Sandars Lectures 2016: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The 2016 Sandars Lectures were given by Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, under the title 'Writing and reading history in Renaissance England: some Cambridge examples'.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was instituted in 1895 with a bequest left to the University by Mr Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837-1894), and continues today in the annual series of Sandars Lectures.
In his third lecture, Professor Grafton studies the layered reading practices of Adam Winthrop and the many generations of the Winthrop family from England to America.
In his second lecture, Professor Grafton analyses what Matthew Parker (1504-1575) might have thought he was doing while he was in the process of compiling what is now known as the Parker Library, and counsels caution with retrospective interpretation. He shows how conceived of his printed books as the primary outcome of his project, while the manuscript collections were deemed fragile and unstatic, and how these printed books were understood as archives at the time.
In his first lecture, Professor Grafton analyses the reading practices of John Caius (1510-1573) and highlights Caius's adoption of the annal tradition and of renewing documents.