Are you curious about what manuscripts can tell us beyond their texts? Join Digital Scholarship @ Oxford and the Bodleian Libraries for a hands-on workshop using data from manuscript catalogues to explore trends and patterns in medieval manuscript production. You’ll learn: You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with manuscripts from the Bodleian’s collections, learning …
Tag: Bodleian Library
Call for Survey Responses: Enabling Digital Research on Manuscript Catalogue Data
A new DiSc-funded project within the Bodleian Libraries is working to transform the Bodleian’s TEI-encoded medieval manuscript catalogues into accessible tabular formats such as CSV, to support innovative research in manuscript studies and the digital humanities. By making these data more user-friendly, the team hope to foster new research avenues and collaborations. We kindly invite you …
Star-struck: A stellar session on mediaeval astronomical instruments
By Edie Young (MSt in Modern Languages) Last week, History of the Book students had the rare opportunity to examine Merton College’s collection of mediaeval astronomical instruments, which were exceptionally out of their cases. Dr Laure Miolo gave a dazzling presentation on mediaeval astrolabes, equatoria, quadrants, and astronomical manuscripts. Laure brought her very own replica …
Hans Sachs Edition 3: The Pamphlets in Oxford
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 …
History of the Book meets Palaeography!
Of making many books there may be no end, but studying the boundless treasure of manuscripts held in the Weston Library is anything but a weariness of the flesh. That was, at least, the experience of the MML History of the Book students on Wednesday of 2nd week as they ventured up to the Horton …
Of a Certain Type: Dialogues and Dancing Death in the Bodleian Bibliographical Press
By Molly Bray (MSt in Medieval Studies) For our first session as book-historians-in-training, we asked the question, ‘what is a book?’ Is it the form, the function? Now, for our second session, we get to see and, indeed, operate the mechanics that make one. Held behind a large wooden door and the once-accurate waymarker of …
Whose hand? Unearthing an Unknown Manuscript in the Bodleian
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?
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 …
Palaeography 101: Understanding, Dismantling and Deciphering the Codex
by Imogen Lewis (MSt. Modern Languages) Palaeography. Now halfway through Michaelmas term, History of the Book students may just about be able to spell the term – but do we really know what it means? Having stroked many a book, discovered the secrets contained within their binding, and even learned to painstakingly typeset our own, …
Pressing Matters
By Giovanna Truong (MSt Yiddish Studies) Oxford’s former Schola Musicae stands tucked in a corner of the Bodleian Old Library quadrangle. In modern times, neither harmonized voices nor metred strums resonate from behind that wooden door; rather, a different rhythm altogether emerges. The clack of type, the punch of the press, the busy murmurs of …