Department of English

• Monday, November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) for a talk titled “Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print.”

Professor Drimmer writes:

“The Boke of St Albans (c.1486) is celebrated as a milestone in the history of the book, counting as the first volume printed in multiple colors in England. Narratives of its technical novelty, however, obscure the conventional nature of its engagement with print; for not only was “impression” a robustly theorized concept prior to the introduction of the printing press, but medieval treatises on heraldry--of which this is one-- were venues for its theorization. In this talk I discuss how impression-based theories of vision informed the late medieval understanding of heraldry as the preeminent political object: a visual phenomenon where alternative perspectives are possible, but only one is correct. Far from using colored inks to elucidate the heraldic treatise it contains, the Boke of St Albans reveals how much one needs to correct one's vision in order to bring one's sight into accord with others’.”

Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (UPenn, 2018) is the first study devoted to the origins of the English literary canon as an illustrated corpus, and it received High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art. Her most recent publication, “Queer Transmissions: English Manuscript, Italian Print, and a Discomforting History of the Book,” appeared in Renaissance Studies, and she is currently completing a monograph titled Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England.