Author: Sarah Werner

Last week I wrote about two students who worked on (two different copies of) the same book. But looking over the 64 texts that the 66 students I’ve taught over the last five years (in eight different seminars), I’m struck by the wide range of works that students have been drawn to. ((In addition to the two students who worked on different copies of the same edition of More’s Utopia, there were two students who, in different years, both worked on the same copy of the same book: John Ogilby’s 1651 edition of Aesop’s Fables. I really can’t explain quite how that happened, since I steer students away from working on the same book that someone else has studied before, both to avoid overuse and possible stress to the physical book and to encourage the process of discovery that’s central to their research.)) In general, I require students to work…

As I’ve written about before, in my Undergraduate Seminars students devote the bulk of their research time to crafting a biography of the book they’ve chosen as their primary focus. They find out who wrote the book and who printed and published it, they speculate on who the book’s intended audience was and on how the book might have been received, and they trace the afterlife of the book through the owners of their copy and the later editions and translations of their text. In the past students have chosen a wide range of books, sometimes drawn to them because of their author or subject, sometimes drawn to them by their physical characteristics. I’ve had students work on Paradise Lost, on a book of hours, on a traveler’s history of Ceylon. But last fall was the first time I had two students end up choosing the same work: the third…