Robinson Ellis and the teaching of Palaeography in Oxford

David Ganz was Professor of Palaeography at King's College London from 1997-2010. In 2016, he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. This post contains a reference to attempted suicide. In 1885 a slim volume, entitled XII Facsimiles from Latin MSS in the Bodleian Library, was published by Oxford University Press. [1] The …

Teachable Features 14: Working with Digital Objects: Digitization as a Teachable Feature, or “How did Those Images Get There?!?!”

Astrid J. Smith has been digitizing materials as rare book and special collections digitization specialist for Stanford Libraries for over a decade. With a background in fine art, and a master’s degree in liberal arts, she strives always to ensure that cultural heritage preservation imaging best practices are combined with her own aesthetic and phenomenological …

Teachable Features 13: Decorative Features in Medieval Manuscripts

Dr Sian Witherden outlines a series of decorative manuscript features. Sian is a Rare Books and Manuscripts specialist. This post also appears on the St John's College blog.  I recently joined the St John’s College (Oxford) library team to work on the TEI project, my main role being to incorporate existing catalogue records into the …

From the Holy Land to the Bodleian: Arnold von Harff’s travelogue travels to Oxford

Aysha Strachan is a PhD student in German at King’s College London/Humboldt University Berlin supervised by Sarah Bowden and Andreas Krass and funded by the LAHP. She completed the MSt. at Oriel College, Oxford in 2019 and took the History of the Book method option to complement her research into the depiction of transgressive women …

Follow the Reader: a Virtual Exhibition Highlighting Manuscript Margins

Mariken Teeuwen is senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), and Professor at the Department History and Art History of Utrecht University. Between 2016-2020, Irene van Renswoude, Irene O’Daly, and I worked together on a project titled The Art of Reasoning: Techniques of …

Creating Public Awareness of the Bestiary in Merton College Library, MS 249

Sebastian Dows-Miller is an MSt candidate at Merton College, Oxford. He has a particular interest in text transmission within manuscript culture, as well as short texts written in Old French, and is always very pleased when the two intersect. Follow him on Twitter here, or follow Merton Beasts directly.  The bestiary genre is well known, …