Next AHRC workshop announced – Museum of London Cheapside Hoard Exhibition

It’s time to register for the next workshop! Come and join us to continue the discussion about the relationship between different kinds of pre-modern materiality and how we analyse and display them…

Following on from the first two in the series of AHRC Collaborative Skills Development workshops hosted by the Museum of London at The London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre, and University of London Senate House Library, the third workshop will take place at the Museum of London. This workshop will examine the practicalities and challenges of displaying objects in museum exhibits.

An initial session will examine a small group artefacts relating to death and mourning from the early modern period and formulate ways that such themes might be interpreted in a display for a variety of different audiences. After having worked up ideas and possible strategies for delivering textual information and display requirements, an area of the Museum of London’s War, Plague and Fire gallery will be studied to learn how objects and text come together in practical terms as part of a grand narrative of an exhibit. This will be followed by a visit to the Museum’s temporary Cheapside Hoard exhibition. Here, the focus will be on analysing specifically the design of a major exhibit and how visitors engage with very small objects as well as related supporting content, reconstructions and illustrative material.

To register go to: http://www.history.ac.uk/research-training/courses/methodologies-material-culture-iii

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Methodologies for material culture workshop 23 September – few places remaining.

Visit Senate House Library at this exciting time in its history to take part in a workshop sharing ways of approaching texts as material objects!

This is the second in a series of AHRC Collaborative Skills Development workshops intended to start a conversation amongst postgraduate students and early career researchers in the Arts and Humanities about the analysis of pre-modern material culture across different disciplines and categories of evidence – from pots to pamphlets and jewellery to armour. The first event, hosted by the Museum of London at The London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre, considered the use of archaeological evidence, and the second will focus on early printed books drawn from the University of London’s Senate House Library’s special collections. This second workshop will consider ways of analysing the lifecycle of the book, exploring peoples’ relationships to textual artefacts through an understanding of manufacture and evidence of ownership, readership and collection.

Offering expert analysis of and access to Senate House Library’s special collections, the day will explore:

•    What makes a book: materials, type, format and their relation to content and circulation.

•    How books differ from each other: different states and the transition from manuscript to print.

•    The copy-specific element: binding and attitudes to texts.

•    Layout and design: how presentation shapes reaction.

•    Reader interaction: different kinds of evidence of reading.

•    Ownership and collecting: provenance and the meaning of books within collections.

•    The role of digitisation: benefits and disadvantages.

The workshop is free to attend but places are limited. To register please visit: http://www.history.ac.uk/research-training/courses/methodologies-material-culture-ii

The third workshop in the series will be taking place at the Museum of London on November 8th 2013 and will focus on early modern domestic material culture in a museum context. The final workshop will take place at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies on December 17th 2013 and will consider the material culture of warfare and scanning technology. More details to follow…