‘A boxe of balme full swete’: books and boxes in early modern England

Monday 21 May 2018
Weston Library Lecture Theatre at 5.15 p.m. (enter via Broad Street entrance)

LUCY RAZZALL (University of Cambridge)

‘A boxe of balme full swete’: books and boxes in early modern England

This lecture examines the material and imaginative relationships between books and boxes in early modern England. The book is an object which has to be engaged with literally and mentally; like a box with a lid it has to be physically opened with the hands, perhaps involving the lifting of a sturdy binding to reveal its contents, but it also has to be mentally opened, entered and explored. The lecture considers what the box-like features of the early modern book as textual and material artefact can tell us about the complex identity of religious books as receptacles for the Word of God in post-Reformation England.

ALL WELCOME