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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). 

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

 

FEBRUARY

36 Kasen: the thirty-six immortals of Japanese poetry

3 February – 4 March 

This small display of illustrated manuscripts from the Bodleian Japanese Library will celebrate the thirty-six great poets. Despite their ancient history, the thirty-six poets, one of the most important and durable icons in Japanese culture, are virtually unknown outside Japan.

 

MARCH

Haydn à l’anglaise: his songs in late 18th-century England - including some he did not know he had written

10 March – 8 April

Haydn’s songs were so popular that new ones had to be invented. Publishers took melodies from his instrumental music and ‘adapted’ them to English poetry. This display coincides with a lecture on 30 March by Dr Derek McCulloch and a short concert by his ensemble Café Mozart, who have recently recorded some of this music from the printed sources in the Bodleian Library.

 

WORLD BOOK DAY DISPLAY

Jane Austen: a literary genius at work

1 March, 10.00 – 16.00

Divinity School, Bodleian Library

A one-day display of Jane Austen’s manuscripts from the Bodleian Library collections showing the newly acquired handwritten manuscript of her unfinished novel The Watsons. Extensively revised and corrected throughout, the manuscript is a testimony of Jane Austen’s efforts to give shape to the earliest ideas as they pour onto paper, as she reviews, revises, deletes and underscores. The Watsons is the very genesis of fiction from one of the Britain’s greatest and best-loved writers. Also included in the display will be Volume the First, a manuscript of Austen’s juvenilia.