Tag: events

‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts

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15/04/2025

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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:

  • What kinds of data can be recorded about manuscripts
  • How to interpret and analyse manuscript catalogue entries
  • Ways to identify trends and patterns using simple tools like Excel

You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with manuscripts from the Bodleian’s collections, learning new skills that you can apply in your future studies and research. You’ll also get to contribute to the ongoing development of the manuscript catalogues, with your contributions credited on the Bodleian website.

No technical experience is required, just a basic familiarity with Excel.

Spaces are limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Workshop dates:

  • Thursday of 3rd week (15th May), 1–5pm – undergraduates
  • Thursday of 4th week (22nd May), 1–5pm – undergraduates
  • Thursday of 7th week (12th June), 1–5pm – postgraduates

Please still fill in the form if you are unavailable on these dates, as we may be able to make additional workshops available if there is demand.

Signup deadline: Midday, Friday of 2nd Week (9th May)

Signup using the online form here: https://forms.office.com/e/cHL1Zg7qJU

If you have any questions, please contact Seb Dows-Miller at sebastian.dows-miller@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

The Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays 2025: Programme

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21/03/2025

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When? 26 April 2025, from 12 noon. Where? St Edmund Hall, Queen’s Lane, OX1 4AR

Come One, Come All! Free entry, no booking required.

On Saturday, 26 April 2025, a cycle of medieval mystery plays will be performed by various troupes around St Edmund Hall’s grounds. Medieval mystery plays were performed throughout the Middle Ages by and for everyday townspeople, and we’re excited to put on quite a day of shows for you!

Worried that you won’t understand the performances done in medieval languages? Never fear! Each play will be accompanied by a modern English prologue, which will help to summarise the play.

12 noon: Old Testament Plays (Front Quad):

The Fall of the Angels (Angels of Oxford) – Middle English

Adam and Eve (Oxford German Medievalists) – Hans Sachs, German

The Flood (The Travelling Beavers) – Middle English

Abraham and Isaac (Shear and Trembling) – Middle English

1.30pm: New Testament Plays (Churchyard):

The Annunciation (Low Countries Ensemble) – Middle Dutch

The Nativity (Les Perles Innocentes) – Marguerite de Navarre, French

The Wedding at Cana (Pusey House) – Modern English, with Middle English archaisms

The Crucifixion (The Wicked Weights) – Middle English

The Lamentation (St Edmund Consort) – Bordesholmer Marienklage, Low German and Latin

The Harrowing of Hell (The Choir of St Edmund Hall) – Latin Sequence

3.30pm: New Testament Plays Continued:

The Resurrection (St Stephen’s House) – Middle English

The Martyrdom of the Three Holy Virgins (Clamor Validus) – Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, Latin and modern English

The Last Judgement (MSt English, 650–1550) – Modern English

6.15pm: Evensong (Chapel)

No tickets or booking is required, and it is free to attend. You are welcome to drop in and out throughout the afternoon. All performances will take place outside, so please dress comfortably for the weather conditions. There will be two small tea breaks, at around 1.15pm and 3.15pm.

The Wicked Weights admire their purpose-built cross – all ready for the Crucifixion! Picture: Rebecca Menmuir

If you have any questions about the cycle or the performances, email the co-heads of performance: Sarah Ware (sarah.ware@merton.ox.ac.uk) and Antonia Anstatt (antonia.anstatt@merton.ox.ac.uk). And look out for updates to our website, where detailed information about the individual plays will be published.

For a trailer of the type of Medieval Mystery play which awaits you, have a look at the extract from the Towneley Last Judgement play performed for a HistoryHit programme about the Apocalypse

Play: The Enterlude of the Godly Queen Hester

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16/03/2025

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When? 28 March, 18:30–20:15
Where? Research Centre, Thatched Barn, Christ Church Meadow

The anonymous English Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester (c. 1529) is a fascinating play, unperformed since the 16th century. Ostensibly in praise of Esther, heroine of Jewish history, the play is actually a political satire about the demise of Cardinal Wolsey. The fall of Wolsey, who had been the monarch’s right-hand man, was a key moment in the reign of Henry VIII. Assuerus, King of Persia, stands for Henry, while Aman, the model of the evil counsellor, for Wolsey. Henry’s wife, Katherine of Aragon, is idealised in the figure of Hester, who fills a traditional role for virtuous royal women by interceding with her husband, but also boldly argues that queens should exhibit the same virtues as kings and can perfectly well govern kingdoms when their husbands are away fighting wars! She thus anticipates the strong secular heroines of Shakespearean comedy.

