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Call for Papers

The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference Committee is delighted to announce this year’s Call for Papers. for ‘Craft and Creativity’: Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2027. Abstracts are invited from graduate students at any university on subjects related to the medieval period, closing Friday 4 December. More conference information is available on our Instagram (@oxfordmgc).

The conference will be held on the 22 and 23 April, 2027 in the Maison . Submissions are welcome from all disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. There are no limitations on geographical focus or time period, so long as the topic pertains to the medieval period.

Please send abstracts of 250 words to oxgradconf@gmail.com by 4th of December 2026.

Christ Church College, 13 October–16 December

Open Tuesday 10am-1pm; Wednesday 1 – 4pm and other times by appointment.

Please note that there is no step-free access. 

The Bible (from the Greek βιβλίον, The Book) has been the most influential written text ever produced. Portions are available in some 4,000 translations, nearly half of known languages, and the whole text in at least 770 languages. The story of its translation is one of extraordinary human endeavour, linguistically, intellectually, technically, socially and politically. 2026 is the anniversary of the publication of the first completed edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament, freshly translated from the Greek, one of the great milestones in the production of the Bible in English. The first complete Bible printed in England was the second edition of Miles Coverdale’s translation. To mark the 500th anniversary and celebrate some of these linguistic triumphs we are putting on an exhibition predominantly using the collections of Christ Church Library.

A highlight of the exhibition is Brasenose College’s 13th century Founder’s Bible which is generously lent by the Principal and Governing Body of Brasenose College. Alongside this will feature a broad selection of items from Christ Church’s collections, including a 13th century French manuscript New Testament, English translations by Wycliffe, Coverdale and Tyndale and printed editions in languages from all over the world. This is the first time the Founder’s Bible has been exhibited in public and the manuscript will be a major feature of a study day which we are running on Saturday 24th October. 

Dr. Jesse Patrick Harrington
5pm, Floor Two, Arumugam Building
St. Catherine’s College, Oxford
Michaelmas 2026

This series of four public lectures re-examines the political and religious history of England and Ireland at the time of the English/Norman conquest of 1169, through the life and afterlife of St. Lorcán Ó Tuathail (Laurence O’Toole, c. 1128–1180): architect of the twelfth-century reform of the Irish Church and principal peacemaker and powerbroker of the conquest, dubbed
‘a second Thomas Becket’ by his contemporaries. Through the abundant yet little studied sources in manuscript libraries in Brussels, Dublin, Oxford, Paris, and Rouen, concerning his early life and later career as abbot of Glendalough, archbishop of Dublin, and papal legate and primate in Ireland, St. Laurence was arguably the most fully documented Irishman of his century—shedding new light on an important medieval life and the many worlds he inhabited, as diplomat, prelate, prince, warrior, and ecumenical saint.

4 November: Windows on a World
St. Laurence O’Toole at 800 and the European Year of the Normans

11 November: Ireland’s Empire
Ireland, the Papacy, and Renovatio Imperii

18 November: Prelude to Invasion
Henry II and Ireland

2 December: Negotiations and Assassinations
St. Laurence as Diplomat, Warrior, and Peacemaker

Dr. Jesse Patrick Harrington is a Research Ireland Pathway Fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (2025–2029), Ireland’s statutory institute for fundamental research, and Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (Michaelmas 2026), where he is preparing a new critical biography and edition of the medieval and early modern manuscript sources concerning St.
Laurence of Dublin. He holds his Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge and has held postdoctoral and visiting research posts in Cork, Dublin, Paris, Poitiers, and Rome. He is advisor to the international St. Laurence anniversary commemorations for 2025–2030, and his public historical research has been extensively quoted in French and Irish national broadcast media, by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, and in sessions of the Irish Parliament (Dáil Éireann).

The four lectures are kindly hosted by St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (5pm Wednesdays 4, 11, 18 November, and 2 December) and form the second part of a larger cycle of public lectures commissioned for 2025–28 by Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and the Ville d’Eu, Normandie (Seine-Maritime), commemorating the 800th anniversary of St. Laurence’s canonisation in 2025, the European Year of the Normans in 2027, and the 900th anniversary of St. Laurence’s birth and millennium of the 1028 foundation of the Dublin diocese and Laurence’s cathedral at Christ Church in 2028. For further details and updates regarding the lectures, please contact jesse@celt.dias.ie or register via the sign-up link

Taking the lead from what must surely be seen as the finest medieval community in the world (us), Cambridge has now launched their own interdisciplinary network for Medieval Studies.

