Creative Commons by Thomas Hawk, Printing Press, May 18, 2006, Flickr.

The CRRS is pleased to host the international conference Rethinking Early Modern Print Culture this coming October. Conference chairs Grégoire Holtz and Holger Schott Syme have stressed the importance of this topic in the conference’s call for papers:

The view that early modernity saw the transformation of European societies into cultures of print has been widely influential in literary, historical, philosophical, and bibliographical studies of the period. The concept of print culture has provided scholars with a powerful tool for analyzing and theorizing new (or seemingly new) regimens of knowledge and networks of information transmission as well as developments in the worlds of literature, theatre, music, and the visual arts. However, more recently the concept has been reexamined and destabilized, as critics have pointed out the continuing existence of cultures of manuscript, queried the privileging of technological advances over other cultural forces, and identified the presence of many of the supposed innovations of print in pre-print societies. This multi-disciplinary conference aims to refine and redefine our understanding of early modern print cultures (from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century).

To find out more about the conference, check its website. Conference dates: October 22-24, 2010. See the suggested list of accommodation near the conference site and download your registration form and program.