Tag: michaelmas 25

Medieval Matter MT25, Week 8

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30/11/2025

23:07

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Medieval Matters, News

Welcome, finally, to week 8. Today is the last day to enter your paper for the Medium Ævum Essay Prize and to register for Ars Inquirendi – Querying the Pre-Modern in the Age of Large Multimodal Models (including a free conference dinner at St Edmund Hall on Saturday!). As always, you can find a complete copy of the Oxford Medieval Studies Booklet here.  Any last-minute changes will be updated in the weekly blogpost and in the calendar, both accessible via https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/. As a little Oxmas gift, have a look at Péter Tóth explaining the layout of this early polyglot Bible fragment in the Bodleian Library, the newest contribution to the OMS Youtube channel.

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30, Weston Library (Horton Room)
  • Introduction to Arabic Palaeography – 2:00, Khalili Research Centre
  • Medieval Archaeology Seminar – 3.00, Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. Aleks Pluskowski, will be speaking on ‘Re-thinking the “Green Revolution” in the Medieval Western Mediterranean (6th-16th centuries)’
  • Carmina Burana: Graduate Text Seminar – 5:00, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5:00 with drinks reception to follow, All Souls College. Robert Swanson (University of Birmingham) will be speaking on “Margins, marginality, and marginalisation: drawing lines within and around late medieval Catholicism”

Tuesday

  • Latin Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room)
  • Medieval Church and Culture Seminar:  5:15pm, Harris Manchester College (tea & coffee from 5.00). Antonia Anstatt (Tübingen): ‘Holy Emotions? Love, Grief, and Anger in the Later Medieval Lives of Elizabeth of Hungary’

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar – 11:15, Somerville College. The topic for this term is Ulrich von Richental, Chronik des Konzils zu Konstanz (1414-1438).
  • Older Scots Reading Group – 2:30, Room 30.401 in the Schwarzman Centre.
  • Medieval Latin Documentary Palaeography Reading Group – 4:00, online.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5:00, Ioannou Centre. Olivier Delouis (Paris) will be speaking on ‘Byzantium in Correspondence: 171 Letters of Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus to Non-Greek Byzantinists (1875–1911)’

Thursday

  • Middle English Reading Group – 11:00, Beckington Room (Lincoln College).
  • Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar – 4:00, Somerville College. – Poetic Exchanges, Including poems by Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, Muhja bint al-Tayyani, Tecla de Borja and ‘Vayona’
  • Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5:00, St Catherine’s College. Kristine Tanton (U of Montreal) will be speaking on ‘Seeing Anew: Digital Methods and the Return of the Medieval Object’.
  • Celtic Seminar – 5:00, hybrid. Merryn Davies-Deacon (Belfast) will be speaking on ‘Lexical prescription in Breton: what does it involve and who is taking notice?’
  • Book Launch: Landscapes and Producers in Medieval England – 5:30, Main Lecture Theatre, Rewley House. A wine reception, with opportunity to purchase copies of the volume, will follow. More information here.

Friday

  • Medievalist Coffee Morning – 10:30, Visiting Scholars Centre (Weston Library). All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Followed by the Medieval Manuscript Support Group 11:30, also in the Weston Library, Horton Room – to get help with a manuscript from a panel of experts, use the form on the website
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Surviving Archives – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room).
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscript Group ‘Reading Group’ – 5:00, online

Opportunities

Book Launch: Landscapes and Producers in Medieval England. Essays presented to Rosamond Faith

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30/11/2025

15:03

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events

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Thursday 4 December – 5.30pm
Main Lecture Theatre, Rewley House
1 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JA


The launch of this festschrift for Dr Rosamond Faith will feature an introduction by the
editors, an appreciation of the honorand by Professor John Blair (University of Oxford),
and commentary by Professor Mark Gardiner (University of Lincoln).
A wine reception, with opportunity to purchase copies of the volume, will follow.
All are welcome

Landscapes and Producers launchDownload

Sergei Zotov: Alchemical Images as Vessels of Knowledge

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26/11/2025

13:19

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Merton College, 5 December 2025, 5pm

Join the Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group for the final event in their Michaelmas Term ’25 programme in the Mure Room at Merton College at 5pm on Friday 5 December (Week 8) where Sergei Zotov (Warburg Institute, London) will speak on ‘Between Science and Allegory: Alchemical Images as Vessels of Knowledge’

The talk examines how alchemical images in medieval manuscripts forged a distinctive mode of knowledge at the threshold of science and imagination. Originating as visual experiments, they developed into a symbolic language that articulated natural philosophy through allegorical form. Far from mere decoration, these images mediated between empirical inquiry and religious, zoological, bodily, or social interpretation — becoming vessels in which medieval science and allegory converged.

