News Archives

Censorship from the Inquisition to the Present

The first-round application deadline for this course is Friday, 7 March 2025.

Course Length: 30 hours 
Course Week: 3-8 August 2025 
Format: in person, University of Chicago in Chicago, IL 
Fee: $1,495

This course, which meets in Special Collections at the University of Chicago, will examine the histories of censorship and information control, with a focus on books and on changes in information technologies. Many sessions will focus on censorship in early modern Europe, including the Inquisition and its practices, the impact of the printing press, […]

Print for Children

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 27 July–1 August 2025
Format: in person, Princeton University in Princeton, NJ
Fee: $1,495

Children have been a major audience for print throughout history, and this course will introduce participants to Western children’s print, visual, and material culture and that of China. The course will draw on the rich resources of historical illustrated books, manuscripts, artwork, ephemera, and multimedia artifacts of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton. Attention will be paid to the classic literary genres such as fairy tales, alphabets, […]

Researching Medieval Manuscripts: From Cataloging to Cultural History

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 29 June–4 July 2025
Format: in person, Oxford University in Oxford, UK
Fee: $1,495

Oxford is home not just to lost causes and dreaming spires but to the largest concentration of medieval manuscripts within any European university. This course will give you privileged access to these, as well as a grounding in how to make the most of them. The core skill which you will learn will be how to provide a codicological description of a manuscript, as appears in the catalogs which act as the main reference works for them. […]

Transmission of the Bible from the Beginnings to 1500

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 29 June–4 July 2025
Format: in person, Oxford University in Oxford, UK
Fee: $1,495

Probably no other book has had a deeper and more wide-reaching impact on human culture and history than the collection of sacred texts we know today as the Bible. Billions of people across the world have read or may even possess a printed copy of these texts, but not many of us know the incredible stories behind our modern pocket bibles. It is this gap that the present course is set to fill by exploring the history and development of “the Bible.”

Taking place at the Bodleian Library, […]

Six Hundred Years of Botanical Illustration

Course Length: 26 hours
Course Week: 21–25 July 2025
Format: in person, Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville, VA
Tuition: $1,185
Housing & food: $950*

This course surveys botanical illustration from the late medieval period to modern times, exploiting the outstanding collection of illustrated books and related drawings held in the Oak Spring Garden Library. Taking a broadly chronological approach, the development of botanical illustration is traced from medieval manuscript and early printed herbals, through florilegia and scientific plant illustration in the seventeenth century, […]

Fragmentology

Course Length: 22 hours
Course Week: 17–22 July 2022
Format: online only
Fee: $1,000

The study of medieval manuscript fragments has developed into its own specialization in recent years, incorporating paleography, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, textual studies, art history, bibliography, provenance, and digital humanities, among other disciplines. In this weeklong class, the first of its kind devoted entirely to the discipline of fragmentology, students will learn how to interpret the layers of evidence in early manuscript fragments—identifying the original text, understanding its reuse, and tracing its modern history—in order to understand the complete story of a fragment from its origins to today. […]

Textual Connected Histories: Books and Reading in the Early Modern European World

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

Each session in this 10-hour course will present multiple approaches to the study of connected textual histories. By following the trajectories of a work, a text, or a word, we will investigate the different meanings and stakes involved in various textual migrations, including translations, editions, revisions, and illustrations. The course will address several fundamental questions: How were words that were spoken by Indigenous peoples transcribed, translated, and printed in European texts at the time of the “discoveries” and colonization? How did certain works become “globalized”? What were the reasons for the transformations of the “same” work’s significance? […]

English Bookbindings, 1450–1850: Identification & Interpretation

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,595

A primary aim of this course is to give participants a toolkit to identify and date English bindings on historic books, 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 recognized. It will focus on external, visible features rather than internal features. Although English bindings form the backbone of the course, bindings from continental Europe will be brought in to compare, […]

The Book of Hours, 1250–1550

This seminar focuses on the Book of Hours—the medieval “bestseller”—popular for three hundred years, from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. The course will consider both the textual and pictorial contents of horae. Textual concerns include the range and variety of prayers within the typical manuscript.  Students will learn how to determine a book’s usage, including the localization of its calendar. Because the Book of Hours is also important for the history of art, variations in artistic styles will also be a major concern (concentrating on French and Flemish illumination from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries). […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

“The course gave me a different perspective on early photography and the development of the photobook.” — 2017 student

This course will explore the evolution of the photographically-illustrated book from the first commercially available example (William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature) to the present day. We will focus on the technical developments in the production of photographically-illustrated books, covering both photographic processes themselves and—in greater depth—the developments in photomechanical printing that have driven the historical expansion of the field. Students will look at key examples, exploring the books themselves and their surviving archival evidence for the technical, […]

