Written by Delilah Pearson, MSt. in Modern Languages 2025
Week one of Michaelmas saw this year’s History of the Book cohort gather for the first time – M.St. Modern Languages students with a range of specialisms, brought together by their curiosity about, among other things, palaeography, conservation techniques, and discussions surrounding books as cultural objects. As we trickled into the Taylorian at the beginning of the session, we were presented with a variety of historical pamphlets from the library’s special collections, all available for us to gawk at and handle (granted we had washed our hands!). After a quick round of spot-the-difference between two sixteenth-century German Reformation pamphlets, identifying dialect idiosyncrasies and printing techniques, we began the session’s main activity: show-and-tell.
Each student was asked to bring to the seminar something they considered a ‘book’. This delightfully vague instruction sparked a thought-provoking discussion about the physicality of printed books, the aesthetic value of covers and illustrations, and the cultural significance of unconventional book forms.
Our objects spanned a range of languages, from Middle High German to Chinese, reflecting the diversity of this year’s cohort and allowing for a variety of perspectives. It was particularly interesting to compare objects printed in the same language to understand how the definition of a ‘book’ can vary so widely. For instance, when comparing a sentimental prayer book with a velvet-embellished cover and satisfying closing mechanism to a mass-produced novel with narrow margins and a low-cost adhesive spine, it seemed that language was one of only a few shared attributes.
Despite the module’s focus on historical books and manuscripts, some students brought more contemporary objects to the session. This encompassed a range of notebooks featuring text that was (or is) continually being added to in the form of dream journals, vocabulary lists, scrapbook diary entries, novel drafts destined for greatness, critical academic annotations, and letters to friends. These objects offered compelling interpretations of what constitutes a ‘book’, with each student confidently presenting their case as to why their chosen object was just as valid as a traditional novel or dictionary. The discussion was very much brought into the twenty-first century with the presentation of a Kindle and an Apple Macbook. To conclude our show-and-tell, and after much deliberation, we organised our books by least to most ‘book-like’ and created a video to immortalise them on the History of the Book timeline.
After hearing from a History of the Book alumna, we left the session excited about the skills to be learned and the discussions to be had over the course of Michaelmas, and with minds already whirring with ideas for how our individual projects may unfold…