For any questions, or to be added to the Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group’s mailing list, contact Fergus Bovill at oxfordmedievalmss@gmail.com

The Secret Geometry Behind Words

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25/11/2025

08:38

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report

Report by Leonie Erbenich, Visiting Graduate Student in Modern Languages, on a workshop with Giles Bergel for the History of the Book students in Modern Languages 2025. Cf. the History of the Book blog on the workshops in 2024 ‘Seeing Materiality through a Computer’s Eyes‘ and 2023 ‘Digital Tools for Image Matching‘

How Archivists can benefit from Computer Vision

Dusty reading rooms are hardly the place where you’d expect to find cutting-edge technology — but AI researchers and libraries have formed an unlikely symbiosis in the field of Computer Vision, a technology that transforms images into geometrical data. You’ve probably come across this branch of AI in your daily life – e. g. when parking your car with park assist, or identifying a plant via an app, or trying to track down a pair of shoes with google lens. But Computer Vision is also a real gamechanger when it comes to unveiling the History of Books.
Humans mostly open books because they want to read the text that’s inside. The absence of this intent in the computational gaze allows for a different focus: Each page becomes first and foremost an image, a surface consisting of shapes and lines that can be measured and compared.
Even before the digital age, bibliographers were already looking for ways to see differences between seemingly identical pages: The McLeod Portable Collator for example is  a wonderfully eccentric, mechanical device that overlaid two printed pages optically. (More information on library machines can be found on the Bodleian blog)

Today, those ingenious optical tools have digital descendants: Software such as ImageCompare, developed by Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group, can compare scans of bookpages and automatically highlight even the tiniest shifts in type, punctuation, or ink. What once required hours of eye-straining concentration can now be done in seconds. Funfact: The beloved “before- after” slide feature on Instagram is only one of several options ImageCompare offers to make it easier to “spot the difference”- for example in these title pages of reformation pamphlets from 1530:

ARCH8o.G.1530(15)
ARCH8o.G.1530(13)

Nevertheless, these tools are not magical “brains in a box” that spit out research results, as Dr Giles Bergel, Digital Humanities Researcher in the Visual Geometry Group Oxford, puts it. They just act as magnifiers that help spotting similarities and differences in material. It’s up to humans to interpret the data: Woodcuts, for example, were often reused across countless editions of books or manuscripts at different times and places. Paradoxically, the newer looking print can sometimes be the older one. Scotland Chapbooks (https://data.nls.uk/data/digitised-collections/chapbooks-printed-in-scotland/) is capable of searching a large dataset for illustrations and visually group them together, allowing researchers to trace how a single woodcut might have changed over time — a crack deepening, a border wearing thin, holes left by a bookworm.

Research Examples

Giovanna Truong, a former History of the Book student, used ImageCompare to identify identical illustrations in two different Yiddish Haggadot-uncovering a link between the two printers of the books based in Venice and Prague.

Blair Hedges, evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University, studied the different patterns of wormholes which appear as white dots on prints and was able to attribute them to two different species of beetles. The holes in the woodcuts revealed how they were spread in Europe at the time, coincidentally strikingly in accordance to the distribution of Catholics and Protestants in Europe…

These examples show how the use of AI reveals formerly invisible patterns that can serve as clues to a book’s life and travels. And it might help to shift the image of dusty librarians and archivist trailing behind their time – as it is actually quite the reverse.

Launch of Peseants’ War Pamphlet

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24/11/2025

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Around Oxford, publications

Friday, 28 November, 5-6.30pm
Room 2 of the Taylor Institution Library

The launch featured a dramatised reading of the text and a display of the Taylorian holdings of German Peasants’ War pamphlets by a group of readers from across the University. The new edition comprises a historical and bibliographic introduction as well as the edition, translation, and facsimile. Open access volume here and a recording.

