The Panizzi Lectures 2023. Thomas Hearne: A Life of Books
Lecture One: Hearne’s Matters
28 November
Professor Henry Woudhuysen gives the first of his 2023 Panizzi Lectures. Although described as being the grumpiest man in Oxford - not just of his time, but of all times - Thomas Herne (1678-1735) was one of England’s earliest historians of the book as a physical object. The 2023 Panizzi lectures survey his copious notebooks, letters, books and manuscripts to reconstruct his life and work as a librarian, collector, and publisher.
In his first lecture, ‘A Life of Fifty odd Years’, Henry Woudhuysen focuses on the contents of the 145 notebooks in which Hearne recorded his life and work. We look at Hearne’s initially happy early years; his patrons and introduction to the world of letters, his association with St Edmund Hall, Oxford and his work at the Bodleian and the Oxford Press, and finish with his expulsion from the Library. We explore how he developed a lifelong interest in the history of manuscripts and printed books, especially in their physical forms.
Henry R. Woudhuysen FBA has been Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, since 2012. Before then, he spent thirty years in the English Department at University College London. His academic interests lie in English literature, bibliography, palaeography, and editorial theory and practice. He has been President of the Bibliographical Society and of the Oxford Bibliographical Society. In 2014, he gave the Lyell lectures at Oxford.
The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by "eminent scholars of the book" and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi (1797 - 1879)