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, […]

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. […]

The History of Typography

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

This course will provide a general overview of the history of typography and related letterforms in the West from the fifteenth century to the present day. It will cover description and identification of types, including moveable metal type, wood type, type for machine production, and digital type. The course will also aim to place type and lettering within historical, cultural, and political perspectives through a series of case studies that examine the creation, […]

The Printing Press in Spanish America, 1500–1830

Course Length: 22 hours
Course Week: 28 July–1 August 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $1,100

This course will examine the production and consumption of print in Spanish America, with a focus on New Spain—the Spanish Empire’s largest viceroy­alty in the Americas, including present-day Mexico, Central America, most of the Caribbean, the U.S. South and Southwest, and the Philippines. The course will start with the European invasion of the Americas in 1492, analyzing the Spanish Crown’s deployment of the press as a tool to establish sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands during the sixteenth century. […]

Spanish American Textual Technologies to 1700

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

This course will explore the history of textual technologies in the region now referred to as Spanish America, from the pre-contact period to the colonial period (c. 300 BC to c. 1700 AD). The framework of “textual technologies”—as opposed to “the book”—encompasses the variety of material modes of writing and recording employed before and after 1492. We will cover a broad range of topics, from stone inscriptions and painted texts on artifacts of a variety of materials to knot-tying, writing with ink on linen paper, and manual printing on the moveable-type press. […]

Six Degrees of Phillis Wheatley

“Never has a single professional development opportunity so profoundly transformed my research, thinking, and teaching.” – 2021 student

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 9–13 June 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $900

If you Google “Phillis Wheatley,” the widely reproduced engraving of her silhouette is easy to find. The image remembers the young (and at times, enslaved) poet sitting alone with pen in hand. It memorializes the writer at her craft, and it also fixes a lone, singular Wheatley in time. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, […]

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? […]

Making the Early Modern Illustrated Scientific Book

Assisted by Caroline Duroselle-Melish

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

This online course will concentrate on the production history of illustrated books in the fields of science, medicine, technology and natural history between 1500–1800. Topics will include letterpress book production; woodcut and engraved illustration; the cutting of woodblocks and the engraving of copperplates; the printing of woodcuts with text and the separate printing of engravings; and bibliographical analysis and description. We will look at online books and discuss what can—and cannot—be learned from digital surrogates, how to research the production of illustrated books, […]

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, […]

The Eighteenth-Century Book

An intensive investigation of the world of print in the eighteenth century, this class will emphasize the material realities of the book in this period as well as consider its role as a major agent of communication. Innovations in printing and illustration will be studied. The rise of scientific and academic publishing, the appearance of the encyclopedia, the immediacy of newspaper and pamphlet publishing, the nature of the book trade, the notion of authorship, the development of copyright protections, and the emergence of modern literary forms will be central to the class investigations. Set amongst significant historical events, from the Enlightenment to the American and French revolutions, […]

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 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; […]

The Bible and Histories of Reading

**Due to unforeseen circumstances, this course has been cancelled for Summer 2025.**

“I came away with a broader understanding of how the biblical texts have been transmitted and used over time and place.” —2017 student

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

In this course, we will be drawing on the extensive materials at Penn to explore how “the bible” was constituted through a variety of material forms for liturgical use, […]

The History of the Book in America, c.1700–1830

This course will focus on the production, distribution, and reception of books, newspapers, and other printed materials in colonial and early national America up to the 1820s. Among the specific topics to be considered are: the role of imported books, the factors limiting the spread of printing, the proliferation of newspapers and circulating libraries, the press in the Revolutionary era, the shift from printing to publishing in the 1790s, the reprint trade, copyright legislation and practice, author-publisher relations, the decentralized nature of the book trade, the rise of cooperative interregional book distribution systems, the structural flaws in the book trade, […]

Printed Books to 1800: Description & Analysis

“Connecting the physicality of the pressroom to format and collation gave me a great model to think through the discovery process with a new book.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

The course is intended for collectors, booksellers, librarians, educators, and others who seek an introduction to the physical aspects of books printed during the hand-press period (1450–1800). Via lectures and hands-on workshops, the course covers the identification and description of paper (laid vs. […]

Medieval & Early Renaissance Bookbinding Structures

Students will investigate the diversities of European bookbinding structures, up to and including the early period of more generalized practice and division of labor. Topics of the course include identification (where possible) of the main types of binding structures; dating and provenance; recognition and recording of materials and techniques.

This course is aimed at librarians, archivists, art historians, and conservators specializing in early books and manuscripts, and others who handle such material. The course will emphasize studies of the physical book and binding craft techniques of the period. It will proceed by means of lecture and discussion, and employ a considerable number of slides, […]