2025 Summer School
Introductory Palaeography Courses
Introduction to Palaeography and Manuscript Studies | Katherine Hindley and Laura Cleaver
Five Day Course: 9-13 June 2025
This course introduces students to key skills for the study of medieval manuscripts, from the making of parchment to reading text and imagery. The course is designed for beginners, with no previous experience or language skills. It is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, those working in libraries and archives, and anyone with an interest in medieval books.
By the end of this course students should:
- Be able to describe the structure and contents of a range of manuscript material using appropriate vocabulary.
- Be able to transcribe text from a manuscript.
- Demonstrate awareness of choices made in the process of transcribing text and relevant debates about editing processes.
- Be aware of a range of resources for working with manuscripts and able to apply these appropriately in their work.
- Be ready to proceed to more specialist study.
More information is available to view on the course page.
Textual Editing: philosophical and theological texts throughout the Middle Ages | Dr Zita Toth & Dr Daniel Hadas
Five Day Course: 9-13 June 2025
This course introduces students to textual editing, especially of Latin writings belonging to the earlier and later medieval philosophical and theological tradition.
More information is available to view on the course page.
Introduction to Making Medieval Manuscripts (Practice Based) | Sara Charles & Steve Lawes
Five Day Course: 9-13 June 2025
This course introduces students to the complicated and messy processes of production through which pre-modern manuscripts were created. It offers a mixture of talks and practical sessions that give students the opportunity to work through the sequence of manuscript production.
More information is available to view on the course page.
English Palaeography
Early Modern English Palaeography | Dr Nigel Ramsay
Two Day Course: 9-10 June 2025
Deciphering the handwriting of the past is just the first step in the process of presenting it for others to read. This course combines palaeography (the decipherment of Early Modern handwriting) with diplomatic (studying the form that past documents took) and the process of editorial intervention that enables us to present our transcription in a form that makes it accessible to others in a satisfactory scholarly way. The act of transcribing a document is always an act of editing: this day will aim to make that act a planned exercise that achieves the transformation in the best way possible.
More information is available to view on the course page .
Introduction to Insular Script and the Palaeography of the Old English Period | Dr Helen McKee
Two Day Course: 9-10 June 2025
This two-day course will provide an introduction to pre-Conquest Insular palaeography in general, and more specifically the palaeography of manuscripts containing Old English.
More information is available to view on the course page.
Reading and Editing Renaissance English Manuscripts | Chris Stamatakis
Two Day Course: 11-12 June 2025
This course will offer participants an opportunity to practise transcribing a variety of literary manuscripts written in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
More information is available to view on the course page.
Italian and Early Medieval Palaeography
Writing in the early Frankish world | Dr Ana de Oliveira Dias
Two Day Course: 9-10 June 2025
In this two-day course, we will explore the fascinating writing culture of the Merovingian and early Carolingian periods, c. 500-800 CE.
More information is available to view on the course page.
Illustrated Vernacular Manuscripts in Quattrocento Florence | Dr Federico Botana
Two Day Course: 11-12 June 2025
This course will provide an introduction to illustrated manuscripts produced by non-professional scribes in fifteenth-century Florence.
More information is available to view on the course page.