The 2022 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Peter D. McDonald, University of Oxford
The Secret Life of Books

Abstract: “The difficulty lies with reading itself,” the leading book historian Robert Darnton remarked in 1996. “We hardly know what it is when it takes place under our noses.” Detailing its “external circumstances” is one thing; capturing the more elusive process of “inner appropriation” quite another—in fact, he thought the latter “may remain beyond the range of research.” Darnton was thinking mainly about the difficulty of recovering what readers in the past made of the books they read, but his doubts about our ability to describe “the ultimate stage in the communication circuit” remain as relevant for multimedia readers today. In this three-part series, Peter D. McDonald addresses the challenge of uncovering, and then relating, the fugitive history of reading’s inwardness.

Lecture 1: Monday, March 14, 2022, 5:30pm: “The History of Sex”: orality, literacy, and the living brain

Introductions by Sean Quimby, Associate University Librarian & Director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.