The Lyell Lectures
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.
The Lyell Lectures 2021–22
Find out more about this year's Lyell Lectures and how to book.
The Lyell Lectures 2020–21
The Genesis, Life, and Afterlife of the Gutenberg Bible
Paul Needham, Princeton
Watch the recordings of the Lyell Lectures 2020–21
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
