Past Events

The Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held by Zoom video conference, on Thursday 18 June 2020 at 4:30 p.m.  It is regretted that there will be no lecture following the meeting this year (our speaker has generously agreed to give his talk during the academic year 2020–2021, perhaps at next year's AGM).  The business of the meeting will begin at 4:30 p.m. (BST).  Members are welcome to attend by Zoom video conference, using this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4507556227

Monday 9 March 2020

Weston Library Lecture Theatre, at 5.15 p.m.

SHIVA MIHAN (Harvard Art Museums/Bahari Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries)

Pieces of gold: piecing together a mutilated Timurid masterpiece

To be followed by a drinks reception in the Blackwell Hall

ELIZABETH SAVAGE

Hans Baldung (Grien) and Johann Schott: rediscovering the most prolific colour printer of the Holy Roman Empire, 1510–1530

Thursday 30 January 2020, Lincoln College, Lower Lecture Room, at 5.30 p.m.

Preceded by a special viewing of prints in the New Douce Room, Ashmolean Museum, at 3.50 p.m.

Please contact the OBS Secretary for further information (secretary@oxbibsoc.org.uk)

ALL WELCOME

Wednesday at 5.15pm in the T.S. Eliot Theatre in Merton College.

Tim Pye (Librarian, National Trust) will be speaking about the library of Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-1786), fellow of Merton College and scholar, later clerk of the House of Commons, and finally editor of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Access to the lecture theatre is via the porters’ lodge on Merton Lane.

ALL WELCOME

THOMAS  ROEBUCK

‘O NOTE THIS PLACE AND THIS LIFE’: a Renaissance reader’s copy of Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579)

Wednesday 8 May 2019, Magdalen College Auditorium at 5.15 p.m.

ALL WELCOME

Claire Breay, Head of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts at the British Library, explores the origins, development, curation and delivery of her "Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms" exhibition.

ALL WELCOME

Visual Rhythm and focus: the function of moveable devices in books

Movable devices in books, though sometimes referred to as ‘novelties’, are hardly new. From anatomical lift-flap books, to astrolabes and other volvelles in early modern science texts, from carousel and pop-up children’s books to contemporary artists’ books, these devices allow authors and artists to emphasize and animate ideas and bring life (or motion anyway) to the pages of their books

Thursday 31 May 2018
Weston Library Lecture Theatre at 5.15 p.m.

RICHARD GAMESON, RALPH HANNA, PETER KIDD and DAVID RUNDLE

A round-table discussion of Oxford’s medieval manuscripts, their catalogues and cataloguing, chaired by Dr Theresa Webber and introduced by Prof. Henry Woudhuysen

Join us for a discussion of the place of the catalogue in the past, present and future of medieval manuscripts, and of the place of the manuscript in catalogues.

ALL WELCOME

Monday 21 May 2018
Weston Library Lecture Theatre at 5.15 p.m. (enter via Broad Street entrance)

LUCY RAZZALL (University of Cambridge)

‘A boxe of balme full swete’: books and boxes in early modern England

Monday 5 March 2018
Weston Library Lecture Theatre at 5.15 p.m. (enter via Parks Road and the readers' barrier)

ROBIN DARWALL-SMITH

The history of the College history

Histories of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges have been produced for over 350 years. Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, who has been involved in three different Oxford College history projects, reflects from personal experience on the history of this genre, and its changes down the centuries.

Monday 20 November 2017
Weston Library Lecture Theatre at 5.15 p.m.

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS

(University of Oxford)

The social uses of books in the eighteenth-century home

Wednesday 18 October 2017 at 3.00 p.m.

Visit to the THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE and the PEET LIBRARY

by kind invitation of the Librarian, Amanda Saville.

Places are limited, and those wishing to attend are asked to inform the Secretary at least two days in advance.

Meet at the College Lodge at 2:55 p.m.

Before finally coming to rest in the British Museum and Lambeth Palace Library, Francis Bacon’s posthumous manuscripts underwent some complex and rather troubled journeys. This talk, which offers the first full reconstruction of their passage, will also take the opportunity to reflect more broadly on the relationship between manuscript, print and collecting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Dr Serjeantson's lecture will follow the Annual General Meeting of the Society (which begins at 4:30 p.m.).  Refreshments will be served.

ADAM SMYTH

‘Tatters allegoricall’: reading and not reading printed waste in early modern books

Oxford Bibliographical Society members are invited to attend this vist, organized by the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles.  Meet at the College lodge at 2:55 p.m.

Oxford Bibliographical Society members are invited to attend this visit, organized by the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles. The visit will be followed by social hour at the Crown and Anchor ...

Oxford Bibliographical Society members are invited to attend this meeting, organized by the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles.  Food and drink will be served.  If you would like to attend, please contact the Secretary for directions.

This is the first Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles event of the term, which members of the Oxford Bibliographical Society are also invited to join. Meet at the College lodge at 4:00 p.m. on Friday 21 October.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING to begin at 4.30 p.m.  Lecture to follow at 5.15 after a brief interval for tea.

What can we learn by looking at a particular type of reader annotation – the personal index, handwritten on the flyleaf of a printed book? This talk looks at how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers indexed their books, the methods they used, and the subjects they wanted to return to.

