HIST41430: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BOOK: CODICOLOGY AND CULTURE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE

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• To achieve an understanding of the manuscript book as a physical artefact, and how its nature affected the transmission and reception of knowledge

• The course will comprise five main units delivered in twelve sessions. The first four (based in a seminar room) are devoted to exploring in turn the nature and implications of the different aspects of the manuscript and early printed book
• Unit 1: Support and fabric: parchment, paper and preparation
• Unit 2: Content: scribes, texts and transmission
• Unit 3: Articulation, presentation and communication: rubric and decoration
• Unit 4: Preservation: binding, storage and the organisation of knowledge
• Unit 5: Will be a 'practical' session, applying the training to the interpretation of real manuscripts (in the Cathedral Library or UL Special Collections)

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• A broad knowledge of the evolving ways and contexts in which manuscripts were made, and of the modern scholarship thereon

Subject-specific Skills:

• An ability to describe a manuscript accurately and technically
• An ability to understand the physical evidence of manuscripts and to deploy it as an integral part of historical, literary, art-historical or bibliographical enquiry

Key Skills:

• A professional approach to handling, examining and interpreting manuscripts so as to investigate them thoroughly while respecting their integrity, fragility and value

• A series of 12 seminar-lectures, eight given weekly in Michaelmas Term, four given fortnightly in Epiphany Term, with extensive use of slides and other reproductions showing the relevant features in particularly revealing manuscripts, will convey the basic elements of this unfamiliar field, while offering a flexible forum for question and answer, plus general debate
• Guided reading will enable students to expand and consolidate their knowledge - thus supplying the 'subject knowledge' and 'skills'
• One or more sessions in the Cathedral Library or UL Special Collections, examining actual manuscripts, will provide a structured and carefully supervised opportunity for putting into practice the skills learned in the seminar room - thus developing the 'key skills'
• The function of the course is to provide skills and information that different students will deploy in different ways according to their particular research interests
• Correspondingly, the assessment is designed to test the core content and its intelligent application, while allowing - indeed encouraging - flexibility of approach

An essay of 3,000 words. Either a description, analysis and cultural exploration of a particular manuscript or incunable; or a thematic study in which codicological methods and evidence form an integral part of the enquiry

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