Introduction by Henrike Lähnemann and Lyndal Roper. Reader in the order of speaking: Henrike Lähnemann, Ryan Hampton, Rahel Micklich, Lyndal Roper, Eddie Handley, Marina Giraudeau, Ararat Ameen, Monty Powell, Georgia Macfarlane, Hannah Free, Victoria Speth, Emma Huber, Tamara Klarić, Timothy Powell

Practice recording of Martin Luther’s pamphlet ‘Against the Bands of Peasants’ by Henrike Lähnemann

1525 was a dramatic year in German politics. The Peasants’ War swept through South and East Germany and mobilised a large number of peasants in support of the movement, and an even larger number on the side of the princes and ruling classes opposing it. Martin Luther, dependent on the princes to realise his Reformation ideas, wrote one of the most vicious pamphlets of his life, attacking the ideas of the peasants, particularly their use of the term ‘freedom’. He defended his own use of the term as pertaining only to spiritual freedom and condemned insurrection in the strongest terms, calling on the princes to “slay, choke and stab” any rebel.

500 years after its first publication, this edition with a new modern English translation, extensive linguistic and historical footnotes, and a comprehensive introduction contextualises the attack, both in terms of its historic significance and its afterlife. As in the previous volumes from the Reformation Series of the Taylor Editions, the text is based on pamphlets from the Taylorian collection which are also provided as facsimiles. The volume is published open access and with additional resources such as an audiobook and ‘fold-your-own-pamphlet’ for both of the copies held in the Taylorian. In the historical introduction, Rahel Micklich discusses in turn the historical background of the Peasants’ War (1), the underlying conflict with radical reformer Thomas Müntzer (2), and the ensuing pamphlet war with the Catholic adversaries of Luther, particularly Johann Cochlaeus. Timothy Powell then looks at the reception of the pamphlet in the GDR who were clearly taking the side of the peasants and of Thomas Müntzer against Luther’s polemic. A book historical chapter follows, examining the contemporary reception of all of Luther’s 1525 pamphlets on the topic as mirrored in the pamphlets held in the Taylorian and in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. The introduction is rounded off by a short explanation of the language of the pamphlet, the typographical conventions, and the principles guiding the edition by Henrike Lähnemann, with a comprehensive bibliography on the pamphlet.

Have a look at the digital editions of the two Taylorian copies of Martin Luther’s pamphlet against the peasants. No. 2 also includes the new English translation.

  1. Wider die sturmēden Bawren Auch wider die reubischen vnd moͤrdisschen rottē der andern Bawren. Taylorian copy ARCH.8°.G.1525(28) [Erfurt: Matthes Maler,] 1525. https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/peasants-erfurt/
  2. Wider die mordischen vnd reubischen Rotten der Pawren. The Taylorian copy ARCH.8°.G.1525(27) [Nuremberg: Friedrich Peypus,] 1525. https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/peasants-nuremberg/

A full list of all Reformation pamphlets in the Taylorian with photographs of their title-pages is available on Taylor Editions website, and links to all published volumes in the three series ‘Treasures of the Taylorian’ is available on the publications website.

Medieval Matter MT25, Week 7

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24/11/2025

08:54

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events, Medieval Matters, News

Week 7, and the prospects of the vac creeps ever closer! Two particular items of note this week. First, there is no Medieval History Seminar this week. Second, Prof. Roberta Mazza’s lecture for the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures has been postponed until next term. If you are looking for an alternative manuscript fix: come to the Medieval Manuscripts Support Group, following the Friday coffee morning this and next week.

As always, you can find a complete copy of the Oxford Medieval Studies Booklet here.  Any last-minute changes will be updated in the weekly blogpost and in the calendar, both accessible via https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/.

Monday

Tuesday

  • Latin Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room)
  • Medieval Church and Culture Seminar – 5:00, Harris Manchester College. Mark Vessey (UBC) will be speaking on ‘Some Problems in the Earliest History of the Latin Life of Antony’.
  • Medieval French Research Seminar – 5:00, Maison Française d’Oxford. Prof. Francis Gingrass (University of Montreal) will be speaking on ‘Luttes fratricides dans l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’.
  • Old English Graduate Reading Group – 5:15, location TBC, contact Hattie Carter

Wednesday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10:00, Clarendon Institute.
  • John Lydgate Book Club – 11:00, Smoking Room (Lincoln College).
  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on the Constance Chronicle – 11:15, Somerville College.
  • EMBI Mapping Workshop – 2:00 in room 00.056 of the Schwartzman Centre. A few spaces are still available – sign up here.
  • Older Scots Reading Group – 2:30, Room 30.401 in the Schwarzman Centre.
  • Medieval Latin Documentary Palaeography Reading Group – 4:00, online.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5:00, Ioannou Centre. Thomas Laver (Cambridge) will be speaking on ‘Estates, Economy, and ‘Holy Men’ in Late Antique Egyptian Monasteries’

