press published his edition of The Dublin Notebook in 2014, co-edited with Lesley Higgins, in The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Suarez delivered the 2015 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Oxford. His 2020 Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, “Printing Abolition” examined the British campaign to end the slave trade through the lens of bibliography and book history.
He is a CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow, a member of the Advisory Board of the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program, the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Board of Managers of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.