Rare Book School Guidelines and Recommendations Regarding Infectious Illness Rare Book School is very excited to welcome back to Charlottesville—and to our partner institutions in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Chicago, …
Rare Book School Executive Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. delivered the 2025 commencement address, on the vital importance of American higher education, at the University of Virginia’s Final Exercises this …
Rare Book School is thrilled to announce the lineup for this summer’s lecture series at the University of Virginia. All lectures are free and open to the public. Unless noted, these …
Book historians have long faced a methodological dilemma. Do we want to study particular material objects in granular detail, or are we primarily concerned with more general patterns connected to …
What do mother-and-daughter book collectors, nineteenth-century book cover designers, and an art museum librarian have in common? Rare Book School, of course! But there’s more to the story. All of …
Illustrated by a cycle of nine historiated initials of scenes from the Old Testament, which function typologically as prefigurations of events from the life of Christ, and by ten full-page …
Printing technology accelerated the forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation. But it also created a major new business problem: publishing risk. A publisher had to spend large sums of …
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Central Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors from distant lands. While these men were not at the forefront of overseas expansion, …
This presentation explores the legal lives of the hundreds of stationery-bound books that survive in English court archives. Who made them, who used them? How did handfuls of paper stitched …
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, cheap and shoddy reprintings of Jane Austen’s novels performed the heavy lifting of bringing her work and reputation before the general public. …
Throughout the world, for hundreds of years, people have expressed themselves by making plain and decorated objects in imitation of specific titles and types of books. No genre of book …
What did American colonists need to know? What should they believe? The Virginia Company had clear ideas about such things as demonstrated by the significant sums spent on books for …