Workshop "The Wonders of Woodblock Printing", Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge (UK), 13 August 2022
Laura Moretti
Wonderfully flexible in shaping visionary mise-en-page and in combining text and images, woodblock printing fuelled a buoyant publishing industry in early modern Japan. From the seventeenth century until the end of the nineteenth century woodblock-printed books and ephemera inundated the market, firing the imagination of authors, artists, publishers, and readers. This workshop brings this rich tradition to your fingertips, featuring professional block cutter Nagai Saeko and printer Ogawa Nobuto from the Sekioka Mokuhanga studio in Tokyo. You will observe how a woodblock is cut, experience how to print from it, and engage with original early modern woodblocks. In conversation with Laura Moretti, there will be a chance to learn more about how a publisher’s workshop would have operated back in time. There will also be an opportunity to view some of the Fitzwilliam's colour woodblock prints and printed books in the Study Room with Curator Elenor Ling.
This workshop is run in conjunction with the Ninth Summer School in Early Modern Palaeography at Emmanuel College. It is generously sponsored by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, Mitsubishi Corporation London Branch, and Jonathan Hill Bookseller.
--- --- ---
Dr Laura Moretti BA, MA(Cantab), PhD
Associate Professor in Pre-modern Japanese Studies
Director of Postgraduate Studies (AMES)
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Emmanuel College
Fellow & Director of Studies (AMES)
Recent publications
Pleasure in Profit.
Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2020. Named a 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; shortlisted for the 2021 DeLong Book History Prize.
"The Ise
monogatari in Eighteenth-Century Kibyōshi," 255–302.
In Joshua S. Mostow, Tokurō Yamamoto, and Kurtis Hanlon (eds.), An
Ise monogatari Reader (Brill, 2021).
Adaptation
as a Strategy for Participation: The Chikusai Storyworld in Early Modern Japanese Literature. Japanese Language and Literature, 54/1 (March 2020): 67-113.
Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children.
Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Other activities
Summer School in Japanese Early-modern Palaeography
YouTube page Japanese Early Modern Palaeography