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Digital Codicology & Book History

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia, PA
Fee: $1,495

This course explores the interplay between books as physical objects and their digital counterparts. The materials focused on will include Western manuscripts and printed books up to 1600, and non-Western (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian) manuscripts through the twentieth century, drawing on the strengths of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts. The course is designed for students who are curious about how digitization is reshaping the study of early books. […]

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, […]

Medieval Manuscript Fragments: Cataloging & Discoverability

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

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. Hundreds of North American collections house early fragments, whether binding waste, cuttings, or single leaves, and most of these are in need of effective description to facilitate discoverability. In this weeklong class—intended primarily for catalogers, curators, and librarians—we will focus on cataloging and discoverability. […]

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. […]

Introduction to Islamicate Manuscripts

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

This course is for students who have not yet had the opportunity to study Islamicate manuscripts. It is an introductory course and will take a broad view of the manuscript arts from the origins of Islam in the seventh century through the early modern period (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), encompassing Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Indian cultures. The course will focus primarily on materials (binding and paper), layout, scripts, and decoration and will be taught through the rich collection of Islamic manuscripts that make up the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project. […]

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 History & Construction of the Mesoamerican Codex, 600–1550

Of the thousands of pre-Columbian books produced, only a handful have survived to the present day, all of which shed a bright light on the history, language, and book production methods and techniques of the Aztecs and the Maya.

This class will introduce the Mesoamerican Codex both as a physical and cultural object. By discussing not only the construction, material make-up, and pigments of the codices, but also by considering broader cultural questions regarding their languages, iconography, and provenance, students can begin to understand how these books functioned within indigenous societies and how they were perceived by Europeans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. […]

Introduction to Islamicate Manuscripts

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 6–11 July 2025
Format: in person, Free Library of Philadelphia
Fee: $1,495

Though the arts of the manuscript book constitute one of the most vital forms of artistic creativity and practice within the Islamic world, they have received relatively little attention within the general field of manuscript studies in Europe and America. This course provides an introduction to the history of Islamicate manuscripts and the constituent arts of calligraphy, illumination, illustration, and binding from the origins of Islam in the seventh century through the early modern period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), […]

Advanced Seminar in Medieval Manuscript Studies

“I would definitely recommend the course to anyone who is past the introductory level and would like to enhance their skills.” —2017 student

This advanced course in medieval manuscript studies will build upon the skills acquired in introductory classes in paleography, codicology, and the history of the hand-produced book; it is intended to deepen an individual’s understanding of the varied approaches to medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

Primary working sessions will be hands-on analysis and discussion of fragments and codices (both complete and incomplete) in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—one of the foremost collections in North America. […]

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. […]

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 Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 7–12 July 2024
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,395

This course is intended for anyone who is curious about English manuscripts from the Tudor and Stuart periods. It provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on English secretary hand. Working from digital images and an online transcription platform, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. We will also experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, […]

The Medieval Manuscript in the Twenty-First Century

“A thrilling introduction to both codicology and digital humanities for someone with any humanistic background.” —2017 student

This course is designed to introduce students of both the digital humanities and manuscript studies to the concepts and realities of working with medieval manuscripts in the twenty-first century. Through the course, students and faculty will examine materials from the collections of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, as well as digitized versions of those materials and others.

Students in the course will consider four issues relating to using medieval manuscripts in a digital world. […]

Introduction to Paleography, 800–1500

“This course was very useful and packed with information.” — 2016 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 23–28 July 2023
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,395

This course provides an introduction to Latinate scripts of the western European Middle Ages and the Renaissance from 700 to 1500, from pre-Caroline through Humanistic scripts. The course has three goals: literacy (learning to read different scripts and expand abbreviations); attribution (learning to use different script characteristics to determine an approximate date and place of origin); and description (learning to identify the hands of different individuals within a particular codex or group of related codices). […]