Originally, the play would have been performed by a boys’ company so it is appropriate that it will be staged by Edward’s Boys. This company, from King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, has, over the last two decades, revolutionised our understanding of the early modern repertoire. Alongside the English Enterlude, they will also present a short purimshpil, a Jewish folk play. The purim plays (still a living tradition in Yiddish) tell the story of Esther in a very different mode, celebrating the rescue of the Jewish people by their heroine in farcical style. The production is part of the WOMARD project, which explores connections between Jewish, Christian and Islamic Theatre and is sponsored by the SNSF.

Book your ticket here

The performance will be preceded by free talks, on Esther in Reformation Europe, and the purimshpil: 

16:00-16:45 Professor Cora Dietl, talk on ‘The Esther tradition and Reformation in medieval and early modern Europe‘

16:45-17:15 Rabbi Bex introduces the purim tradition, and a Q and A session with Bea Baldwin 

Esther pleads for the Jewish people; from The Queen’s College Library, Sel. d. 81, a Sammelband of Reformation-related pamphlets. Retratos o Tablas de las Historias de testamento (1568)
Retratos o tablas de las historias del Testamento viejo, : hechas y dibuxadas por vn muy primo y sotil artifice. Iuntamente con vna muy breue y clara exposicion … de cada vna dellas en Latin, con las quotas de los lugares de la sagrada scritura de donde se tomaron, y la mesma en lengua Castellana, para que todos gozen delas. Frellon, Jean, -1568 M. D. XLIX. | En Lion de Francia, : [Excudebat Ioannes Frellonius] | [52] leaves : ill. ; 4⁰


 

Volunteering at Iffley Church

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25/02/2025

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Invitation to a tea party with LIVING STONES on SATURDAY 15 MARCH 3.00-4.30 in the Church Hall, Church Way, Iffley OX4 4EG.
Come along and find out about LIVING STONES. Meet the Living Stones volunteers. Join in: Living Stones is looking for volunteers of any age, background or beliefs

Living Stones is the heritage and educational arm of St Mary’s, the church at the heart of Iffley village, Rose Hill and Donnington. Volunteers welcome visitors to the church. They also run activities, events and talks on its history and architecture. They will start welcoming visitors to the church on Sunday afternoons on Palm Sunday, 13 April. They also have three events planned:

SATURDAY 10 MAY 10.00-4.30 – Drawing Iffley Church, day-school with artist Micah Hayns.

SATURDAY 17 MAY 11.00-7.15 – Day of chant in celebration of St Dunstan, patron saint of bellringers and music. The day ends with a special service in the church sung to music composed by St Dunstan and first written down in the 12th century.

SUNDAY 7 SEPTEMBER – Patronal Festival for St Mary the Virgin, picnic and family fun.

CMTC presents — “Work in Progress” Colloquium

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13/02/2025

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The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures’ Hilary Term ‘Work-in-Progress’ colloquium – Tuesday 18th February (5.15-6.45pm, the Memorial Room at Queen’s) 

The CMTC is delighted to be hosting the following speakers: 

Dr Riccardo Montalto (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II): From manuscripts to history: The reconstruction of the Greek manuscript library of Achilles Statius (1524-1581)

Achilles Statius was a Portuguese humanist active in Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century. Committed to editorial and propaganda activities and, in particular, in the edition of the texts of the Fathers of the Greek Church, Statius set up one of the largest private libraries in Renaissance Rome, peculiar for its size and intellectual value. Starting from the material data detectable from the manuscripts, compared with the data available from different sources – primarily historical, archival and library science – the research aims to reconstruct a part of Achilles Statius’s library and to identify some methods and working practices of the late Renaissance humanists.

Holly Dempster-Edwards (University of Liverpool): Emotions, Gender and Crusading in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Prose Epics and Chronicles

This paper will give an overview of my PhD thesis, which examines the social function of emotions at the fifteenth-century court of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467). My methodology is based on that of the historian Barbara Rosenwein, whose concept of ‘emotional communities’ has been highly influential within Medieval Studies. My study is based on emotion words in three Burgundian mises en prose Les Croniques et Conquestes de Charlemaine by David Aubert, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople by Jehan Wauquelin, and Mabrien (attrib. Aubert). I have built on Rosenwein’s framework by employing quantitative analysis of the gendered and ‘racial-religious’ distribution of emotions within each text, alongside qualitative textual analysis and examination of text-image relations. This paper demonstrates how emotions have a social function within this specific emotional community of Burgundian knights and would-be crusaders in response to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and how these texts function as literary propaganda which presents itself as didactic; in so doing they attempt to achieve their more subtle aim of maintaining emotion norms within the context of Burgundian chivalric masculinity, hoping to persuade Philip’s courtiers to go on crusade with him in response to the defeat of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

