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Home  »   About Us  »  Exhibitions and Events

The Bodleian Libraries offer a range of exhibitions and events throughout the year.

MAIN EXHIBITIONS

The Romance of the Middle Ages

28 January – 13 May 2012

Exhibition Room, Bodleian Library
Old Schools Quad, Catte Street, Oxford OX1 3BG

The Romance of the Middle Ages exhibition showcases the Bodleian’s outstanding collection of manuscripts and early printed books containing medieval romance. These range from lavishly illustrated volumes about King Arthur or Alexander the Great, to personal notebooks and fragments only saved by chance. This exhibition highlights works by great figures of English medieval literature such as Geoffrey Chaucer and the anonymous Gawain-Poet. We set these texts alongside books from around Britain and Europe, and artworks that illustrate romance legends. 

The amazing variety of medieval romance continues to feed our imagination. This colourful exhibition looks at how its compelling stories have inspired writers and artists across the centuries from the early modern period (including Shakespeare, Ariosto and Cervantes); through medievalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including Walter Scott, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris); to contemporary versions and adaptations (including manuscripts and drafts by JRR Tolkien, Philip Pullman and the Monty Python team). 

The exhibition is curated by Dr Nicholas Perkins, Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hugh's College and University Lecturer in Medieval English, University of Oxford. He has published widely on medieval literature, and on how modern writers and artists have been inspired by the Middle Ages. 

Opening Hours:
Monday to Friday 9.00 – 17.00
Saturday 9.00 – 16.30
Sunday 11.00 – 17.00

A series of lunchtime talks will run alongside the exhibition: http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/romance-lectures

Exhibition website: http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Follow us on twitter @bodleianlibs #BODromance

 

FORTHCOMING

Dickens and his World

2 June – 28 October 2012

Exhibition Room, Bodleian Library
Old Schools Quad, Catte Street, Oxford OX1 3BG

The Bodleian Library will be celebrating the great novelist's bicentenary with an exhibition this summer showing something of the world he lived in using contemporary materials, much of it ephemeral, prompted by quotations from his writings. There will be sections on the many stage adaptations that were often performed before the novels had completed their serialization; the plays Dickens produced and acted in, sometimes privately; Victorian London and its amusements; the coming of the railways; domestic entertainments; and his novels and other writings in their original form.

TEMPORARY DISPLAYS 

Old Library Entrance, Bodleian Library
Old Schools Quad, Catte Street, Oxford OX1 3BG

Opening Hours
Monday to Friday 9.00 - 19.00
Saturday 9.00 - 16.30
Sunday 11.00 - 17.00

Admission Free

 

DESIGNER BOOKBINDERS UK TOUR

31 March – 27 May

Designer Bookbinders is one of the foremost societies devoted to the craft of fine bookbinding 

and the display at the Bodleian Library is part of their first major British tour for some years. 

The show represents contemporary British bookbinding and includes bindings by some of the 

most respected practitioners working today. These artists push the boundaries of technique and 

craftsmanship to present the bound text as a unique art object. 

Also on display is a personal selection of bookbindings from the collection of David Arrowsmith.

 

TITANIC CALLING - WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS DURING THE GREAT DISASTER

14 April – 13 May

This year sees the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic on the night of 14/15 April 1912. To remember the tragic event, this display draws on the Library’s Marconi Archives to illuminate the unfolding drama as recorded in the unique radio operators’ logs and messages between the ship and shore wireless stations involved. It complements the publication (by Bodleian Library Publishing in association with Bernard Quaritch Ltd.) of Titanic Calling: Wireless Communications during the Great Disaster.

 

JAIN TREASURES AT THE BODLEIAN

19 May – 1 July

Jainism is one of the main and most ancient Indian religious traditions. This display shows original manuscripts preserved at the Bodleian Library together with photographs of manuscripts preserved at the Wellcome Trust, London. It is part of the Jainpedia project, managed by the Institute of Jainology, London, with partner institutions.