Professor James Loxley’s dynamic report on the origin, development and future of the Palimpsest Project provided an engaging second lecture for this spring series at the Centre for the History of the Book. The blog associated with the project, which Professor Loxley directed us to throughout the lecture, explains that the name Palimpsest was chosen ‘to evoke the multi-layered imaginative, conceptual and historical cityscapes of our everyday settings that this resource seeks to bring to life.’ Professor Loxley’s lecture further elucidated these noble aims and outlined some of the obstacles the project faced throughout its journey.

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Professor Paolo Quattrone began this semester’s seminar series at the Centre for the History of the Book with a wide-ranging discussion of accounting, rhetoric, and the administration of the Jesuit Order.

If these seem unlikely topics to crop up at the Centre’s seminar series, it’s because they are; indeed, as a Professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Quattrone himself may seem an unlikely choice. The majority of past speakers have had their feet firmly planted in the field of humanistic studies; however, Quattrone (who, incidentally, also holds the position of Dean of Special Projects at the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences) has produced research that realises the connections between our respective disciplines. From the beginning of the seminar, Quattrone connected the dots between business and humanistic studies by drawing attention to the importance of etymology in realising the link between rhetoric and accounting. The etymology of the word ‘inventory,’ for example, comes from the Latin inventio, the first of the five canons of rhetoric. This type of interdisciplinary enquiry is exactly the kind of research welcomed by book historians and exemplified by the field of the History of the Book as a whole.

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