Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. She has collected some resources for further reading to wrap up her series How to collate an early printed book. Online Resources Cambridge Digital Library - especially the collection of paper stocks …
4. Next Steps with Collation
Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. This final post in a series on collation explains how to handle more complex examples, and highlights some useful resources. Going further In part 3, we covered how to collate the Bodleian’s …
3. Collating in Practice
Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. This post — the third in a four-part series on collation — offers a ‘guided tour’ of the Bodleian’s second edition of Earl River’s ‘Cordyal’ (1494). Moving forward In part 2, we …
2. Identifying format
Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. This post explaining paper formats is the second in a four-part series on collation. Setting the context In part 1, we explored what collation is and introduced our main case study for …
1. Introducing Collation
Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. This post is the first in a series on how to collate early printed books. What is collation? If you are starting to learn about early printed books, you may well have …
Medieval MSS Support Group at the Weston Library
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!
Teaching the Hybrid Text: An Example
Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29 has a bit of everything when it comes to hybridity, which makes it a very useful object with which to challenge students to think outside of the categories with which they are often presented in courses on the medieval period, such as medieval vs Early Modern, manuscript vs print, parchment vs paper, or verse vs prose.
Don’t mention the punctuation! Introducing materiality to text-based teaching contexts
How are students to know that medieval punctuation practices were vastly different from our own, if we don’t tell them, especially when they are encouraged to comment on punctuation by colleagues teaching more recent texts? Why wouldn’t they assume that the modern editions that they encounter aren’t fully faithful representations of some ‘original’ text?
2024 Hybridity Workshop Report
On 17th May 2024, Teaching the Codex hosted its fourth in-person event, a workshop on the theme of Hybridity, kindly sponsored by AMARC and hosted by Merton College, Oxford. Roughly half of the attendees presented, and half were there to contribute to the discussion. The rationale for the workshop was as follows: What constitutes hybridity …
2024 Wakelet Collection
Click on the image below to see our Wakelet collection of tweets from our hashtag #teachingcodex at the 2024 workshop on hybridity. Each presentation was live tweeted as a separate thread, and you can click on the embedded tweet to see an overview of the whole presentation. For readers who do not use Twitter, a …
Teaching the Codex 