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This season’s publications include Rachel Burns’s A History of Old English Verse Layout: Poetics on The Page, which is the third book in our thought-provoking new series BOOK CULTURES, edited by Elaine Treharne (Stanford), Mateusz Fafinski (Erfurt) and Bonnie Mak (Illinois).

This series responds to a growing realization by researchers and practitioners of the significance of bookish forms of communication—their wholeness, materiality, contexts of production, and multiple meanings through time and space.

Rachel Burns’s book follows two other recent publications in the series: Astrid Smith’s Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age and Elaine Treharne’s own book Disrupting Categories, 1050–1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts. New to the series in 2025 will be J.D. Sargan’s Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: Experiments in Bibliography.

In Elaine Treharne’s words, this new series “aims to produce short and focused scholarly contributions to the field of bibliographical, media, and manuscript studies”, and “to start conversations and highlight innovative and creative thinking about all forms of written and illustrated communication from any period and any global tradition. We invite all scholars to participate in this ongoing discussion.”

So if you have a book proposal that you think might suit our brief, email Anna Henderson, Director of Acquisitions, on [email protected]

For further information about the series, see https://www.arc-humanities.org/search-results-list/?series=book-cultures.

For those interested in Anna Henderson’s abseiling exploits back in May, which helped raise £89,000 towards Exeter Cathedral’s new cloister gallery https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-63661129, the image (see left) is the new window paid for by these funds. Anna attended the official opening of Exeter Cathedral’s new cloister gallery in October. The gallery stands on the site of a medieval precursor that was demolished in 1657. For a time this housed a medieval library, and Exeter Cathedral is one of the very few medieval institutions in England that has kept good numbers of its ancient books.