The lecture series by Henrike Lähnemann (Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics) in Michaelmas Term 2022 at the Taylor Institution Library, Room 2, discusses German prose texts published in the first hundred years of printing. This includes a number of iconic texts written earlier such as the ‘Ackermann von Böhmen’ or transformed from verse …
Category: Hands-On
Videocast series ‘Parchment and Paper’
The videocast series Parchment and Paper is dedicated to the treasures of the college library at Queen’s. In episode 3 of series 3, Dr Conor O’Brien (Associate Professor in the Early Mediaeval History of the British Isles and North Atlantic World, and Tutorial Fellow in History at Queen’s: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-conor-o%E2%80%99brien) joins Matthew Shaw (College Librarian at Queen’s: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-gabriele-rota) …
Pergament in der Praxis
Versuche zur mittelalterlichen Herstellungstechnik und Oberflächenbehandlung von Pergament Guest blog post by Anna Vogel, Master Student at the University of Freiburg in the MARS degree. Anna Vogel studiert Mittelalter- und Renaissancestudien an der Universität Freiburg. Ihr Hauptinteressensgebiet sind die handwerklichen Techniken der historischen Buchherstellung. Im August und September 2021 bekam sie die Möglichkeit, gemeinsam mit …
Looking at the Goostly Psalmes
Jane Eagan and Matthew Shaw Librarians and conservators see a lot of books. As such, they are often only passing acquaintances at best with many of them, and large numbers in their collection or care are positively strangers. It’s also unusual to know much at all about what researchers do with the books that they …
Script vs print vs code: the information revolution in one afternoon
Event, 11 October 2021
Members of the Oxford Scribes and printers from the Bodleian Bibliographical Press race to produce a page of text. Settle the 500-year-old question – which is faster?
UNIQ+ Project: ‘Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes’
‘Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes: a digital edition’ is available to read now on the Taylor Editions website. I was quite at a loss when, towards the end of our first week on the History of the Book and Digital Humanities project, we were directed by our graduate mentors – Mary Newman and Sebastian Dows-Miller …
Wt’s yt thē?: A Brief Guide to Reading Early Printed English
Things are a little disconcerting when you open an early printed book for the first time: everything initially seems familiar, yet upon further inspection you realise that some things are not quite right. Alongside the characters that we glide over without much thought feature strange additions and conspicuous absences, many of which are incomprehensible if …
UNIQ+ Project: ‘An A.B.C. for Chyldren’
For the five weeks of our UNIQ+ internship, the text that I have been working to encode is ‘An A.B.C. for Chyldren’, a sixteen-page pamphlet which (ambitiously) aims to teach people to read and write both English and Latin in just six weeks. Although the author of the document is anonymous, we do know that this …
UNIQ+ Week 4: Clarity and Chaos
“What on earth is that?!” I thought to myself when we were presented with our latest Code-a-thon challenge on Monday morning. As you may well be able to see from the header image, the test before us was a difficult one: columns, colours, glosses, handwriting and marginalia (that even had its own marginalia!). How could …
Bric-a-brac or: A breviary in an Oxford Charity Shop
by Henrike Lähnemann On 4 August 2021, Mark Butler, an Oxford medical researcher working in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine , entered the Sobell House Charity Shop on Little Clarendon Street where a batch of framed leaves, prints and other miscellaneous donations had been placed at the back of the shop. Recently, while talking about my teaching of …