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 will challenge students to:

• destabilize and broaden the traditional definition of ‘map’.
• recognize maps as socially constructed objects that are indicative of the values and biases of their makers and the cultures that created them.
• be able to analyse and catalogue maps for a variety of research purposes.
• discuss changes in map technology and style without recourse to a progressive narrative of scientific improvement.

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This course will give participants a toolkit to identify and date English bindings on historic books of the handpress period, distinguishing the contemporary from the later and the repaired, covering the progression of decorative styles which enable simple as well as upmarket bindings to be recognised. 

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This course examines the characteristics of bookshops and bookselling in Britain and beyond with a focus on the eighteenth century onwards when books became cheaper and more accessible.

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This course will provide students with an introduction to typography in the early modern period, focussing on English books but taking an international outlook. It combines perspectives from descriptive bibliography, type design, literary history, and the study of the material text. We will cover the technical aspects of typography, including how fonts were manufactured, distributed, and used, procedures for identifying and dating type, as well as the language used by typographers and bibliographers to describe it.

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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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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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The course is an intensive survey of the origins of, and the changes in, textual culture that took place between c. 2500 BC and 400 AD. It will set these changes into their related historical contexts and place close emphasis on the material nature of writing and book construction.

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This course introduces a range of modern pamphlets published internationally in the 20th and 21st centuries, but with reference to significant earlier examples of the form published from Britain. Seminars will involve discussing, seeing and handling texts ranging from Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) to the Internationalist Commune of Rojava’s Make Rojava Green Again (2018).      

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This course will introduce students to health-related books and manuscripts as objects and what they can tell us about attitudes towards medicine and illness across time and space. It considers the impact of collecting, loss and survival on our understandings of past experiences of health and provides opportunities to handle and study these items, including ways to approach difficult or sensitive material.

Focusing on items held by Wellcome Collection, this course is aimed at postgraduate students, early career researchers, heritage professionals and those with a general interest in health-related books and manuscripts. 

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