Those interested in finding out about the range of talks and societies can access their website here, and their booklet of upcoming events here.

This term sees the first event in Dr Laura Varnam‘s John Fell Funded project ‘Creating Medieval Criticism Now’ on Wednesday 28th October at 5pm (3rd week) in the Goodhart Seminar Room at University College. All are welcome, please sign up via this Eventbrite link.

Co-sponsored by the Guild of Medievalist Makers, the first seminar will be on THE FORMS OF CRITICISM, with poet Susie Campbell, writer Nik Gunn, and cartoonist & illustrator Esther McManus.

Chaired by Laura, the speakers will explore the benefits & challenges of their particular creative practice (poetry, the historical novel, comics) as their mode of critical engagement with the Middle Ages in the modern day.

In Hilary Term, the network seminar will be on Creativity in the Classroom with Dr Daisy Black & Dr James Paz, and in Trinity Term is will be on Public Engagement and/as Creative Criticism with Prof Anthony Bale and Dr Eleanor Barraclough.

Speaker bios:

Susie Campbell completed a creative practice poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes in 2024. Her poetry is medievalist, experimental, and multi-modal. Her poetry publications include Tenter (2020), The Sleeping Place (2023), and Wastelands (2025). She has a chapter in the forthcoming book Beyond Medieval Archives due out from UCL Press later this year, plus a new poetry pamphlet Sarsen forthcoming from Little Hirundine Press this November.

Nik Gunn is a writer and medievalist. He received his PhD from the University of York in 2017, specialising in Anglo-Norse linguistic and literary exchange in the Viking Age. He held teaching positions at UCL and Oxford before leaving academia in 2022. He now works in creative and cultural industries policy.

Esther McManus teaches BA Graphic Communication Design ​(Central Saint Martins, UAL) and MA Illustration (Camberwell, UAL). She is currently undertaking a PhD titled ‘Under Construction: Representing Queer Archival Presence & Absence Through Comics’ at UAL. As a cartoonist and illustrator, her books & comics explore personal & collective relationships to history, informed by archival research.

With thanks to the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford for their generous funding.

Thursday 9 July 2026, 6:00 p.m.

Lecture Hall of the Museum of Decorative Arts Kulturforum, Potsdamer Platz, Matthäikirchplatz 4/6, 10785 Berlin

In a lecture for the Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin (Founded in 1887), Martin Kauffmann (Head of Early and Rare Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford) will speak on an Ottonian illuminated manuscript in Oxford, and how to study it

Oxford’s most important medieval work of art from the German-speaking lands is an illuminated manuscript which, though it does not tell us where or when or by whom it was made, was probably produced at the monastic house of Reichenau on Lake Constance in the first half of the 11th century. Whilst exploring the making of the manuscript, its relation to other books made at the same house, its uses and its reception (including its subsequent travels), it is important to interrogate the interlocking tools which historians have traditionally used to analyze such objects: codicology, palaeography, liturgy, stylistic criticism, and iconography. What is the place of an illuminated book in history, and in the history of art? Martin Kauffmann was born in London but his mother’s family came from Berlin. He studied History at Oxford and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on a group of 13th-century illustrated saints’ lives. After a fellowship at the Warburg Institute he was appointed Curator of medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, where he has catalogued, exhibited, taught and written about illuminated manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the Middle Ages. He is now Head of Early and Rare Collections at the Bodleian (consisting of maps, music, early and rare printed books, and medieval and early modern manuscripts).

This lecture will be held in English The Secretary Please note that the main entrance to the Kulturforum closes at 6:00 p.m. After that time, the lecture hall can only be accessed via the entrance to the Art Library (coat check on the ground floor). Annual membership fees (€35, reduced rate €15) should be transferred to the account of the Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin IBAN DE46 1001 0010 0623 7771 39, BIC PBNKDEFF, Postbank Hamburg. Mailing Address:: Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 6, 10117 Berlin Phone: 030/266-42-5531, e-mail: anmeldung@kunstgeschichtliche-gesellschaft.de