News about medieval manuscripts, rare books and other special collections from the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
Dr Gabriele Balbi (University of Lugano and Byrne-Bussey Marconi Fellow, 2012) will speak about the Marconi Company’s understanding of two ideas of communication (point-to-point and one-to-many) that were at the basis of two different media: the telegraph and radio broadcasting.
Saturday, 20 April 2013, 1 pm
Convocation House, Bodleian Library
Contact: bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
The 2013 D.F. McKenzie Lecture was given by Xu Bing, an artist whose work incorporates and explores words and script. To a capacity crowd of 170 in the English Faculty lecture theatre, the artist described his fascination with the forms of graphic communication, and explained how his works, beginning with the room installation “Book from the Sky,” have explored the boundaries of script, icons and language. He showed and discussed examples of this in his work, including English words portrayed as Chinese characters, in “Square Word Calligraphy”, and a novel in icons, “Book from the Ground: From Point-to-Point”.
An exhibition of Xu Bing’s work, Landscape Landscript, appears at the Ashmolean Museum from 28 February to 19 May 2013, curated by Shelagh Vainker.
Xu Bing was introduced by Peter McDonald (English Faculty) who drew a comparison between the artist’s examination of meaning in form, and D.F. McKenzie’s famous puzzle to his students in the 1980s, asking them to deduce a book’s origin from its physical form alone. As McDonald pointed out, “In their different ways, the professor of bibliography with his blank book and the young artist with his nonsense characters were asking the same question: what constitutes a sign? Does the term apply only to the black marks inscribed on paper? What about the paper itself or the size and format of the book? And if the latter are signs, then what sense are we to make of the philosophical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, what we apprehend through our senses and what we read with our so-called mind’s eye?”
Each year the McKenzie Trust, in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book, presents the D.F. McKenzie Lecture, on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts.
Monday, 25 February: Oxford Bibliographical Society Lecture
Paddy Bullard (University of Kent) “Bare words not being sufficient…”: Tacit Knowledge and Early-Modern Books
All welcome. Taylor Institution at 5.15 pm
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Wednesday, 27 February: Magdalen Library Talk
Dr Tom Freeman (University of Essex) ‘The Making of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’
Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, 5:30 pm
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28 February, 5-6 pm: Annual D.F. McKenzie Lecture
Xu Bing, ‘The sort of artist I am’
“Central to all Xu Bing’s art is the theme of language: its uses and changes; misunderstandings; and dialogues within and between cultures. As a Chinese artist, Xu Bing has focused particularly on the pictorial quality of the Chinese language which, he maintains, lies at the core of Chinese culture.”
Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, St Cross Building
Micha Lazarus (St. John’s) was awarded the Gordon Duff Prize for his essay, ‘Chaekus habet: the circulation of Aristotle’s Poetics in sixteenth-century England’. Richard Ovenden, Deputy Librarian and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Book, presented Dr Lazarus with the prize on 17 January, 2013.
Lazarus surveyed sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English institutional library catalogues (including Thomas James’s catalogues of the Bodleian) and private booklists, to present an extensive list of owners of the Poetics in the period. One of these was Sir John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University and tutor to Edward VI; the inscription “Chaekus habet” in a manuscript booklist indicated his ownership of a volume containing the work.
This detailed bibliographical study also casts light on the circulation and modernisation of Aristotelian collections in England. It emerged from Lazarus’s doctoral research, supervised by Professor Richard McCabe, on the subject ‘Aristotle’s Poetics in Renaissance England’.
The Gordon Duff Prize is awarded for an unpublished essay on a subject relating to the science or arts of books and manuscripts. The competition is open to all members of the University. The next prize will be awarded in 2014.
In an exciting conclusion to the autumn season of masterclasses, Felix Waldmann (Cambridge) spoke on ‘James Tyrrell, John Locke, and the text of Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681): the evidence from some Bodleian copies’.
Examining three Bodleian copies, Dr Waldmann found that the pattern of annotations, corrections, and manuscript additions in these copies, from the libraries of Thomas Barlow (the subject of an earlier masterclass) and John Locke himself, contributed significant evidence touching on theories of the composition of the text, which have variously described the publication as a collaboration between Locke and Tyrrell or Tyrrell’s original work which inspired Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.
This was the second in the series of Early Printed Books masterclasses convened by William Poole (New College).
