Many congratulations to Tess Eastgate, who has been awarded the Bodleian Libraries' Gordon Duff Prize.
The prize is awarded yearly to a student at Oxford for an essay on subjects relating to bibliography, palaeography, the history of reading, and the history of the book. Tess's essay, entitled ‘Commonplacing in the Spanish Baroque: Bodleian MS Span. e. 9’, analysed an early eighteenth-century Spanish manuscript. In conjunction with the essay, Tess has rewritten the Bodleian's catalogue entry for the manuscript, and produced a digital edition of its commonplacing section.
Tess is studying for a DPhil in French. She holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (CRCV), which is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. She is also a Clarendon scholar.
Recently, Tess has also been awarded Keble College’s Durham Prize for outstanding performance in her MSt in French and Spanish, which she completed earlier this year.
Tess’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Catriona Seth FBA MAE, will focus on Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with the politician Antoine Barnave. Alongside this, she will produce a physical edition and a digital publication of this correspondence, in collaboration with the CRCV.