Lectures, seminars, workshops, prizes and opportunities for engagement with manuscripts, book history, and Bodleian Special Collections. Links below to affiliated groups and programmes.
To register for email updates from the Centre for the Study of the Book, email bookcentre-newslist-subscribe[at]maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Visit the Bodleian Bibliographical Press: printing history through practice
March – May 2025
weston library 10th anniversary symposium
From Jean le Bon to Good Duke Humfrey: a new manuscript witness to Anglo-French cultural exchange
Friday 21 March, 11 am – 5 pm, Weston Library
Booking required
The Bodleian Libraries have recently acquired a previously unknown manuscript from the library of Humfrey Duke of Gloucester. First written and illuminated in Paris towards the end of the 13th century, the manuscript is an early example of the translation of the New Testament into French. Owned by Jean le Bon, King of France, in the middle of the 14th century, by the early 15th it was in England and came into the hands of a series of Lancastrian royal princes.
This symposium provides a first opportunity to explore this outstanding arrival and to point the way for future research.
Coffee and tea will be provided.
This symposium will be followed by a drinks reception in Blackwell Hall.
Bodleian Special Collections Coffee mornings, Fridays at 10:30am in the Weston Library for Special Collections
All Bodleian Readers are welcome, every Friday in termtime, 10:30-11:30 at the Special Collections coffee morning in the Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2, Weston Library).
A Bodleian Reader card or University card is required for access. Each week a guest speaker shows new acquisitions, discoveries or re-discoveries from the Special Collections. To subscribe to email updates for Friday coffee mornings, send an email message to coffee-mornings-weston-subscribe[at]maillist.ox.ac.uk
Lectures and public events at the Weston LIbrary
Magna Carta 1225: new discoveries and repercussions
A series of three lectures accompanying the display, Magna Carta 1225, on view in the Blackwell Hall, Weston Library. Register to attend these public lectures, open to all: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/magna-carta
Friday 31 Jan, 1-2pm, Nicholas Vincent, ‘Magna Carta: new discoveries’
Thursday 20 Feb, 12-1pm, Dean Irwin, ‘Magna Carta and Jewish communities’
Thursday 27 March, 1-2pm, Sophie Thérèse Ambler, ‘Magna Carta and England’s First Revolution, 1258-1265’
Oxford Bibliographical Society meetings
All welcome. See the OBS website for list of events.
Thursday 29 May at 5.15 pm
T. S. Eliot Lecture Theatre: jointly with the Merton History of the Book Group
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Meeting to begin at 4.30 p.m. Lecture to follow at 5.15 after a brief interval for tea
Sarah Cusk (Lincoln College) and Sophie Floate (Brasenose College)
Printed books from the libraries of some early
Oxford humanists
History of the Book at Oxford
The Lyell Lectures begin 29 April 2025
Leah Price (Rutgers), ‘Victorian Books and their Servants‘
All at 5:15 pm in the Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. All welcome. Registration (free ticket gives entry to all five lectures); https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/lyell-lectures-2025
Tuesday 29 April Bibliodomesticity: Who served Victorian books?
Thursday 1 May Shirkspaces: Where don’t George Gissing’s characters write?
Tuesday 6 May The angel in the library: reading aloud between chattel slavery and domestic violence
Thursday 8 May Biblioempathy: How rich and poor readers pictured each other
Thursday 15 May Literacy at nurse: Is it ever too late to read?
The Concertina-fold Book Across Cultures
Thursday 1 May, 3-4 pm, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library
Accordion, screenfold, chain—various terms have been applied to books folded in a zig-zag or ‘concertina’ pattern. Seen now as novelties, concertina-fold books were once found worldwide. They were even the preferred or sole book format in some places, before the imperial spread of the codex. A group of International experts come together for an afternoon conversation on the historic uses of the format as part of The Concertina-Fold Book across Time, Space and Cultures project, supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Their discussion will be grounded in some of the outstanding examples housed at the Bodleian. Attendees will have the opportunity to see a few of the Bodley books in action and to play with concertina-book facsimiles.
Workshop: Archives, Family and Memory
Wednesday 14 May, 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm, Weston Library
Peter Brathwaite tells the interconnected stories of three of his ancestors, whose lives intersected amid the grim reality of slavery in 18th-century Barbados. The workshop will examine original archival material.
To register interest, email csb[at]bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Crafting the Bloomsbury book
Friday 23 May, 2-5 pm, Weston Library and Bibliographical Press
A session looking at the material properties of early-twentieth-century publications of the Hogarth Press. Reanna Brooks discusses Virginia Woolf’s hands-on involvement in printing and bookbinding. Then try your own hand at the crafts used to make decorated papers for bindings.
To register interest in the Bloomsbury talk (2-3 pm) or the Bloomsbury talk and workshop (2-5 pm), e-mail csb[at]bodleian.ox.ac.uk, using one of those phrases as the subject line.