From the archive

Tuesday the 13th of February 2024, 5.15–6.45pm UK time Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures

Memorial Room, The Queen’s College    

1. A. D’Angelo (Rome ‘Sapienza’), ‘Catullan marginalia in the 16th century: the books of Piero Vettori’. 

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich preserves three printed editions of Catullus’ Liber with marginal notes by Piero Vettori (1499-1585). This important scholar edited dozens of Classical authors, but never published anything on Catullus: thus, these books are the main extant evidence of his work on this poet. The notes contain variant readings, original conjectures and loci similes, and they offer new insights on Vettori’s philological method and his library. Through these marginalia, I will try to point out Vettori’s main interests in Catullus’ poetry and the sources he used for his Catullan studies.

2. Marlene Schilling (Oxford), ‘A special form of devotion – personifications of time in late medieval prayer books from Northern Germany’.  

Addressing liturgical holidays, for example welcoming Mr Easterday, is a particular characteristic of late medieval vernacular prayer-books from North German female convents. They highlight a distinct form of poetics, because describing and interacting with specific points in time – personifying them – allows an intercommunication with the divine that conveys a certain form of agency to the speaker. In this paper, we explore the particular type of prayer-books these personifications are found in, talk about their material indicators within the text, and think about the special role of the prayer-books from the Cistercian convent Medingen within this distinct manuscript landscape.

Medieval Matters H25, Week 3

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02/02/2025

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The sun is out (for how long remains unclear), and third week is upon us. Please find below the events and opportunities for this week: the full booklet, as always, can be found here. Let me draw your particular attention to Brepols’ upcoming webinar introducing their International Medieval Bibliography (12th Feb at 4pm, see below). There is still time to sign up for the Medieval Mystery Plays on 26 April – just contact Antonia Anstatt and Sarah Ware who are finalising the list of plays this week!

Events

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Alice Rio (KCL) will be speaking on ‘Twelve Migrant Women and the History of Early Medieval Europe’

Tuesday

  • Old Norse Seminar – 12.15 in the English Faculty’s History of the Book room. Ela Sefcikova (Berlin) will be speaking on ‘læ, lygð and slǿgð: Loki in Old Norse Literature’. The seminar will be followed by a sandwich lunch in the Graduate Common.
  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5pm in the Horton Room, Weston Library (NB. change of location! orginal manuscripts will be shown!) Lesley Smith (HMC) will be speaking on ‘The Repair Shop: How We Took Apart a Manuscript of Henry VIII and How We Put it Back Together’.
  • Medieval French Research Seminar – 5pm in the Maison française d’Oxford. Chimene Bateman, University of Oxford will be speaking on ‘Flight, Founding and Foreignness in the Roman d’Eneas’,

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on ‘Geistliche Spiele’ on the ‘Eisenacher Zehn-Jungfrauenspiel’ with Rebecca Schleuß – 11.15am in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would like to be added to the teams group
  • History and Materiality of the Book Seminar – 2pm in the Weston Library, Horton room. Julia Bearman and Robert Minte will be speaking on ‘Inks and Pigments’.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online, please contact Michael Stansfield.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Dan Gallaher (Oxford), ‘Beyond a Boundary: Armenia and Byzantium in the Ninth Century’
  • Slade Lecture Series – 5pm at St John’s College. ‘Gaps in Images’. Check this page for recordings or to check whether places have become available.
  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 5.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2, St. Cross Building. Marilina Cesario (Queen’s University, Belfast) will be speaking on ‘The windsele in Christ and Satan: Demonic Winds in Medieval Literature’.

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute.
  • Middle English Reading Group – 4pm, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. The text this term will be the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde.
  • Germanic Reading Group ‒ 4pm on Teams. Speaking names in Werner’s ‘Helmbrecht’ and Hugo von Trimberg’s ‘Der Renner’ with Bradley G. Weiss (Texas). Please contact Howard Jones to request the handout and to be added to the list.
  • Ford Lecture – 5pm in the Examination Schools. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving the third of her lectures, titled ‘Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253×59).
  • Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music – 5pm on Zoom. James Tomlinson (University of Oslo) will be speaking on ‘A Reassessment of Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 512/543 and its Implications for the Production and Transmission of Polyphony in Late Medieval England’.
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15pm in the in the Ioannou Centre/Faculty of Classics’ Lecture Theatre. Tuğrul Acar (Harvard University) will be speaking on ‘Enacting the Divine Love and Remembering the Dervish-Sultan Murad II: the Inscriptions of the Muradiye Mevlevi Lodge in Edirne (1435–36)’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided. This week, Alyssa Steiner (BL) will speak on the extensive Ship of Fools collection of Francis Douce.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Manuscripts Support Group – 2pm in the Horton Room. Come along or contact Matthew Holford in beforehand if you have a manuscript to discuss!
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group – 3pm. This week, the group will be visiting the The Queen’s College Library.
  • Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College and online. For more information on the texts, email Jane Bliss.

