Presenters: Joanna Jarvis and Elaine Mitchell

This event is FREE but booking is necessary. Tickets can be reserved here.

John Bell (1745-1831): publisher, bookseller, printer, typographer. In 1775 John Bell began publishing individual editions of Shakespeare’s plays entitled Bell’s Shakespeare, soon to be followed by Bell’s British Theatre. Seen in retrospect, these volumes were early in a career that would gain him a reputation for publishing volumes of superior intellectual and aesthetic quality that were affordable for a wide range of people. This seminar will look at the context of John Bell as a publisher and printer, beginning with his importance in the history of British theatre.

Joanna Jarvis lectures on the Theatre Performance & Event Design course at Birmingham City University. She is also a freelance costume designer and maker specialising in period costume. Her long association with the choreographer Mary Collins has led to a particular interest in period dance and how the cut of clothes affects movement. Joanna is a doctoral candidate at Birmingham City University where she is examining the relationship between fashion and costume for dance in the late eighteenth century. She is a committee member of the Baskerville Society.

Marigolds not manufacturing: plants, print and commerce in eighteenth-century Birmingham Eighteenth-century Britain experienced a flood of plant introductions from around the world, the result of exploration, colonisation and commercialisation. The growth of print was essential to this circulation of new plants and the attendant dissemination of horticultural and botanical knowledge. Elaine will present the catalogue of Birmingham nurseryman, John Brunton, Curtis’ Botanical Magazine and Elizabeth Blackwell’s Curious Herbal drawing attention to the fruitful connections to be made between the study of garden history and that of printing history and culture.

Elaine Mitchell is a doctoral researcher in the Centre for West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham. Her PhD investigates the culture of horticulture within the urban confines of eighteenth-century Birmingham. With Dr Malcolm Dick she co-edited Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2018) to which she also contributed a chapter on Birmingham’s eighteenth-century pleasure gardens. Elaine is a member of the Centre for Printing History and Culture and the Baskerville Society.

A bi-monthly seminar series on the theme of ‘Pen and Print: archives, books and ephemera for research students’. The purpose of the seminars is three-fold:

1. to familiarise research students who are using historical sources with the range of material available in the CRL;

2. to engage research students from a variety of discipline to explore together how primary sources can be used;

3. to compare the different approaches that scholars from diverse disciplines take to the interpretation of manuscripts and printed matter.