jamesgray2

This semester, Dr Anne Kirkham has been teaching a Level 3 course on Art in Medieval Books.

The course introduced students to the glorious imagery on the pages of many medieval books in the West, from the first regular appearances of a ‘rectangular object with pages’ in the fifth century to the time when printed books with printed images became relatively commonplace in the sixteenth century.Students studied how the complex history of this period influenced the production of manuscripts and the art that they contain. The course also considered the effects of collecting and connoisseurship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the practices of conservation and curating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Several classes were at John Rylands Library, where specific objects were studied at close-hand, and specialist staff, including the conservation and photographic teams, provided privileged insights into the work of a special collections library.

The final…