I recently joined SHARP-L (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing List-serv) and am finding it so worthwhile. In a recent thread, a post-doctoral fellow at Ghent University in Belgium, Yuri Cowan, reflected on her recent experiences teaching 2nd year undergraduate students “Elements of material bibliography and print culture” at the University of Toronto. Her class, which consisted of 100 students (wow!) was given a final assignment consisting of a bibliographical description of a pre-1800 book accompanied by a reflective essay. One of the students “noted a mysterious stain on a page halfway through an eighteenth-century medical texts [sic], a stain which looked suspiciously like blood, and in her reflective essay she ventured that the book might actually have been referred to during a dissection or anatomy lesson. Was she right? Who knows? and anyway that stain was certainly not part of the history of the book’s production. Yet the fact of her seizing upon that mysterious stain shows that the inclusion of the history of reading and use, and of the social history of print culture, has real pedagogical value in the classroom, if only because it encourages attention to detail and a sense of the ways in which the material book is shaped not only by its making, but by its subsequent use and reuse.”
The value of joining this list-serv is already evident. The value and ways of using primary sources in the classroom are becoming clearer!
La pensée des lumières 