COMMITTEE FOR PALAEOGRAPHY/BODLEIAN CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF THE BOOK
Medieval manuscripts masterclass
In copying late Middle English, as in copying other languages, scribes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England drew on techniques long established in practice but seldom written down. Those techniques of the scribes, their collaborators and their readers can be reconstructed from the manuscripts themselves.
These techniques might sometimes have been ‘tacit’, as good as unthinking; but what is intriguing is the question whether correcting ever reflects conscious ‘second thoughts’ about the text corrected and about the process of copying it into a book. Sometimes scribes fix practical problems in scribal labour; sometimes they stop to emend or even collate texts in ways which suggest their reading of, or attitudes to, the language and works they copy. Correcting is thereby a crucial part both of the history of book production and of an interesting period in the history of responses to English language and literature.
Daniel Wakelin came to Oxford in 2011 as Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of St Hilda’s College. He formerly taught in the Faculty of English and Christ’s College in Cambridge.
The class will be held on Monday, 19 November at 2:15 in the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Room
Masterclass on 12 November 2012, 2:15 pm
Lecture Room, Pitt Rivers Museum
Chris Fletcher (Keeper of Special collections and fellow of Exeter College) and Marinita Stiglitz (Bodleian Libraries Conservation) will explore a recently acquired commonplace book kept by the Misses Parkyns (and Aunt), Byron’s early friends at Newstead Abbey.
The session will look at the context of its acquisition and touch on the commonplace book as Byronic trophy cabinet, a source for life writing, literary reception and response.
from Martin Kauffmann
COMMITTEE FOR PALAEOGRAPHY/BODLEIAN CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF THE BOOK
Medieval manuscripts masterclass
Monday 5 November, 2.15pm, Pitt Rivers Museum lecture room
(entrance through the Museum or via Robinson Close off the South Parks Road)
Prof. Julia Crick (King’s College London)
Beyond the metropolis: script and scribes in south-western Britain in the tenth century
Localizable and datable manuscripts are in short supply in western Britain at the end of the first millennium. As a consequence a limited number of models is available to interpret the unlocalized evidence we do have. This seminar looks at a very striking instance of a manuscript assigned an English origin, containing a text of extreme pertinence to the English Benedictine reform movement of the tenth century, but copied by a scribe who was trained in a centre outside the English mainstream, under Welsh or Irish influence. The historical and palaeographical challenge of this manuscript is compounded by the fact that it represents perhaps the earliest specimen of Caroline minuscule, the script of the reform, to have been written by a scribe on this side of the English Channel.
Will Poole’s masterclass in treating a collection of books as a primary source took the example of Thomas Barlow (1608-1691), Bodley’s Librarian, Provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford, Professor of Divinity and Bishop of Lincoln. As Dr Poole remarked, the examples shown in the class demonstrated that in Oxford, early modern books couldn’t be neatly divided into printed books and manuscripts. The class examined extensive additions and annotations made by Barlow to his books. Some annotations fall into the category of marks of reading but others extend to subject bibliographies or biographical notes on authors. Many record politico-theological disputes of the time, with Barlow’s own vehement remarks on the pertinence of the contents. In effect, Poole pointed out, these printed books contain working notes for Barlow’s own academic life as a polemical theologian.
Locating all the copies that belonged to Barlow has taken Poole into some detective work in the Bodleian’s own archives and in the archives of the Queen’s College, two institutions which shared in Barlow’s bequest. Librarians were interested to hear what further copy-specific information could be added to catalogue records on the basis of Poole’s research.
Will Poole examines the books belonging to Thomas Barlow (1607–1691) Provost of The Queen’s College and Bishop of Lincoln, in a masterclass to be held Monday, 29 October at 2:15, in the Pitt Rivers Lecture Room.
Extensive annotations and manuscript additions give clues to Barlow’s reading, including his notes (pictured) in Bodleian G 7.3 Th. [Nicholas Crosse], The Cynosura, or a Saving Star (London, 1670), criticising the dedicatory letter to the Countess of Shrewsbury – and questioning the morals of the countess herself.
Some of Barlow’s books and library records detailing their history, and the history of other early modern printed collections within the Bodleian, will be inspected during the class.
The classes on annotated books continue later in the term with:
26 November : masterclass
Felix Waldmann (Cambridge), ‘James Tyrrell, John Locke, and the text of Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681): the evidence from some Bodleian copies”
2:15, in the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Room