Jaakko Tahkokallio, PhD and docent in general history, is information specialist in the Special Collections of the National Library of Finland. Besides his curatorial responsibilities, he teaches history of the book and palaeography at the University of Helsinki and supervises graduate and postgraduate work on medieval manuscripts.

Tahkokallio’s research concentrates on high- and late-medieval manuscript culture. His doctoral dissertation was on the manuscript reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a topic on which he has thence published several articles. He has also published a short monograph on Geoffrey of Monmouth and his contemporaries William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon as publishers (Anglo-Norman Historical Canon: Publishing and Manuscript Culture, Cambridge 2019).

In his curatorial role, Tahkokallio works closely with the large collection of manuscript fragments of the National Library. He has published several articles on this collection, addressing, e.g., its Franciscan book fragments and the remains of uniform Missals produced for the parish churches of the Diocese of Turku in the fifteenth century.

Other themes of Tahkokallio’s interest are the use of Classical Latin texts in the Middle Ages and long-term developments in the modes of production of manuscript books. In his study of these topics, Tahkokallio has developed and applied quantitative methods in particular.

Previously, Tahkokallio has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at King’s College (2014-2015), London and University of Helsinki (2013-2014). During 2018, he spent a research leave as a researcher in an ERC-funded project Medieval Publishing (PI: Samu Niskanen, University of Helsinki).