By kind invitation of the Librarian, Naomi van Loo, members will visit the Hubert Worthington library and view a display of treasures from the collection, and also have the chance to visit the garden, cloisters and chapel. Those wishing to attend are asked to inform the Secretary at least one week in advance.

The Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held this year in the Sir Charles Frank Lecture Theatre at Lincoln College's EPA Centre on Museum Road, Oxford, at 4:30 p.m. (please note the change of advertised venue).  After the business of the meeting, at 5:15 p.m., Ian Maclean will address the Society on:

Richard Stonley, an Elizabethan exchequer official and the first documented reader of Shakespeare, left two fascinating traces in the archives. The first comprises three volumes of journals covering periods of the 1580s and 1590s; the second is a booklist that was compiled when the contents of Stonley’s house on London’s Aldersgate Street were sold off to defray his alleged embezzlements in office in 1597. This paper will dig into both documents in order to contextualize a highly distinctive early modern library.

Members are invited to visit the Library of St John's College, Oxford, by kind invitation of the Librarian, Stewart Tiley. If you would like to attend, please contact the Secretary by sending an e-mail to secretary@oxbibsoc.org.uk or telephoning 01608 654349.

Colour-printed images were produced in their thousands across Europe from at least the 1490s, even in countries where colour-printing is thought to have been introduced hundreds of years later. Join Dr Savage for a discussion of how such prints were made, who bought and used them, and how they reshape our understanding of the processes of printing and the dissemination of printed matter.

Regrettably, due to the indisposition of the speaker, this event has been cancelled, and will be rescheduled.

The first classical Spanish plays to be printed date from 1496. Although the classical period —the Golden Age— supposedly ended in 1700, classical plays and other theatre texts continued to be printed in the same format well into the eighteenth century: the usual cut-off point is  reckoned to be 1833. The total number of recorded titles for the classical period runs into five figures. Many of these are lost, while some survive only in manuscript, but over 2000 classical items were printed. There are probably more than 10,000 editions.

GABRIELE ROSSI ROGNONI is curator of the Royal College of Music Museum in London. He currently serves as Vice-President of the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections (CIMCIM) of ICOM (the International Council for Museums), Board member of the Galpin Society, and corresponding Board member of the American Musical Instrument Society.

The visit will include a view of some of the treasures of the Codrington Library. Members wishing to come are asked to inform the Secretary.

Dr Cristina Neagu
Honorary Secretary
Oxford Bibliographical Society
www.oxbibsoc.org.uk

Christ Church Library
Oxford OX1 1DP
England
Tel: + 44 (0)1865 276 265
Email: cristina.neagu@chch.ox.ac.uk

Dr Alixe Bovey is a historian who specialises in the visual culture of the later Middle Ages. She began her career as a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, working on a project that has evolved into the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, and she joined the University of Kent in 2005. Themes running through her work are pictorial narrative, word-image relations, the role of the visual arts in public ritual and private devotion, and the rhetorical and didactic functions of images.

Participants will have a chance to print their own 'Gutenberg Bible' page and to see the exhibition 'From Scriptoria to the Printing Press' open from 6 September to 29 November 2013 in the Upper Library at Christ Church. The one-pull press on display was built by Alan May for a programme commissioned by  BBC 4, 'The Machine That Made Us', presented by Stephen Fry and broadcast in 2008.

Richard Ovenden was Keeper of Special Collections and, since 2011, is Deputy Librarian of the Bodleian Libraries. He was educated at Durham University and University College London, and has worked as a professional librarian since 1985. He has served on the staff of Durham University Library, the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland (as Deputy Head of the Rare Books Section), at the University of Edinburgh (as Director of Collections), and since 2003 at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford.

Dr PADDY BULLARD is lecturer in eighteenth-century studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. From January 2005 to December 2009 he was an AHRC Research Fellow attached to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, and Rank Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. His monograph, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge in 2011, and he has co-edited with James McLaverty a volume of essays, Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (CUP, 2013).

RICHARD GAMESON is Professor of the History of the Book at Durham University.  He has published some 80 studies on medieval manuscripts, book collections and art.  His most recent publication is The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol. I, c. 400-1100 (2012).  He has just completed a book on the history and contexts of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to accompany a spectacular loan exhibition to be held in Durham this summer (2013).

Time to be announced. Visit to the Parker Library, Cambridge. Introduction to the

collection by Dr Christopher de Hamel. Members wishing to join the
party are asked to inform the Secretary of the Society at least 3 weeks
in advance.

The talk is cancelled due to speaker’s illness. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Dr Kate Bennett is currently Lecturer in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford.  

Brian Cummings is currently Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He specialises in many aspects of early modern English literature, especially More, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. He also works on the history of the Reformation, the history of theology and of heresy, the English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, medieval and Renaissance philosophy, humanism, especially Erasmus, the European Renaissance and the reception of the classics, grammar, logic and rhetoric and on literary theory and the philosophy of language.

Introduction to the collection by the Curator, David Morrison.

Visit to the Ashmolean Museum Conservation Studio.