{"id":24719,"date":"2023-04-07T14:11:46","date_gmt":"2023-04-07T18:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=24719"},"modified":"2023-04-13T09:43:08","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T13:43:08","slug":"student-brings-lit-to-life-with-romantic-bookmaking-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/student-brings-lit-to-life-with-romantic-bookmaking-technique\/","title":{"rendered":"Student brings lit to life with Romantic-era bookmaking technique"},"content":{"rendered":"

English major Sophia Anthony \u201924 spent Fall 2022 on a study away visit<\/a> to the British Isles. While there, she and her classmates spent two weeks with the Wordsworth Grasmere trust<\/a> in Grasmere, a village in the center of England\u2019s Lake District. The trust is dedicated to preserving the legacy and work of William Wordsworth, including maintaining Dove Cottage, where siblings William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived from 1799 to 1808, pursuing the poetic vision of \u201cplain living and high thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michele Speitz<\/a>, an associate professor of English, and Jeff Cowton, principal curator and head of learning at Wordsworth Grasmere, had an intriguing challenge for the Furman students: \u201cThe work for that class was to write a grant proposal that would bring the morals and values of the trust either to Furman or to our hometown or someplace else that mattered to us,\u201d said Anthony, who is also pursuing a minor in musical theater.<\/p>\n

For Anthony, who has wanted to be a teacher \u201cfor as long as (she) can remember,\u201d a place that mattered was her old high school, Northwest High School in Germantown, Maryland.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really wanted high schoolers who were learning Romanticism for the first time to experience what I experienced,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Commonplace Books<\/h3>\n

Anthony had been learning about commonplace books, a centuries-old literary tradition of copying fragments of writings from various sources \u2013 whatever the writer found worth remembering \u2013 onto blank bound pages.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the Notes app of the Romantic era,\u201d Anthony said. \u201cThey were for everything \u2013 for the commonplace. They just wrote anything they wanted in there and kept it, because if it wasn\u2019t written down, it wouldn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Grasmere, she got to study the commonplace book the Wordsworths kept during their time at Dove Cottage. Its pages include diary entries, poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and Robert Burns, and inventories of household goods and recipes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were even notes of Wordsworth\u2019s son\u2019s first words, which were really cool to read,\u201d remembered Anthony.<\/p>\n

For half of the day, the students examined the collection of the Jerwood Centre library and archives<\/a> next door to Dove Cottage. The rest of the day \u2013 \u201cafter tea,\u201d Anthony said \u2013 they created their own commonplace books, sewing the pages together by hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever did I think I would sew paper,\u201d she said. \u201cIt felt like bringing a historical event back to life, like keeping a tradition alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthony\u2019s proposal, \u201cMaking the Commonplace Book Common Again,\u201d won the grant. \u201cSophia had done a lot of legwork, and she was able to fold in the evidence of the preliminary work that she had done into the grant,\u201d said Speitz. \u201cIt was clear that this proposal had a high likelihood of succeeding and reaching a wide audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bringing literature to life<\/h3>\n
\"An

An English student at Northwest High School in Germantown, Maryland, works on binding a commonplace book with thread.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anthony originally planned to travel to Germantown for two days in March to join several senior AP English classes, but the teachers at Northwest High were so enthusiastic that they convinced her to Zoom in to a sophomore class in January.<\/p>\n

Overall, Anthony led some 250 students through the hands-on process of creating their own commonplace books, pages filled with selections of Romantic poetry and Shakespeare\u2019s verse.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really embodies The Furman Advantage<\/a>,\u201d said Speitz. \u201cThis unique student was granted an opportunity to explore and get a jump on doing what they dream to do in their professional life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Furman Humanities Center<\/a> is working on securing funding to help Anthony introduce the commonplace book to next year\u2019s Northwest High students, said Speitz, the center’s director.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the act of keeping the book isn\u2019t as important as the act of making the book,\u201d Anthony said. \u201cThey can be proud of something that they created from nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a way to ignite interest in a subject that some high school students might have found dull, said Anthony.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething fun and interesting like this that would have been just a task in the past is a really cool way of keeping that tradition alive,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sophia Anthony \u201924 brought home the tradition of the commonplace book from a study away trip to the British Isles back to her hometown high school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":24720,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,47,30],"tags":[757,224],"class_list":["post-24719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-study-away-and-international-education","category-top-stories","tag-furman-humanities-center","tag-the-furman-advantage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}