2025 Summer School

Illuminated manuscripts are not just beautiful books, they provide a particularly rich source of exploration of the nature of individual projects and of the inter-relationship between word and image in both generation and reception. This course will introduce students to the components and vocabulary of illumination and to its techniques and will incorporate brief surveys of its development. 

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This course looks at the artists’ book in the broadest sense, charting its evolution and critical history from the mid-twentieth century onward, following its various strands and examining the main figures and practices associated with it. The course aims to orient students in this lively, fascinating but complex field. 

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This course offers an introduction to the study of printed books of the hand-press period (c.1450-1800). It aims to equip students with foundational knowledge of the intricacies of book production in the period, and of the material and mechanical circumstances that shaped the early printed page. 

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The history of bookbinding is not simply the history of a decorative art, but that of a craft answering a commercial need. This course will follow European bookbinding from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, using the bindings themselves to illustrate the aims and intentions of the binding trade. 

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In this “introduction to the modern rare book trade”, two practitioners, one historically (but not exclusively) focussed on twentieth-century English books and the other on early modern continental books, will discuss: trade vocabulary; trends and ideas of collectability; provenance; diversity and inclusion; techniques of research in the trade (including trade bibliography); how marks of ownership change “the meaning of the book”; and fakes and frauds.

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The place of natural history illustration is often overlooked in traditional histories of art and visual culture. But images of the natural world created by such renowned artists as Dürer and Leonardo, lesser-known figures Hoefnagel, Ligozzi, and natural history illustrators Catesby and Ehret, hold an important place in the intersection of art and science. This course offers new perspectives on the ways in which nature has been viewed, drawn, and illustrated in books from the early Renaissance to modern times and examines the making and function of such images.

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This 5-day course introduces a variety of digital methods and tools for book history research, in addition to a historical survey of digitisation and electronic books. The primary purpose of this introduction is to give students a view of the landscape of digital research in book history, including bibliographic data and content management systems, data visualisation, IIIF (the leading standard for image sharing and annotation in libraries and archives), computer vision, and 3D modelling and printing. 

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27 September 2024 | Hereford Cathedral

Hereford Cathedral is home to one of the most ancient and significant collections of medieval manuscripts in Britain. Its treasures include the Hereford Gospels, made in Britain around 800, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi of c.1300 - one of the most famous of the medieval world maps. It also houses the finest surviving specimen of a chained library, a rare survivor of how institutional libraries used to be. 

This special study day offers a rare opportunity to explore these and other of the library's remarkable holdings, in the context of medieval book production, under the expert tuition of Michelle Brown and Rosemary Firman, the Cathedral Librarian.

More information is available to view on the course page.

• Standard: £90
• Concession*: £65

*student/unwaged

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