On March 22 from 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in Cathedral of Learning room 501, the Children's Literature Program and European Studies will host a talk by M.O. Grenby, Professor of Children's Literature and Eighteenth-Century Studies at Newcastle University, Director of the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute, and author of The Child Reader 1700-1840.
In his talk, open to the public, Dr. Grenby will discuss his research on transnational popular print for children c.1600-1850—i.e. the cheap, often ephemeral material that was published for children, or that was used by them, across Europe, European colonies and beyond, in the early modern period.
Dr. Grenby’s research shows that an enormous amount and an impressive range of cheap material was printed for children in many different regions of Europe. This ranged from Dutch almanacs, and Neujahrsstücke or Neujahrsblätter (New Year's sheets) in Zurich and other Swiss cities, both explicitly addressed to children from the 17th century onwards, to picture-sheets of various kinds, such as those printed in the Dutch Republic (‘centsprenten’), Germany (‘bilderbogen’) Britain (‘catchpenny prints’), Spain (‘pliegos de aleluya’) and Russia (‘Lubki’). Educational and religious works were even more universal, even if there were also intriguingly distinctive national variations (such as ‘battledores’ in Britain and North America). Moreover, there is evidence of the widespread transmission of these materials from Europe to other points of the globe – of Spanish- and Dutch-printed cartillas and catechismos to Latin America for instance, or British-style chapbooks exported, re-purposed, and adapted in South Asia. This work sheds light on the history of print culture, but also the rise of children’s literature.