Exciting news about external grant capture for Stephen Mossman, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History as well as a member of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective! Together with Nikolaus Weichselbaumer (Mainz), Vincent Christlein (Erlangen), and Edward Potten (York), Stephen has been awarded around £650,000 across three years (2022–2025) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities competition for 2020/21. ‘Werck der bücher’: Transitions, Experimentation, and Collaboration in Reprographic Technologies, 1440–1470 will redefine what is understood as the invention of printing: the single most important technological innovation of the European Middle Ages. The international research team will situate the technology of typographic printing within a wider experimental print culture in Central Europe, c. 1440–1470, exploring craft intersections, workshop practices, and a shared culture of exchange and innovation across media. This pioneering project will draw together expertise from various disciplines, and will be the first project to offer a holistic analysis of reprographic technology in its first European generation. The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective congratulates Stephen and his collaborators on this amazing success! 

More detailed project descriptions can be found here (in German) and here (in English)

Detail of the earliest extant Apocalypse blockbook Conuersi ab ydolis p[er] predicatione[m] b[ea]ti joha[n]nis drusiana [et] ceteri (Netherlands: s.n., c. 1450–1452?). © The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Special Collections 3103.

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