Elaine Treharne
About Elaine: Elaine is the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, Robert K. Packard Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. She is a specialist in medieval British literature and culture and in manuscript and archival studies, technologies of communication and digital humanities. She has published some three-dozen books and articles on these areas of research, and she teaches courses on Cultural Heritage and its sustainability, as well as on all forms and aspects of the historical and contemporary Human Record.
Talk title: The World’s Most Famous Books
The World’s Most Famous Books What makes a book famous? From the largest to the smallest, the most expensive to the most dangerous, books-–in their infinite variety and flexibility of form—fascinate and delight, infuriate, challenge, and even kill. This lecture will ask what motivates the producers and users of books to make their decisions about materials, design, and contents. What inspires collectors to pay millions of dollars for specific books and textual objects? Why are books hoarded and used as family archives? Conversely, why are books burned, banned, and mutilated? How can the story of a book’s life and use (not even its contents) move and haunt, or disgust and appall? Treasures from Stanford’s Special Collections, together with remarkable books—old and new—drawn from a global library, will be used to illustrate this talk, which will create both wonder and appreciation for this most remarkable and long-lived of technologies.
Related Reading: Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (OUP, 2022) by Elaine Treharne