The Bodleian Libraries (BODcasts)

Professor Katherine Duncan Jones, Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, gives a talk on Shakespeare's poem, Venus and Adonis. In 1592-93, with London playhouses closed because of plague, Shakespeare wrote his most technically perfect work. Venus and Adonis (1593) is a highly original 'take' on the ancient Greek myth of the doomed Adonis - presented here as a pubertal boy incapable of responding to the goddess's amorous advances. It was a tearaway success with Elizabethan readers.

Peter McCullough, Professor of English, University of Oxford, gives a talk on John Donne. John Donne's sermon, Death's duell, was part of an early Stuart vogue for funeral sermons. Professor McCullough discusses Donne's contribution to this genre, and looks at how this tradition is connected to the poetic and dramatic representations of death on display in the exhibition, Shakespeare's Dead.

This podcast talks about accidental deaths and the hazards of everyday life in Shakespeare's day Coroners' inquest reports into accidental deaths tell us about the hazards of everyday life in Shakespeare's day. There were dangerous jobs, not just building, mining and farming, but also fetching water, and travel was perilous whether by cart, horse or boat. Even relaxation had its risks, from football and wrestling to maypole-dancing or a game of bowls on the frozen River Cherwell.

This lecture will celebrate Shakespeare's immortality on the exact 400th anniversary of his burial. It will begin from Theseus' famous speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream about the magical, transformative power of poetry. It will argue that Shakespeare inherited from antiquity a fascination with the intimate association between erotic love, magic and the creative imagination, and that this is one of the keys to the enduring power of his plays.

Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, is one of the world's most renowned Shakespeare scholars, the author of, among many other works, Shakespeare and Ovid, The Genius of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age and (as co-editor) The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. He co-curated Shakespeare Staging the World, the British Museum's exhibition for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and he is the author of Being Shakespeare: A One-Man Play for Simon Callow, which has toured nationally and internationally and had three runs in the West End.

In this talk Andrew Dunning (Royal Bank of Canada Foundation Fellow) traces the development of the work of Alexander Neckam, one of the earliest known lecturers in Oxford, through manuscripts housed at the Bodleian. Leading up to the creation of the University, the priories of the Augustinian canons were among the most prominent intellectual foundations in twelfth-century Oxford. One of the earliest known lecturers in the town was Alexander Neckam, working at St Frideswide (now Christ Church) from around 1190, who practised a brand of education that promoted the development of individuals and the health of communities. Through manuscripts housed at the Bodleian, it is possible to trace the development of his work, and to uncover his peers at his later home in Cirencester. They emerge as precise scholars who produced books collaboratively, and later created a monument to his writings in an exchange with Malmesbury Abbey.

Abbess Baerbel Goercke, Mariensee, delivers a talk for the Medingen Manuscripts Masterclass.

Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Utrecht University, delivers a talk for the Medingen Manuscripts Masterclass.

Alan Coates, Rare Books Assistant Librarian, Bodleain, delivers a talk for the Medingen Manuscripts Masterclass.

Nigel F. Palmer, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, delivers a talk for the Medingen Manuscripts Masterclass.

Andrew Honey, Book Conservator (Research and Teaching), University of Oxford, delivers a talk for the Medingen Manuscripts Masterclass.