Thursday

  • Middle English Reading Group – 11:00, Beckington Room (Lincoln College).
  • Environmental History Working Group – 12:30, Room 20.421 in the Schwarzman Centre. Meeting details to be announced.
  • Celtic Seminar – 5:00, hybrid. Gwen Angharad Gruffudd & Arwel Vittle will be speaking on ‘‘Dros Gymru’n Gwlad’: hanes sefydlu’r Blaid Genedlaethol’
  • King Faisal Lecture – 5:00, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Professor Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi (Columbia University) will be speaking on ‘The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction’. All Welcome. No registration is required.
  • Compline in the Crypt – 9:30pm, St Edmund Hall.

Friday

Opportunities

Tony Hunt Obituary

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14/11/2025

10:45

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News

Oxford Medieval Studies is saddened to hear of the death last week of Tony Hunt (1944-2025), Faculty Lecturer in Medieval French and Fellow of St Peter’s College (1990-2009).

Tony’s contributions to Anglo-Norman and Medieval French research were prolific and ground-breaking, recognised by Fellowship of the British Academy in 1999; he was decorated Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques in 2009. A brilliant scholar with a razor-sharp intellect he was also a generous and much valued tutor, supervisor, mentor, and colleague. A pillar of the Anglo-Norman studies community, he was President of the Anglo-Norman Texts Society from 2011 until his death; his editions of texts ranged remarkably, from chess treatises and the teaching and learning of Latin in England to medicine and botany.

ANTS website Tony Hunt (1944-2025) | Anglo-Norman Text Society

Copyists’ Slip in Dante

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06/11/2025

08:18

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Around Oxford, paper

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As part of the Italian Research Seminar, Ryan Pepin will speak on ‘Dietro la memoria non può ire’: Copyists’ Slips in the Textual Tradition of the Commedia.

Time and Place: Monday, November 10th (5th week), Taylorian, Room 2, 1-2:30 PM

Abstract: The enormous textual tradition of Dante’s Commedia – over 600 complete manuscripts – is a mine of data on how scribes worked in late medieval Italy. Thanks to the efforts of palaeographers and codicologists over the last twenty years, we have learned about the difference between professional and amateur milieux (Pomaro), the development of collaborative, serial book production in Florence (De Robertis, Ceccherini), copyists’ efforts to compare and correct their texts (Tonello) – even about the ‘habits’ of individual scribes (Marchetti). 

This paper studies a type of error which to which Dante’s copyists were especially prone: errors that resulted from a good memory of the poem. By studying scribal innovations that ‘echo’ other lines in the text (Petrocchi), we come as close as we can to early readers’ ear for the poem: what they attended to, how they understood the poet’s style – and even, I will suggest, how they understood the poet’s own compositional practice.

Bio: Ryan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York. He is currently studying medieval Latin rhythmical poetry that circulated in Italy during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. 

Header picture: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Ital. 108, fol. 32r, https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/ante-purgatory/

Medieval Matter MT25, Week 4

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03/11/2025

08:25

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities

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Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30, Weston Library (Horton Room)
  • Introduction to Arabic Palaeography – 2:00, Khalili Research Centre
  • Medieval Archaeology Seminar – 3.00, Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. Wyatt Wilcox will be speaking on ‘Isolated Barrows in Early Medieval England: A Spatial Analysis’
  • Carmina Burana: Graduate Text Seminar – 5:00, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5:00 with drinks reception to follow, All Souls College. Anna Chrysostomides (Queen Mary, University of London) will be speaking on “Non-Binary Gender in Abbasid Baghdad: Reality vs. Fiction”

Tuesday

  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 12:15, Margaret Thatcher Centre, Somerville. Kathy Lavezzo (U of Iowa) will be speaking on ‘The Darker Side of the Middle Ages’.
  • Latin Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room)
  • Medieval Church and Culture Seminar – 5:00, Harris Manchester College. Clare Whitton (Blackfriars) will be speaking on ‘Resurrecting a Patron Saint: The Feast of San Gennaro in 14th century Naples’

