Instructors: Robert Desjardins (Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies), François Pageau (Campus Saint-Jean), and Linda Quirk (Bruce Peel Special Collections). Description: Manuscript production in Europe reached its zenith in the fifteenth century while the printing press began to proliferate and gradually take over as the standard form of book production. In this workshop, we will gain some insight into this time of rapidly shifting ideas and technologies through three very special manuscripts: a luxurious custom-designed and illustrated book of devotion, a scholarly treatise that takes a disturbing approach to the first of the large-scale witch trials in Europe, and a mysterious encrypted manuscript that continues to defy all attempts to decipher it (including by the AI team at U of A that attempted to identify the source language). Together, these manuscripts will give us a glimpse at life in the fifteenth century, a time that had more in common with the present time of change than we might expect. This online workshop is open only to the University of Alberta community and is capped at 30 participants.

The website for Bruce Peel Special Collections offers detailed information about this series of workshops as well as information about research and exhibitions.