Fergus Bovill

Fergus holds a BA in Art History from the University of York and an MSt in Medieval Studies from Merton College, Oxford. Although a medievalist by training, his research centres on the histories and reception of medieval illuminated manuscripts in the long 19th century. His DPhil project investigates the cutting up en masse of medieval books across Europe during this period, their afterlives, and what this reveals about changing attitudes towards 'the medieval' and its material/visual culture. His project will offer the first book-length study on the culture of assembling illuminated cuttings in albums and collages that proliferated from the around the last decade of the 18th century. Focusing on the formative, generative dimensions to such acts of destruction, overlooked in scholarship to date, it advocates for a new approach to objects of this kind: one that studies them not simply as assemblages of individual fragments from medieval originals, but objects and artefacts in their own right.
 
Co-funded by the Clarendon Fund and Merton College, his research explores the windows albums and collages open onto the artistic, social, cultural, and intellectual worlds in which they were assembled, and how they force us to rethink our understanding of the life and afterlives of the medieval book as an object, idea, and symbol. It will draw attention to the complex ways illuminated manuscripts were remade and reimagined by their post-medieval audiences, and consider their implications for how we approach, preserve, teach, and display medieval objects today.

Supervisors: Nancy Thebaut and Henrike Lähnemann