The Panizzi Lectures 2023: Thomas Hearne - A Life of Books
Lecture two: Hearne’s Matters
7 December

Professor Henry Woudhuysen gives the second of his 2023 Panizzi Lectures.
Although described as being the grumpiest man in Oxford – not just of his time, but of all times - Thomas Herne (1678–1735) was one of England’s earliest historians of the book as a physical object. The 2023 Panizzi lectures survey his copious notebooks, letters, books and manuscripts to reconstruct his life and work as a librarian, collector, and publisher.
In his second 2023 Panizzi Lecture, entitled ‘Indefatigable in fetching Learning from Places where many would not have sought after it’, Henry Woudhuysen looks what we know about of Hearne’s own collections and how he acquired and stored his books in St Edmund Hall. He argues that Hearne is unusual in this period for his acute sense of how material evidence can and should be recovered from individual copies of old books.
The first and third Panizzi lectures are on Tuesday 28 November and Thursday 14 December. Separate bookings are required.

Henry R. Woudhuysen FBA has been Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, since 2012. Before then, he spent thirty years in the English Department at University College London. His academic interests lie in English literature, bibliography, palaeography, and editorial theory and practice. He has been President of the Bibliographical Society and of the Oxford Bibliographical Society. In 2014, he gave the Lyell lectures at Oxford.

The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by "eminent scholars of the book" and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi (1797 – 1879)