Exploring the world of books at Oxford
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, …
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 …
By Tianyi Liu (MSt in Modern Languages) On 8 November 2023, as a prelude to the launch of the e-ilustrace database of early printed Czech books (https://e-ilustrace.cz/en/), Dr Giles Bergel treated the History of the Book class to a fascinating session on image matching technology. Giles Bergel trained as book historian and now works in …
My internship at Oxford in Medieval German Studies by Anja Peters Travelling to Oxford to work as an intern with Professor Henrike Lähnemann for Trinity Term of 2023, I didn’t fully know what to expect. Of course I knew why I was going: To gain insights into the work and research at one of the …