| Project Detail |
Investigating book adaptability in the past
Be they digital e-books, old hand-copied manuscripts or printed works, books have remained culturally and economically valuable because they are adaptable. Funded by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the REBPAF (‘Re-Mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures’) project will focus on how 15th and 16th century copyists, printers and business people dealt with the culturally and commercially transformative process of adapting manuscript books into printed versions. REBPAF will also investigate the relevance of this process to the digital world by engaging non-academic stakeholders (e.g. publishers, book dealers, etc.) and academics alike. The expected outcome is a greater appreciation of the underlying historical and future value of books.
"The digital revolution is opening our eyes to the important historical truth that the enduring cultural and economic value of the book has always depended on its adaptability to different media, today from printed book to e-book (and back again), and in the past from manuscript book to printed book (and vice versa). The MSCA Doctoral Network ""Re-Mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures"" focuses on the ways in which 15th- and 16th-century book producers (scribes, printers, entrepreneurs) negotiated the dynamic relations between the manuscript book and the printed book and adapted to the evolving challenges of the market; and it demonstrates the continuing relevance of these cultural and economic negotiations to the modern world. To this end, it unites the interests of present-day organisations that re-mediate the early book – publishers, bookdealers, museums, creative and heritage industries – with those of academic scholarship, with the double aim of (1) engaging a new generation of medievalists and early modernists in an innovative and collaborative research programme that asks fundamental and interdisciplinary questions about the history of the book and the written word and its future in a digital environment; and (2) equipping the researchers recruited to this Doctoral Network with high-level transferable skills and competences to be acquired and applied not just in academic settings but also through secondments and training workshops provided by a suite of nine European non-academic partners that have a direct interest in, and relevance to, our research agenda. |