Upcoming

  • Brepols are running a short online webinar introducing their International Medieval Bibliography, on the 12th Feb at 4pm. This is a great chance to get to grips with this useful resource, and is especially recommended for MSt/ MPhil students.
  • “The Jewish Recipes in a 13th C Andalusian Cookbook” by Hélène Jawhara Piñer will be on Zoom at 5 pm Wednesday 19 February. Event details and the link to register is here.

Opportunities

French in Medieval Britain: The James Ford Lectures 2025

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08/01/2025

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Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500

Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools

French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture.  As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade.  Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity.  These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England.

About the Lecture Series: The Ford Lectures in British History were founded by a bequest from James Ford, and inaugurated by S.R.Gardiner in 1896-7. Since then, an annual series has been delivered over six weeks in Hilary term. They have long been established as the most prestigious series in Oxford and an important annual event in the University’s calendar.

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne in her allotment on Osney Island in Oxford

About the speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne is Professor emerita of both the University of York, where she held the Chair of Medieval Literature from 2005 to 2010, and Fordham University in New York, where she was the Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature from 2010 to 2019.

Her wide-ranging scholarship has most recently focused on the reconceptualization of English medieval literary culture as a multilingual community. She has created a fundamentally new understanding of the importance attached to knowing, speaking, reading and/or writing French in later medieval England: work on the culture of late medieval England is now unthinkable without taking her insights into account. The approach was spearheaded in her Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translation (with Thelma Fenster and Delbert Russell) (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016), which built on the earlier The Idea of the Vernacular: Middle English Literary Theory c. 1280-1520, with Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans. A book of essays, The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2017), speaks to the extensive influence of her work and the esteem in which she is held by the scholarly community.

Jocelyn came to Oxford from Australia to study for the BPhil in Medieval Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College under the supervision of Elspeth Kennedy, one of Oxford’s most inspirational teachers. Her fellow countryman, Bruce Mitchell, another medievalist, became her mentor, and she became established in Oxford at the events he hosted for students from the southern hemisphere. Jocelyn started a DPhil in Old Norse and Old French, but accepted a lectureship in Early Middle English and Anglo-Norman at Liverpool, later receiving a doctorate on the strength of her numerous publications. Liverpool was followed by positions at York and Fordham, where her dedication to students and teaching won her a basket of teaching awards, in addition to her distinguished research profile.

Now living in Oxford and a member of St Edmund Hall, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne remains a dynamo of multi-disciplinary research.  Her Ford Lectures will undoubtedly turn our concept of ‘English History’ on its head.

Lecture Schedule

23rd Jan: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/event/expansions-everyone-knows-that-french-is-better-understood-and-more-widely-used-than-latin-mat

30th Jan: Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women.

6th Feb: Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253×59)

13th Feb: ‘That each may in his own tongue … know his God’ (Grosseteste, in French, 1230s): Bible Translation in Medieval England

20th Feb: “Lette Frenchmen in their Frenche endyten”(Thomas Usk, c.1384-87): French in the Multilingual Fourteenth Century

27th Feb: “Et lors que parlerez anglois /Que vous n’oubliez pas le François” (manuscript dedication, c. 1445) : Off-shoring French?

Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools

More information can be found here: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history

Epiros: The Other Western Rome, Workshop 8th-9th November 2024

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05/12/2024

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On Friday 8th and Saturday 9th November, the online workshop Epiros: The Other Western Rome was held, platforming twenty-one papers from sixteen universities. As the second phase of a new international project, the workshop investigated the Byzantine successor-state of Epiros (1204–1444). Formed from the Fourth Crusade, this Balkan state existed as an alternative narrative and third Byzantine-Roman context, encompassing a vast variety of peoples of the former empire.

