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Dr Andrew Dunning

Roles and subjects

Hugh Price Fellow in Book History

Contact

andrew.dunning@Jesus.ox.ac.uk

Academic Background

BA (Ottawa), MA, PhD (Toronto)

Dr Andrew Dunning is the R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and a Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Ottawa, followed by an MA and PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. At the Bodleian, he collaborates with colleagues to preserve and interpret one of the world’s most significant collections of medieval manuscripts.

Dr Dunning has worked internationally, including as Curator of Medieval Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, a Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and a Postdoctoral Fellow from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He has been awarded grants from the Zeno Karl Schindler Foundation, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, Art Fund, and the British Academy.

Undergraduate Teaching

Dr Dunning teaches medieval manuscripts, book history, and digital scholarship.

At the Weston Library, he is a regular guest teacher for undergraduate and postgraduate students visiting to learn how to analyse primary sources for their subject area from a textual and material perspective.

Postgraduate Teaching

Dr Dunning supervises master’s and doctoral students in all aspects of medieval manuscripts, their historical contexts, and applications of research within the cultural heritage sector. With Henry Parkes (University of Nottingham), he is co-supervising the project ‘Digital approaches to medieval chant and local religious heritage’ as part of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (2025–29).

As chair of the MSt examination in Medieval Studies, Dr Dunning oversees the programme’s assessment and academic standards.

Research Interests

Dr Dunning’s research interests encompass the production, use, and circulation of medieval books in Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. While traditional interpretations of books separate manuscript and printed material, the activities of authors and textual communities during the Middle Ages shows that many manuscripts are the result of deliberate publication activities. This is visible in the activities of individual authors associated with Oxford and Cirencester Abbey, a narrative grounded especially in his studies of the manuscripts of Jesus College.

Community publication is also a focal point of his forthcoming book Lives and Miracles of Saint Frideswide, under contract with the Oxford Medieval Texts series (Oxford University Press), which presents the Latin and Middle English textual evidence for Oxford’s patron saint for the first time to argue for the cult’s organic development and ability to bridge Oxford’s town and gown divisions.

His work also delves into digital manuscript studies, employing computational techniques to enhance the understanding and accessibility of medieval texts. In 2025, the British Academy awarded him funding to revive Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, a dataset reassociating medieval books with their earliest collections. He volunteers for open-source projects supporting text processing and scholarly publishing, including the Citation Style Language and Pandoc. He is also directing a project to digitize the Jesus College manuscripts via Digital Bodleian, which will culminate in a comprehensive history of the collection and a detailed catalogue for the Oxford Bibliographical Society.

Hobbies

Outside his academic pursuits, Dr Dunning sings early music, from the medieval through baroque periods. He has a keen interest in nature and sustainability, volunteering regularly with the Oxford City Farm.

Publications

Books

Articles

Review articles (peer-reviewed)

  • ‘Reledmac. Typesetting technology-independent critical editions with LaTeX’, RIDE: Rezensionszeitschrift des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 11 (2020), https://doi.org/djqs
  • ‘Teaching Latin textual criticism to a new generation’: review essay on Richard Tarrant, Texts, Editors, and Readers and Ralph Hanna, Editing Medieval Texts’, Journal of Medieval Latin 28 (2018): 333–42, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e2d41c47-9cf0-4212-ac1e-b8a28c256639
  • ‘Rethinking the publication of premodern sources: Petrus Plaoul on the Sentences’, RIDE: Rezensionszeitschrift des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 3 (2015), https://doi.org/cczp

Book reviews

Notes

For additional publication data, see ORA and ORCID.

Links

Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:

See Dr Andrew’s departmental profile and the Faculty of English Website