Fergus Bovill, B.A.
Student Assistant
Fergus is a Student Assistant in Department Gerhard Wolf. He has recently completed a BA in the History of Art at the University of York, graduating with First Class Honours with Distinction. In October 2023, he will begin a MSt in Medieval Studies at Merton College, Oxford, where he will hold Clarendon and Oxford-Merton scholarships.
His research focuses on the reception of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the nineteenth century and wider medievalisms in the period. He is currently working on the tracings of illuminations made by the German artist and collector Johann Anton Ramboux (1790–1866) during his travels around Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century. One part of this research, published recently, has focused on tracings of illuminations by the Florentine-born Littifredi Corbizzi for a monastery in Gubbio at the turn of the sixteenth century. His next project will focus on albums of manuscript cuttings; particularly what they reveal about attitudes towards art and ‘the medieval’ in the period. Wider interests include digital fragmentology, image-text relationships in manuscripts, art historiography, medieval Christian theology, and mnemonics.
- Italian medieval and Renaissance manuscripts
- Manuscript leaves, cuttings, and fragments
- The reception of illumination in the nineteenth century
- Medievalisms
- The history of collecting
- The history of art history
- Digital fragmentology
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.