Thank you to Alison Ray for allowing us to reblog her post about an exciting new manuscripts initiative in Oxford!
Alison Ray is the Archivist at St Peter’s and All Souls Colleges in Oxford.
We are pleased to trial a new session, once or twice a month, in which readers of medieval manuscripts can pose questions to a mixed group of fellow readers and Bodleian curators in a friendly environment. Come with your own questions, or to see what questions other readers have!
The sort of questions you might bring are:
- What is the place and date of origin of this MS?
- What is the place and date of origin of this binding?
- What does the decoration of this MS suggest?
- What does this semi-legible inscription say?
- Whose bookplate is this, or how could I find out?
Meetings will typically be held in the Horton Room (just across the corridor from the manuscripts reading room on the 1st floor). If you wish to pose a question, please order the relevant manuscript to the issue desk, and email the details to Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts, the day before, so that he can arrange for it to be transferred across to the Horton Room for the session. Alternatively, provide a good quality digital image that we can display on a large monitor.
In the expectation that many readers will be at the Weston Library on Fridays for the weekly Coffee Morning in the Visiting Scholars’ Centre, the first such sessions are scheduled for the following dates:
- Friday, 19 July (Horton Room) 11.30-12.30
- Friday, 6 September (Horton Room) 11.30-12.30
Alison Ray, University of Oxford
Teaching the Codex 