The Lyell readership in bibliography at Oxford University is endowed by a bequest from James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell (1871-1948), a solicitor, book collector and bibliographer. Each year since 1952, a distinguished scholar has been elected to deliver the lectures, usually six in number, on any topic of bibliography, broadly conceived. J.P.R. Lyell lived in Oxford and (on his retirement) in Abingdon from 1927 until the end of his life. Even as a young man he was interested in collecting early printed books, and he made a study of early book illustration in Spain. In the 1930s he began collecting medieval manuscripts, eventually accumulating some 250 of these, of which one hundred were bequeathed to the Bodleian Library. A further series of some 65 manuscripts, mostly post-medieval, were bought by the Library from his executors. The first Lyell lectures, for the academic year 1952-3, were delivered by Neil R. Ker, university reader in palaeography and fellow of Magdalen College.

Latest episodes of the podcast Lyell Lectures

• Shaping legacies
• Complicating attributions
• Mechanical and intellectual
• Invisible and visible
• Amanuenses in the longue durée
• Assimilation or change? Normans at Winchester
• From Neumes in campo aperto to Neumes on Lines (at Christchurch, Canterbury)
• St Augustine’s and Christchurch, 950–1091
• ‘L’ecriture Anglaise Dans Sa Perfection’
• A Community of Scribes at Worcester
• Sound and its Capture in Anglo-Saxon England
• The serpentine text of the Gutenberg Bible
• Fifteenth-century Latin Bible printing and distribution
• The Texts of the Gutenberg Bible; the case of 4 Ezra
• Latin Bible-writing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Gutenberg Bible workshop
• The Christian Latin Bible from its origins to the 13th-century Paris Bible
• Writing Models and the Formation of National Scripts
• Bibliography and the Life Cycles of Writing Books
• Renaissance Calligraphy from Pen to Press and Back
• The Golden Age of French Writing Masters?