Centre for urban history, University of Leicester

Friday, 31st may 2013

“During the sixteenth century the business of printing became a constituent part of European urban culture, and this development reinforced the differences between life in the town and life in the countryside. In the course of the remaining five centuries of the millennium, print conquered the world, but also remained a product intimately embedded in urban life: printed matter was manufactured, sold, and largely invented in urban centres.”Printed Matters: Printing, Publishing and Urban Culture in Europe in the Modern Period, ed. M. Gee & T. Kirk (Ashgate, 2002), p. 1.

“In an age of urban mass literacy, the city as place and the city as text defined each other in mutually constitutive ways. […] As the word city acquired more layers, the uses to which words could be put multiplied, enhancing their disorderly potential.”Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Harvard, 1996), pp. 1, 4-5.

Papers are invited for this interdisciplinary Study Day from postgraduates, independent researchers and established scholars working on medieval to modern Britain or Europe. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Intersections between urban cultural history and the history of books/prints/manuscripts/images
• How the culture of text or image has contributed to – and/or been shaped by – its primarily urban setting
• Urban texts and images: their creation, production, distribution and consumption/reception
• Popular print culture and ‘street literature’ (ballads, chapbooks, broadsides etc.)
• How texts and images disseminated urban ideas and culture into rural hinterlands
• Reading the ‘word city’ through newspapers, maps, posters, timetables and ephemeral texts/images
• Representations of urban space or modernity in text or image; urban ‘renaissance(s)’
• Radical, innovative and subversive uses of urban texts and images

Book History Research Network: http://www.bookhistory.org.uk