2005 Summer Seminar
"Publishing God:
Printing, Preaching, and Reading in Eighteenth-Century America"
June 12 - June 17, 2005
The 2005 summer seminar focused on the eighteenth-century Anglophone
colonies to track the interplay between religious cultures and the
circulation of print. Part of the aim of the course was be to
defamiliarize the concept of "religion" and to correct the presentist
assumption that religion plays a marginal or secondary role in the genesis
and structure of the public sphere. The seminar paid particular attention
to
how publicly circulated materials helped to inculcate habits of piety, and
how rhetorics of piety elaborated public cultures among strangers,
bringing into dialogue scholars from a variety of fields, including
history of the book, public sphere theory, religious history, music history,
art history, anthropology,
literary studies, and cultural history. Librarians and curators of rare
book collections were also encouraged to
apply.
Drawing on the treasures of the AAS collection, the seminar concentrated
on
practical case studies to open up major theoretical questions for each of
the following topics:
- the Bible in colonial culture
- new histories of reading
- evangelism, the so-called "Great Awakening," uses of print, and the
rise
of an evangelical public
- transformations of the New-England Primer in its long career
- the circulation of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as a Protestant
classic and icon
- Benjamin Franklin, in his complex relation to religion and religious
markets
Discussion of these topics joined general readings in the secondary
literature with hands-on examination of
materials in a number of planned workshops.
For example, in discussing the cultures of the Bible and scripture
reading, we focused on specific psalms and passages from Genesis and
Revelation, tracking their production, reproduction and circulation in
textual and visual forms.
View the syllabus
Seminar Leaders
* Michael Warner, Rutgers University
* Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania
Guest Faculty
* James N. Green, Library
Company of Philadelphia
* David D. Hall, Harvard University
* Members of the AAS staff
Cost
The fee for the seminar was $795, which includes tuition, selected course
materials, two dinners, and five lunches. Information about housing, for
which there is an additional fee, was sent to those accepted for the
seminar.
About the Seminar Leaders
Michael Warner teaches at Rutgers University,
where he is Board of
Governors Professor of English. His most recent books include Publics
and Counterpublics (Zone Books, 2002) and The Portable Walt
Whitman
(Penguin, 2003). He is also the author of The Letters of the
Republic
(1990) and The Trouble with Normal (1999). He has edited two
literary
anthologies: American Sermons (Library of America, 1999); and,
with Myra
Jehlen, The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1997). He
is also
the editor of Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social
Theory
(1993); and, with Gerald Graff, The Origins of Literary Studies in
America: A Documentary Anthology (1988).
Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C.
Annenberg Professor in the
Humanities, Director of the History of Material Texts, and Co-Director of
the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. His most
recent books are O Casaco de Marx (Marx's Coat), published
in Brazil in
1999, and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, written
with
Ann Rosalind Jones, which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA
in 2001. In 2004, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on the
material culture of reading, writing and note-taking in early modern
England and colonial America and to prepare an exhibition with James Green
on "Benjamin Franklin and the Book" for 2006.
About the Guest Faculty
James N. Green is the Librarian at the Library
Company of
Philadelphia. A member of the staff of the LCP for twenty-two years, he
has been a member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America
and of the Editorial Board of the American Antiquarian Society's
multivolume work A History
of
the Book in America, as well as a contributor to its first and second
volumes. Currently, he is working on a major exhibition on "Franklin and
the Book" for the Library Company's 275th anniversary and the tercentenary
of Franklin's birth. Jim Green has rich and varied experience in the
areas of bibliography and rare books.
David D. Hall teaches at Harvard Divinity
School and
in the History of
American Civilization program. He serves as general editor of the
American Antiquarian Society's
multi-volume "A History of the Book in America," and co-edited, with Hugh
Amory, the initial volume in this series, The Colonial Book in the
Atlantic
World (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has written widely on
popular
religion, witch-hunting, literacy, and culture in early America.
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~ About the seminar leaders
~ About the guest faculty
~ View the syllabus
~ Previous summer seminars
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