Originally envisioned as a one-day workshop, the programme was expanded to two days to accommodate so many excellent submissions. As a result, we were able to offer panels on, The ‘Post-Komnenian System’, ‘Epiros and Bulgaria’, ‘Epiros and its other Neighbours’, ‘Network Analysis,’ ‘Hybrid Material Culture,’ and more. The workshop’s convenors are hugely grateful for the participation of speakers and attendees, as well as the support of both The Oxford Centre Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR).

An edited volume of papers is planned, and a selection of images below.

Epiros-Workshop-Programme-Final-Download

Medieval Afterlives Season Workshop

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04/12/2024

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Date: Tuesday 21 January, 13.00-14.00, with lunch provided from 12.30
Location: Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities (and online via MS Teams)

As part of the preparations for annual ‘Cultural Seasons’ in the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, this is an invitation to brainstorm ideas for a Cultural Programme Season on Medieval Afterlives. From Oxford Medieval Studies, Prof. Marion Turner (English), Prof. Henrike Lähnemann (MML), Prof. Nancy Thebaut (History), and Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach (Music) are already collaborating with the Cultural Programme on possible opportunities for the season and John Fulljames, Director of Oxford University’s Humanities Cultural Programme, is keen now to extend an invitation to others to join the conversation to explore and test the potential for the season and bring together researchers who could be involved in shaping and delivering it.
The focus of the season will be on contemporary creativity, while also centring Oxford’s extraordinary medieval resources where appropriate – our manuscripts, instruments, objects, architecture, and spaces. This season might engage with novelists, poets, musicians, graphic artists, puppeteers, playwrights, actors, composers, designers, children’s book writers, textile workers, cartoonists, computer game programmers, AI technology, and more.
We would like the season to be ambitious and international while also engaging grass-roots, local communities, especially schools and young people. It will be wide-ranging, inclusive, accessible, innovative, and fun. We also want to be open about the dark side of medieval appropriations in recent years, especially by the far right (see the previous TORCH OMS workshop on Medieval Studies and the Far Right), and to examine and counter these narratives. While we want to bring in high-profile writers and artists, we also want to celebrate the creativity of everyone, including students. The season would be likely to take place circa 2028.
One overarching question might be whether this kind of contemporary creativity is an end in itself, or a gateway to the medieval past. Please come along to this initial group meeting for all interested parties, which will be structured around the question: What has medieval research to do with contemporary creativity?

If you have something you would like to share or discuss in advance, please feel free to reach out to the researchers who are already involved or the Cultural Programme via Justine Shaw. Please RSVP to: Cultural Programmes with ‘Medieval Afterlives Workshop’ (culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk) in the subject line by 7 January 2025.

Image: ‘Serenade to Chaucer’, a pop-up version of Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ by Paul Johnson, runner-up of the Redesigning the Medieval Book competition by the Bodleian Library.

Crafting the Book: A One-Day Workshop Report

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25/11/2024

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On 22 November, the ‘Crafting the Book’ Workshop was organised by Alison Ray (St Peter’s College) with talks and practical activities led by Sara Charles (University of London) and Eleanor Baker (Balliol College). Attended by university students, researchers, as well as library and archives staff, the workshop engaged with the history of the book and material culture of medieval manuscripts and early printed works, including their production, decoration, and provenance through signs of ownership.

The lunchtime lecture featured talks in the Weston Library by Sara and Eleanor on their recently published research on book history. First, Sara presented three case studies of early female scribes from her trade publication, The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, August 2024). Next, Eleanor shared a range of book curses from the Middle Ages onwards, and the research process behind her new work, Book Curses (Bodleian Publishing, November 2024). The lecture was a stimulating look at the human agency involved in the lifecycle of manuscripts and early books, from production and use to their survival today.

The afternoon continued with practical workshops in the Bodleian Bibliographical Press led by Sara and Eleanor, in which participants developed a deeper understanding of contemporary artistic and reader practices through taking part in hands-on craft methods. In our first workshop, Sara guided participants in the preparation of iron gall ink and quills to practice medieval writing, and they additionally tested pigments used in illumination. For our second workshop, Eleanor led groups of participants to prepare their own book curses on bookmarks using letterpress printing and the session was accompanied by an introduction to printing techniques by press supervisor Richard Lawrence. Attendees greatly enjoyed engaging with the materiality and craft methods in manuscript and print culture.

The ‘Crafting the Book’ Workshop was held in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). We are also grateful for assistance in planning and supporting the workshop on the day by Alex Franklin (Bodleian), Richard Lawrence, Tianqi Wang (St Peter’s) and Holly Smith (St Anne’s).

Alison Ray, St Peter’s College