Queen Elizabeth's Book of Oxford

Among the many gifts presented to Queen Elizabeth during her week-long visit to Oxford in the summer of 1566, none is more remarkable than this manuscript history of the University illustrated with exceptionally fine drawings of its buildings.

Though little known outside Oxford, its importance as a literary and artistic experiment is enormous.

In their attempt to both entertain and instruct the Queen, the book's makers Thomas Neale and John Bereblock, self-consciously attempted to create a new literary genre - 'topographical delineation' - in which word and image claimed equal importance.

The drawings by Bereblock are of great historical significance as the first systematic visual record of the architecture of Oxford University and, indeed, one of the earliest examples in England of the developing practice of topography.Just as innovative is the literary form by, Thomas Neale, the Professor of Hebrew, who constructs an imaginary dialogue between the Queen and her favourite, the Earl of Leicester who, in his role as Chancellor of the University, acts as the Queen's guide on a 'virtual progress' around the famous buildings of the University, explaining the history of their foundation and the fame of their founders.

Through this daring fiction of a private conversation between Elizabeth and Leicester, Neale attempted an elaborate and politically astute compliment to both his patrons who appear in the dialogue as the champions of learning.

For the first time, this unique work is available in actual-size facsimile together with a full-text translation, and with a commentary on the architectural drawings.

Louise Durning's introductory essay provides the first detailed analysis of this manuscript, its makers, and the historical context for its production, locating it within the specific political circumstances of early Elizabethan Oxford and the broader contexts of emergent literary and artistic fashions.She reveals its relationships to new trends in map-making and topography and to the rhetorical devices of courtly dialogue, emblematics and encomium.