A painted portrait of a man sitting in a leather chair - he wears a tweed suit, and looks into the mid-distance. He holds a pipe in his right hand

Lecture series

The Lyell Lectures

Annual lecture series

The Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford University is endowed by a bequest from James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell (1871–1948), a solicitor, book collector and bibliographer.

Each year since 1952, a distinguished scholar has been elected to deliver the lectures, usually six in number, on any topic of bibliography, broadly conceived.

J.P.R. Lyell lived in Oxford and (on his retirement) in Abingdon from 1927 until the end of his life. Even as a young man he was interested in collecting early printed books, and he made a study of early book illustration in Spain. In the 1930s he began collecting medieval manuscripts, eventually accumulating some 250 of these, of which one hundred were bequeathed to the Bodleian Library. A further series of some 65 manuscripts, mostly post-medieval, were bought by the Library from his executors.

The first Lyell lectures, for the academic year 1952–3, were delivered by Neil R. Ker, university reader in palaeography and fellow of Magdalen College.

In 2025 the Lyell Lectures will be delivered by Professor Leah Price.

Image: Portrait of James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell (1871–1948) by Helen McDougall Campbell. Bodleian Library LP 827

2020s

Date	Reader	Lecture series title	Publication / Recording
2023–24	Professor Stephen Oakley	Copying the Classics (and Fathers): explorations in the transmission of Latin text	Watch the 2023–24 lectures
2022–23	Professor Ann M Blair	In the scholar’s workshop: amanuenses in early modern Europe	Watch the 2022–23 lectures
2021–22	Professor Susan Rankin	From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books & Musical Notations, 900–1150	Watch the 2021–22 lectures
2020–21	Paul Needham	The Genesis, Life, and Afterlife of the Gutenberg Bible	Watch the 2020–21 lectures

2010s

Date	Reader	Lecture series title	Publication / Recording
2019–20	Marc Smith	Writing models from manuscript to print: France, England and Europe, c.1400–1800	Watch the 2019–20 lectures
2018–19	Richard Sharpe	Libraries and books in medieval England: the role of libraries in a changing book economy	Watch the 2018–19 lectures
2017–18	David Pearson	Book Ownership in Stuart England	Watch the 2017–18 lectures Oxford University Press, 2021
2016–17	Paul Nelles	The Vatican Library and the Counter-Reformation
2015–16	Teresa Webber	Public Reading and its Books: Monastic Ideals and Practice in England c.1000–c.1300
2014–15	Michael Suarez, SJ	The reach of bibliography	Listen to the 2014–5 lectures
2013–14	H.R. Woudhuysen	'Almost Identical': Copying Books in England, 1600–1900	Watch an introduction to the 2014 lecture series
2012–13	Richard Beadle	Late medieval English autograph writings and their uses
2011–12	Lukas Erne	Shakespeare and the book trade	Cambridge University Press, 2013
2010–11	David Parker	Describing the New Testament	Oxford University Press, 2012

2000s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
2009–10	Ian Maclean	The business of scholarship: the trade in Latin books in the age of confessions, 1560–1630	Scholarship, Commerce, Religion. Harvard University Press, 2012
2008–9	Christopher F R de Hamel	Fragments in Book Bindings
2007–8	Kristian Jensen	Collecting Incunabula: Enlightenment, revolution and the market – rediscovering and re-creating the earliest printed books in the eighteenth century	Cambridge University Press
2006–7	Mirella Ferrari	The scriptorium and library of Bobbio
2005–6	Leslie Howsam	Historical knowledge and British publishers, 1850–1950: discipline and narrative	BL /Toronto UP, 2009
2004–5	Reinhard Wittmann	Literary life and book-market in Germany under the Swastika 1933–1945
2003–4	Kathleen L Scott	Suppleatur per ymaginacionem : Exceptional images in later medieval English manuscripts	London, 2007
2002–3	Nigel G Wilson	The world of books in Byzantium
2001–2	Bruce Bryning Redford	Designing the Life of Johnson	Oxford University Press, 2002
2000–1	Rodney Malcolm Thomson	Books and learning in twelfth-century England: the ending of 'Alter Orbis'	Red Gull Press, 2006

