Exploring the world of books at Oxford
Following our foray into textual encoding last week, Dr Giles Bergel joined us from the Visual Geometry Group (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/) to talk about book-historical uses of computer vision. Originally trained as a book historian, Dr Bergel gave us an overview of the theory behind it, how it has been used in humanities projects, and what computer …
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 …
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?
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 …
A Presentation by Veronika Sladká One hundred years before Martin Luther’s arrival, the Reformation had already established itself in One hundred years before Martin Luther’s arrival, the Reformation had already established itself in Bohemia, resulting in a significant aversion towards sacred images. Nevertheless, bibliographical records suggest that around 6,000 printed images had been disseminated through …
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 …
By Kate McKee A blog post from 2019 by a former History of the Book student documents the findings of Professor Cristina Dondi’s pioneering research on the material evidence in incunabula since the project’s inception in 2014. In this blog post, I focus on the 2021 illustrated copy census of an early printed edition of …
In the first week of the History of the Book methods option, students and researchers gathered in the Taylor Institute Library to explore items from the special collections that challenge the very notion of the ‘book’. From the curious collection of printed and handwritten manuscript pages rebound in Arch.Fol.It.1478(1) where Petrarch’s ‘sonetti et cançone’ are …
CELEBRATION WEEKEND for the 75th ANNIVERSARY OF SIGNING OF the LINK AGREEMENT on 9 OCTOBER 1947 FRIDAY 7 October 7.15 p.m. German Lutheran Congregation House, 15a Lathbury Road, Oxford. Left-hand door! Talk by the Revd Donald Norwood: A pre-war contribution towards twinning. German Refugees in 1938/1939 Oxford and the work of the Revd Nathaniel Micklem …