Professor Earle Havens at the Moore Institute

Earle Havens, the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, & Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of German & Romance Languages & Literatures, Johns Hopkins University visited the Moore Institute in September 2016. During his time at the Moore Institute he gave two lectures and spoke with students about Digital Humanities. You can listen to an interview with Prof Havens here.

Lecture One:

His first lecture, Falling Down the Rabbit Hole: Reading Renaissance Marginalia in a Digital Research Environment was a presentation on the history of reading practices drawn from the recent August 31, 2016 initial launch of the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe website and user interface. Prof Havens is the Principal Investigator for this digital humanities initiative, with co-PIs Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) and Dr. Matthew Symonds (University College London). This is a 4-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project to digitise, transcribe, and make searchable the manuscript marginalia preserved in dozens of 16th-century imprints heavily annotated by Renaissance scholars. Project website: https://www.bookwheel.org. Listen to the lecture here.

Lecture Two:

His second lecture Papist Patronesses: Reconstructing Networks of Gentry Catholic Women & Recusant Scribes in Elizabethan England was an illustrated lecture on the fortunes of a solitary East Anglian Catholic scribe and the elaborate network of gentry patronesses in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England who appear to have sustained his activity for decades. The lecture explored scribal practice in the relative absence of Catholic access to print, particularly during the Elizabethan crisis years of the 1580s and 1590s surrounding the Succession Crisis and the Spanish Armada. Prof Havens asked how did Catholic women of the provincial social elite form confessional relationships, and maintain the vestiges of confessional and devotional solidarity in this period of repression? And why do we possess so little of their own literary activity, in manuscript or in printed forms from this crucial period in history? Listen to the Lecture here.

Listen to all three recordings here.