An essay by EMRC member, Rebecca Bullard, has been awarded the Sylvia Bowerbank Award 2013 by the International Margaret Cavendish Society. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an extraordinary woman \u2014 one of the first female scientists in England, she was also a political exile who spent the Civil Wars in continental Europe on account of her royalist beliefs. Rebecca\u2019s essay, \u2018Gatherings in Exile: Interpreting the Bibliographical Structure of\u00a0Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life<\/i>\u00a0(1656)\u2019, published in the journal\u00a0English Studies<\/i>,\u00a0takes a closer look at the physical composition of the large folio volumes that Cavendish published throughout the 1650s while she was in exile. It argues that\u00a0we can read the material structure of Margaret Cavendish\u2019s volume \u2014 the way it was constructed out of folded and bound sheets of paper \u2014 as a form of autobiography.<\/p>\n
Like many researchers at the University of Reading, Rebecca is interested in tracing the ways in which the physical or material aspects of early modern books might be read and interpreted alongside their literary characteristics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"