Fergus Bovill

Research Topic: Breaking, Remaking, Reimagining: The Afterlives of Illuminated Manuscripts in the 19th Century

My research centres on the histories and reception of medieval illuminated manuscripts in the long 19th century. It 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 and visual culture. My 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.

This 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, more broadly, their implications for how we approach, preserve, teach, and display medieval objects today.

The project is funded by the Oxford-Open-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, the University's Clarendon Fund, and the Merton College David Ure Scholarship in the Humanities. 

Supervisors: Nancy Thebaut and Henrike Lähnemann

Peer-reviewed publications

- "From Manuscript to Album: The Life and Afterlife of a Group of Choirbook Initials between the 15th and 19th Centuries," in Fragmented Illuminations: The Many Lives of Manuscript Cuttings, ed. Catherine Yvard (London: UCL Press & the V&A, 2026). 

- "Littifredi Corbizzi, Johann Anton Ramboux and an Album of Manuscript Cuttings at the John Rylands Library," The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 98, no. 2 (2022): pp. 87-110. 

Research profile

I completed my undergraduate studies in Art History at the University of York in 2022, and an MSt in Medieval Studies at Merton College in 2024. Between the MSt and DPhil, I held short-term fellowships with the Swiss-based Fragmentarium: Digital Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz--Max-Planck-Institut. 

I also co-organise the Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group, a termly seminar series for all things medieval manuscripts based at Merton.