Exploring the world of books at Oxford
Posts about ongoing research in book history at Oxford.
A Call for Readers! On the 500th anniversary of their first publication, the four hilarious, successful and witty Reformation Dialogues by Hans Sachs will be reissued in a new edition. This will include new English translations, a historical introduction, linguistic footnotes, and also the 15th century English translation of the first dialogue. We are looking …
Oxford, more than many other cities, is like a game. To merely observe is fascinating. As an Oxford intern you will get the chance to play a little yourself. You won’t have to know all the rules and moves since there’ll be lots of kind players to help you and time to learn as you …
Clara Busch, MSt. Modern Languages 2023-24 It is Monday, January 8th, and a small group of students and scholars gather it the Weston Library to have first look at what is to become the focus of our History of the Book project: Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks. 2024 marks the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka …
The discovery of an unknown Bodleian manuscript of Hieronymus Emser’s defence against Huldrych Zwingli’s 1524 tract opposing the Catholic Mass, which celebrates its quincentenary this year, raises many questions: Who penned or commissioned it, for whom, why, and where did it come from?
Special Collections Exhibition | Taylor Institution Library | University of Oxford 14 – 26 June 2024 When we pick up a book, we often forget that as well as reading a text we are looking at an object. Unlike the relative intangibility of words, which dwell in our minds and memories as well as on …
David Hirsch studies Translation Studies at Heidelberg University and spent his mandatory placement in Oxford during Hilary Term 2024, working with Henrike Lähnemann I was very nervous arriving in Oxford, as I had never had an experience quite like this before. It was quite beneficial to me, then, to be instantly thrown in the deep …
During Michaelmas Term 2023, Kira Kohlgrüber (Frankfurt) and Karen Wenzel (Augsburg) worked as research interns with Henrike Lähnemann. Here Kira reports on behalf of both of them on highlights of their time in the city, on working with manuscripts, Reformation pamphlets, and xml, and being part of the History of the Book group at the …
For Volume 6 of the series ‘Reformation Pamphlets’, a team of Germanists from Halle and Oxford have edited two short polemical texts from 1523 held in the Taylorian by Martin Luther, dealing with the question whether monks and nuns should leave their monastic houses: Deutung der greulichen Figur des Mönchkalbs (‘Interpretation of the Gruesome Figure …
The Week 7 seminar, in which books are stored, relics are lost, and stairs are climbed.
Rebecca Schleuss, MSt Modern Langauges This sunny afternoon the History of the Book seminar met in the Weston Library’s lecture theatre to explore another important aspect of medieval manuscripts: their materiality. When you mostly work with editions of texts, it is easy to detach them from their physical containers and forget about their materiality. Andrew …