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A week in Paradise: the Cassino Summer School

How does one describe an amazing experience that involves history, Italy, pizza and a ton of amazing medieval manuscripts coming from the most famous monastery in Southern Italy? Let's try starting from the beginning: From June the 29th until July the 3rd we had the privilege of attending the first Cassino Summer School, or better, the first International Summer School in Cassino (Italy): Trends in Manuscript Studies - Sources, Issues and Technologies, organized by Liber, Libro e Ricerca, and it was great; we would like to share the experience with you readers.

Free Online Course: England in the time of King Richard III from the University of Leicester

King Richard III and the MOOCs

Since the last couple of years, more and more universities are participating in collaborations where they create so-called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These are a way for anyone that is interested to participate in open-access, free from costs university courses. The courses are basically on any kind of subject you can think of: from art and history to literature, computer science and medicine. You can find lists of courses on pages like Coursera and Futurelearn. I just finished a six-week course on Futurelearn by the University of Southampton about the archaeology of the old Roman port of Rome, Portus. My experiences with this were so good, I decided to also enroll for England in the time of King Richard III which is offered by the University of Leicester also on Futurelearn. One of the biggest news items in the field of archaeology last year was the discovery and identification of the (in)famous King Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester. Now, the University from this same city has created a six-week course starting coming Monday 30th of June about all sorts of aspects of the time of this King of England. You might wonder, however, how this connects to codicology and medieval manuscripts. Richard III was a medieval king during a time of change in the field of book history. Handwritten books were less produced and printing was on the rise. This English king might not have had one of the most famous libraries, but nevertheless a very important one. He was one of the few people in high society of those days that signed his books. BL Royal 20 C VII f.134 Richard III's signature.