Lucky the man who enjoys what he does! I shall be sharing some of my great loves by teaching them at Christ Church University in Canterbury this autumn. If you are historically minded but hindered by early documents, come and learn some classical Latin (always a good basis for the later mediaeval), and if you can’t read early forms of English, then come and practise your palaeographical skills with a variety of late mediaeval, Tudor and Stuart documents. Allied to both of these subjects, a day course on classical manuscripts and early printed books will show how classical texts survived the Dark Ages, were rewritten under Charlemagne in his especially devised and wonderfully legible new script, and then frequently copied in succeeding centuries. But copying often meant gradual textual corruption, and at the advent of printing in the 1400s, how fit were texts to be committed to the printed page? Here enters the world of textual criticism which has tested some of the most acute minds in the history of scholarship. As a boy I was mad on stamp collecting – and still am! This still hugely popular and very visual hobby attracts millions of collector and millions of pounds in the formation of great collections. Every country in the world has issued stamps reflecting its own history, geography, products and famous people, starting with the 1d black in 1840. The world is your oyster on the album page!
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