The Books of the Plays: Shakespeare & Print

It is a cliché of Shakespeare scholarship that he was a “man of the theater.” But he was also a product of print. This class will be an intensive exploration of the ways in which print was responsible for Shakespeare (or better, for “Shakespeare”). No manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays have survived, so print is what allows us to read and even perform Shakespeare now. But it wasn’t inevitable that his plays reached print, and, even when they did, it wasn’t inevitable that they would have survived. (Think about Love’s Labor’s Won, a title mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, […]

Textual Mobilities: Works, Books & Reading Across Early Modern Europe

“Be prepared for, and excited about, a very inter-disciplinary conversation!” — 2016 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia, PA
Fee: $1,495

This course considers histories of books, texts, and reading using the lens of connected history. The new global history has brought an ever-increasing scholarly focus on exchanges, on trade and colonialism, and on the movements of peoples, ideas, and goods in and across spaces. Here we will investigate what these approaches may mean for book history. […]

Book Production and Social Practice in Early Modern Europe and America

Working outward from the material book, this course will highlight the unique value of book history in the study of culture, religion, and politics of the early modern period. Case studies will range from Europe, to England, and North America c.1500–1800, and will include John Foxe’s book of martyrs, the Essais of Montaigne, and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Each student will also work closely with one historical source selected by the instructors based on his or her special interests, culminating in a brief presentation to the group on Friday. The course assumes a basic familiarity with book history, […]

Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts

This course is aimed at those who, whether by professional or personal interests, seek some basics on what can be a difficult field. Because of their light-sensitive nature, manuscripts are almost never on permanent exhibition anywhere; furthermore, their consultation is often restricted to the learned few. The course will emphasize illumination, and will thus discuss chronological and stylistic development, iconography, nomenclature (how all those “Masters of ?” get their names) and other pertinent terminology, and text/picture relationships. The course will concentrate on liturgical service books, and thus lectures will treat such relevant topics as Medieval Catholic dogma, liturgical practices, calendars and concepts of time, […]

Seminar in Western Codicology

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 28 July–2 August 2024
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,395

The principles, bibliography, and methodology of the analysis and description of Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The course includes a survey of the development of the physical features of manuscript books and practical work by the students on particular points. Applicants must have considerable background in the historical humanities, and a good basic knowledge of Latin and Latin paleography is needed.

Traditional research on manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is based principally on the study of script and illumination. […]

The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800

“This course was an excellent balance of lecture, book examination, historical techniques instruction, and discussion.” — 2016 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 7–12 July 2024
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will consider the production, formal qualities, and role of images in scientific books. The focus of the course will be on how and why images were made. Students will be asked to consider images with the same attention to the techniques and conditions of production given to verbal texts. […]

The Stationers’ Company to 1775

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 28 July–1 August 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $900

The Stationers’ Company, founded in 1403 and incorporated in 1557, dominated London’s trade in printed books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following the loss of its monopoly over printing in 1695, its regulatory powers diminished, but it retained a vital role in the life of the London trade, not least through its lucrative joint-stock publishing venture, known as the “English Stock.” Among its members can be counted nearly all of London’s leading printers and publishers, and its roster also includes thousands of lesser-known men and women in the trade: typefounders, […]

The Printed Book in the West to 1800

“I can imagine no more effective means of gaining such a comprehensive introduction to the history of the book in so short a time. This course is wonderful and I highly recommend it.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will cover the development of the Western printed book in the hand-press period, that is, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, […]

Fifteenth-Century Books in Print & Manuscript

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 27 July–1 August 2025
Format: in person, Princeton University in Princeton, NJ
Fee: $1,495

The use of a wide variety of evidence—paper, parchment, type, script, rubrication and illumination, bindings, ownership marks, and annotations—can shed light both on questions of analytical bibliography and on wider questions of book distribution, provenance, and use. There will be a fairly detailed discussion and analysis of both good and bad features in existing reference works on manuscripts and early printing.

This course is intended to serve as a general introduction to bibliographical analysis. […]

The Book in the Manuscript Era

“This was a balanced, authoritative overview which gave us the overall contours of the subject in a reliable way, and made a great foundation for further work.” —2017 student

An introduction to the manuscript book in the West that covers the period from late antiquity to the beginning of the sixteenth century, using the manuscript resources of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Topics include: the book form; its materials and construction; the writing and decorating of books; different types of books: biblical, theological, historical, poetic, legal, classical, liturgical and devotional; the histories of books; […]