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?
Kafka’s Languages
Exhibition in the Voltaire Room, Taylor Institution Library29 May to 13 June 2024 Who was Kafka? It is hard to escape Kafka at the moment in Oxford, with the Kafka24 celebrations marking 100 years since his death, on 3 June 1924. He is one of the most significant German-language authors of the 20th century, and …
Epic! Homer and Nibelungenlied in Translation
Exhibition in the Voltaire Room in the Taylor Institution Library May-June 2024 to accompany the workshop ‘The Reading and Reception of the Homeric Poems and the Nibelungenlied in Germany and Europe from the Eighteenth Century to the Present‘. Download the publication including a full catalogue of the exhibition: Mary Boyle, Philip Flacke, Timothy Powell: Epic! Homer and …
Seeing Dante’s Commedia in Print from the Renaissance to Today
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 …
As Translation Intern in Oxford
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 …
Taking Editorial Decisions for a Collection of Early Modern Villancicos
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. …
Multilingual Monkcalves and Manuscripts. Working as Intern at Oxford
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 …
Digitising Dante’s Inferno – A Project Report
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 …
Monk-Calf and Nuns on the Run. Two Reformation Pamphlets from 1523
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 …
Caring for Collections
The Week 7 seminar, in which books are stored, relics are lost, and stairs are climbed.