Virtual exhibition: Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800

Posted by mdever on April 4, 2020 in archives, Cultural Heritage, exhibition, humanities, libraries, literary heritage, manuscripts, research

While the Beinecke Library like so many others is currently closed, it is possible to view online some of their exhibition, “Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800”.

There is a beautifully detailed exhibition brochure and a series of videos on different aspects of the materials on display.

You can download the Brochure for Subscribed at the Beinecke Library.  It describes the exhibition thus:

Subscribed explores the agencies of the pen in three simultaneous exhibitions on manuscript culture and power in early modern Britain. The exhibitions together reflect a critical tradition of engagement with the manuscript in early modern British culture, in which writers and readers understood precisely the inflections of power inherent in the usages of pen, paper, and ink. This understanding extends to the present: the curators of Subscribed write with an understanding of the manuscript’s centrality to our framing of the British past or an English literary canon.

The exhibition looks closely at the hand-written text in early modern Britain, and asks what it has to tell us about power, wit, and the questions we should ask of the manuscript past.