1990s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
1999–2000	David McKitterick	Set in print: The fortunes of an idea, c.1450–1800	Cambridge University Press, 2003
1998–9	Malcolm B Parkes	Their hands before our eyes: A closer look at scribes	Ashgate, 2008
1996–7	Robert Darnton	Policing literature in eighteenth-century Paris
1995–6	Peter Beal	In praise of scribes: Manuscripts and their makers in seventeenth-century England	Oxford University Press, 1998
1994–5	Henri-Jean Martin	Du manuscrit au livre imprimé: mise en page et mise en texte des textes littéraires Français de la fin due XVe siècle au milieu du XVIIe siècle	Electre, 2000
1993–4	Joseph Burney Trapp	Illustrations of Petrarch from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century	Quaderni petrarcheschi, 1996
1992–3	Bernhard Fabian	English authors and German publishers in the eighteenth century
1991–2	R H Rouse	Book-producers and book-production in Paris: family, shop and neighbourhood on the Rue neuve Notre-Dame, 1200–1500	Harvey Miller, 1998 / 2000
1990–1	A R A Hobson	Two renaissance book-collectors: Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their libraries and bookbindings	Cambridge University Press, 1998

1980s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
1989–90	Elizabeth L Eisenstein	Grub Street abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution	Oxford University Press, 1992
1988–9	Donald H Reiman	The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private	Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
1987–8	D F McKenzie	Bibliography and history: seventeenth-century England
1986–7	Mary Pollard	Dublin Trade in Books 1550 to 1800	Oxford University Press, 1989
1985–6	Edwin Wolf	Books, bookmen, and booksellers in colonial Philadelphia	Oxford University Press, 1988
1984–5	Gordon Norton Ray	The Art Deco book in France	Univerity of Virginia Bibliographical Society, 2005
1983–4	Robert Shackleton	The bibliographical history of Montesquieu
1982–3	Jonathan J G Alexander	Creation and transmission: methods of work of manuscript illuminators in the Middle Ages	Yale, 1993
1981–2	Berthold Wolpe	The quest for Beauchesne: contributions to the history of Elizabethan calligraphy and print-making
1980–1	Ian Gilbert Philip	The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries	Oxford University Press, 1983

1970s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
1979–80	Monsignor José Ruysschaert	Recherches vaticanes sur la miniature italienne du quinzième siecle
1978–9	Howard Millar Nixon	English decorated bookbindings
1977–8	Mme Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer	La famille Fournier et la fonderie typographique en France au XVIIIe siècle
1976–7	T Julian Brown	The insular system of scripts, c.600–c.850
1975–6	David F Foxon	Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade	Oxford University Press, 1991
1974–5	T A M Bishop	The script of Corbie	1977
1973–4	Alan W Tyson	Beethoven: Studies in the genesis of his music 1803-9
1972–3	André Masson	Le catalogue figuratif: a pictorial guide to the contents of European libraries from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century	Oxford University Press, 1981
1971–2	Wytze Hellinga	The bibliography of early printing in the Low Countries between 1767 and 1874
1970–1	Otto Ernst Pächt	The art of drawing within the realm of medieval illumination

1960s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
1969–70	William Burton Todd	Scholarly texts: variable techniques and designs
1968–9	Cornelis Reedijk	The labours of Hercules: some observations on the history of Erasmus's Opera omnia	Basel, 1980
1967–8	Harry Graham Carter	A View of Early Typography up to about 1600	Oxford University Press, 1969
1966–7	Anthony Ian Doyle	Some English scribes and scriptoria of the later middle ages	Published as articles
1965–6	Simon Harcourt Nowell-Smith	International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the reign of Queen Victoria	Oxford University Press, 1968
1964–5	William Beattie	Some aspects of the history of the Advocates' Library
1963–4	Jacques Guignard	L'Art de le reliure en France et l'action des bibliophiles: quelques aspects de la question
1962–3	A N L Munby	Three nineteenth-century collectors of manuscripts	Oxford University Press, 1972
1961–2	Philip Hofer	The artist and the book in France
1960–1	Henry Graham Pollard	The medieval book trade in Oxford

1950s

Date	Reader	Lecture title	Publication / Recording
1958–9	Fredson T Bowers	Bibliography and Textual Criticism	Oxford University Press, 1964
1956–7	Stanley Arthur Morison	Aspects of Authority and Freedom in relation to Greco-Latin Script, Inscription, and Type	Privately printed as pamphlets, 1957
1954–5	Walter Wilson Greg	Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650	Oxford University Press, 1956
1952–3	Neil Ripley Ker	English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1960). Ker's first lecture, 'The manuscripts of James P. R. Lyell, delivered at the Ashmolean Museum, 29 Jan 1953, in accordance with the terms of Lyell's will, as the first Lyell Lecture by the first James P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography, was printed in Catalogue of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian Library Oxford by James P. R. Lyell, by Albinia de la Mare (Oxford, 1971), xv-xxi. The more complete typescript is now Bodl. MS Eng. c. 2013.	Oxford University Press, 1960