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar – 11:15, Somerville College. The topic for this term is Ulrich von Richental, Chronik des Konzils zu Konstanz (1414-1438).
  • Centre for Early Medieval Britain and Ireland Welcome Lunch – 12.30, Balliol College
  • Older Scots Reading Group – 2:30, Room 30.401 in the Schwarzman Centre.
  • Medieval Latin Documentary Palaeography Reading Group – 4:00, online.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5:00, Ioannou Centre. Erin Thomas Dailey (Leicester) will be speaking on ‘Why Did the Byzantine Empire Forbid SlaveOwners from Making Eunuchs of their Slaves? Castration, Masculinity, and Identity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10:00, Catherine Lewis Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Institute and online.
  • Middle English Reading Group – 11:00, Beckington Room (Lincoln College).
  • Chronicling the Self: including extracts from the memoirs of Lady Nijo and Leonor López de Córdoba
  • Celtic Seminar – 5:00, online. Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff) will be speaking on ‘London Puritan networks and the publication of the 1630 Welsh Bible’
  • David Patterson Lecture – 6:00, Clarendon Institute, Walton St. Dr Emily Rose (Academic Visitor, OCHJS) will be speaking on “A Bleeding Corpse, A Grim Grimm Fairy Tale with Early Modern Shivers: The Dubious Margaret of Pforzheim (1267?), A Singular Female Blood Libel”. In order to participate in this lecture via Zoom, please register at this link.
  • Latin Compline in the Crypt – 9:30pm, in the crypt below St-Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall

Friday

  • Medievalist Coffee Morning – 10:30, Visiting Scholars Centre (Weston Library). All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Surviving Archives – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room).
  • Oxford University Heraldry Society Lecture – 4:30, Harris Seminar Room of Oriel College. Professor Yorick Gomez Gane will be speaking on “The Italian Language in British Heraldry,” followed by a drinks reception.

Opportunities

Heritage Science and Manuscripts Conference: Programme

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26/10/2025

13:31

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Around Oxford, conference

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New directions in the study of written artefacts from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages.
Organised by the Crafting Documents project (AHRC-DFG) and co-sponsored by the Centre for Manuscripts and Text Cultures, University of Oxford.
13-14 NOVEMBER 2025, SHULMAN AUDITORIUM. THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Register for free here

9:30 Arrival and registration (coffee and tea available for all attendees)
9:45 Welcome
Julia M. H. Smith (Crafting Documents co-PI, All Souls College, University of Oxford)
Martin Kauffman (Head of early and rare collections, Special Collections, Bodleian Library)
Dirk Meyer (Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, The Queen’s College, Oxford)
10:00 Brent Seales (University of Kentucky): UnLost: uncovering lost knowledge from the ancient library of Herculaneum
10:50 Richard Gameson (Durham University): The Hereford palimpsest psalter
11:40 Jess Hodgkinson (University of Leicester)
Insular manuscripts and their readers: using photometric stereo imaging
to study drypoint writing
12:30 Lunch Break
TECHNOLOGIES TO RETRIEVE WRITING
(Chair Lesley Smith, Harris Manchester College, Oxford)
INKS AND PARCHMENT
(Chair Martin Kauffman, Bodleian Library)
2:30 Kristine Rose-Beers (University Library Cambridge)
Early Islamic manuscripts on parchment: surface preparation and
practice-based research
3:20 Andy Beeby (Durham University)
On the variation in the density of writing as seen by multi and hyper-spectral
imaging: looking over the scribe’s shoulder
4:10 Coffee and tea break
5:00 Ira Rabin (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung)
Ana de Oliveira Dias (University of Oxford)
Ink analysis of early medieval relic labels
Wine reception sponsored by the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures,
The Queen’s College, Oxford
(6:00 – 7:00)DAY 2
MATERIAL SCIENCE AND HERITAGE RESEARCH
9:30 Alberto Campagnolo (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven)
Approaches to heritage science for manuscripts in the Digital Humanities
10:20 Michael Marx, Institut für Studien der Kultur und Religion des Islam
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt / Institute of Advanced Studies Jerusalem
Results of carbondating of early Qurʾānic manuscript and their implications for
our understanding of the history of the Qurʾān
11:10 Coffee and tea break
11:40 Matthew Collins (University of Copenhagen/University of Cambridge)
Proteomics analysis of parchment samples
12:30 Colloquium pause
(Chair Dirk Meyer, The Queen’s College, Oxford)
4:00 Coffee and tea
4:30 Tessa Webber (Trinity College, University of Cambridge)
Early medieval written artefacts: a palaeographical perspective
5:00 Round table discussion
BROADER PERSPECTIVES
(Chair Julia Smith, All Souls College, University of Oxford)

Heritage Science and Manuscripts programmeDownload