Wendy Wall to lecture on 17th-century domestic manual ‘The English Housewife’

Wendy Wall to lecture on 17th-century domestic manual ‘The English Housewife’February 06, 2007Mary Beth Hintonmbhinton@syr.edu

Wendy Wall, professor and chair of Northwestern University’s English Department, will speak on Friday, Feb. 23, as part of the Syracuse University Seminar in the History of the Book series. Her lecture, “Indexing the Index, and Reading the Home: The Case of ‘The English Housewife’ in the 17th Century,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons on the first floor of E.S. Bird Library.

Gervase Markham’s encyclopedic domestic manual “The English Housewife” was so popular that it went through 10 editions in the 17th century. In this talk, Wall will briefly examine the publication history of Markham’s text, with an eye to understanding how the book’s typographical features and preliminary materials guided the reading experience and changed the way that the book was expected to be used. Her talk is positioned at the point where histories of the book and histories of the domus intersect.

Wall is a specialist in early modern literature and culture, and the author of “The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance” (Cornell University Press, 1993) and “Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama” (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Wall has received several grants and awards for her teaching and research, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently at work on two projects: a book on early modern reading practices and a book titled “Reading Food: A Culinary History from Shakespeare to Martha Stewart.”

This History of the Book event is free and open to the public. Visitor parking is available in the Marion lot. The History of the Book Seminar Series at Syracuse University is sponsored by the University Library, the School of Information Studies and The College of Arts and Sciences, including the Dean’s Office and the departments of anthropology; English; history; languages, literatures and linguistics; philosophy; and religion.