Fergus Bovill, M.St.
Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft
Fergus holds a BA in Art History from the University of York and an MSt in Medieval Studies from Merton College, Oxford. In October this year, he will return to Merton to begin a DPhil in the History of Art, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the college’s David Ure Scholarship in the Humanities.
Although a medievalist by training, his research centres on the histories and reception of medieval objects in the 19th century, especially European illuminated manuscripts. His DPhil project, Breaking, Remaking, Reimagining: The Afterlives of Illuminated Manuscripts in the 19th Century, examines the cutting up of medieval books in the period and the largely unstudied practices of (re)assembling their illuminated cuttings in albums and collages.
This year, Fergus has held a fellowship with Fragmentarium: Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments, and is currently turning his MSt dissertation—a critical rethinking of the history and scholarly understanding of the album of cuttings, recognised by the Società internazionale di Storia della miniatura and the Association for Art History—into an article.
He worked as a Student Assistant in Department Gerhard Wolf between June 2022 and September 2023.
- Italian late medieval and Renaissance manuscripts
- Manuscript leaves, cuttings, and fragments
- The reception of medieval art in the 19th century
- Medievalism and medieval afterlives, material and symbolic
- Practices and theories of the fragment and fragmentation
- Digital fragmentology
- The history of collecting
- Art historiography and the history of art history
Fergus Bovill, Littifredi Corbizzi, Johann Anton Ramboux and an Album of Manuscript Cuttings at the John Rylands Library The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 98 (2022), no. 2 (2022): 87–110.