Exploring the world of books at Oxford
By Matthew McConkey As anyone who has grappled with Single Sign-on can attest, humanities researchers and IT are often uneasy bedfellows. It was this perceived <div>ide that the 2024 history of the book students confronted last Wednesday: just what hides behind the intimidating pseudonyms ‘XML’ and ‘TEI?’ Luckily, we had an expert guide in Emma …
By Henrike Lähnemann Preface to the Edition 2024 marks the 500th anniversary of Hans Sachs publishing in quick succession four prose dialogues which became bestsellers, particularly the first one where he has his alter ego, Hans the cobbler, debate a pompous priest – and win the day, of course. That the Taylorian was aware of …
By Philip Flacke The Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany was a matter of public debate to a scale that had never been seen before. It was carried by a generation, born between 1470 and 1500, whom Thomas Kaufmann has recently characterised as ‘printing natives’ in analogy to the digital natives of today.1 These women and men …
By Jacob Ridley When the nine-year-old Edward VI came to the throne of England in January 1547, the floodgates of English Protestant print opened. His father Henry VIII had declared an independent Church of England in 1534, rejecting the authority of the Pope, but Henry remained theologically conservative and enforced heresy laws against the more …
By Thomas Wood Situated on the river Pegnitz in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, the Nuremberg of Hans Sachs was a thriving Free City that acted in 1524 as a site of both Imperial power and religious conflict. In the late Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, Nuremberg had been a prosperous …
On the 500th anniversary of their first publication, the first of the four hilarious, successful and witty Reformation Dialogues by Hans Sachs is reissued in a new edition. This includes a new English translation, a historical introduction, linguistic footnotes, and also the 15th century Dutch and English translations. The launch event comes in three parts, …
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?
By the end of Michaelmas term, I came across a volume at the Weston Library on which several villancico chapbooks were bound. The volume itself had no title, no index, no author. There was nothing that could point to its origin but a shelfmark – Arch. Sigma III 70 – belonging to an enigmatic collection. …
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 …
by Thomas Godfrey (MSt. Modern Languages 2021) As part of my MSt. in Modern Languages, I was fortunate enough to take Henrike Lähnemann’s method option, entitled Palaeography, History of the Book and Digital Humanities. This particular method option provides training in dealing with manuscripts and books, and the final assessment requires students to come up …