PAPER STORIES:
Paper and Book History in Post-Medieval Europe
7-8 May 2020, Reykjavík, Iceland
Keynote lecture 1: Orietta Da Rold (University of Cambridge)
"Paper stories in pre- and postmodern England"
In England, pre-printing and pre-modern paper succeeded across a wide range of appropriations because it was perceived as a ductile material with properties extending beyond the initial purpose of its creation; that is, writing. In this paper, I will discuss how paper become an easy to find material which could fulfil both mundane and luxurious needs. Paper was brought to England by the international economic relationships that the country enjoyed with other European centers of power and people at the end of the thirteenth century. The way in which paper could be used after the investments in perfecting the technology started to transform a local craft into a transnational commodity with international demands and an ever-expanding market. Paper in early modern England is a tool which enables memory; not just as a record of facts, but as a record of performances, and confirms the significance of paper as a tool for modernity. In this lecture I will discuss the significance of paper before and after the advent of print technology as the key to understanding modernity.
Thursday 7 May, 9:30, National Museum
Keynote lecture 2: Dana Sajdi (Boston College)
"The place of culture (from the view of the Arabic tradition)"
Similar to Icelandic knowledge production, Arabic cultural tradition was primarily predicated upon words, both written and oral, and were expressed in both elegant scholarly and refreshingly popular language registers. This primacy of the verbal forces us, modern scholars, to rely on the text for its generous offerings of evidence as well as its moments of hesitance, silence, and omission. Since modern knowledge classification has rendered the text a disparate and field-specific phenomenon, the scholar of text is constrained within the particular fields of philology, literary criticism, or history and the specific rules and goals of each. In my address, I argue that in order to recover the integrity of the text and to arrive at a more imaginative understanding of the past, tackling the text not only in terms of time and language, but also as a phenomenon of, in, and about space may be a more productive enterprise. Thinking spatially gives the text value that exceeds its role as an indicator or data container to become a medium of transmission, a site of performance, and a cultural product. In short, the text becomes a social world.
Thursday 7 May, 13:30, National Museum
Presentations (in alphabetical order)
Davíð Ólafsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"Many pages, much ink: the materiality of writing in nineteenth century Iceland"
The enduring existence of scribal culture in Iceland throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth has been a well-recognized, but at the same time relatively little-studied phenomenon, up to the turn of the twenty-first century. The term scribal culture in this context refers to the everyday practices of production, dissemination and consumption of texts in handwritten form, for the most part performed by and for ordinary people with little or no formal education or status.
Sighvatur Grímsson Borgfirðingur (1840–1930) was an active scribe and lay-scholar for over seven decades and can be considered one of the most prominent and productive in the field. A substantial portion of his vast writings and transcripts – made both for himself and others – is now preserved in the Manuscript department of National and University Library of Iceland, notably due a bilateral agreement from 1906 where Sighvatur bequeathed all his current manuscripts and future writings in return for a yearly stipend. This archive of handwritten books and documents that he composed, copied, or compiled throughout his life contains little short of 200 items and is estimated to come to around or over 100.000 pages in total.
The conditions of how and where Sighvatur – or other agents of these popular literacy practices – obtained various instruments for their massive production of textual matter is largely unknown. In this talk I will explore dispersed clues on this aspect, found in Sighvatur Grímsson’s documents. This paper will touch upon and converge numerous of the topics and questions proposed for the conference, incl. paper trade as a part of social and economic history, private paper buyers, history of books and book collections, object biography, and agents involved in acquisition and circulation of manuscripts and books.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Museum
Geoffrey Day (Winchester College)
"Frost Fairs and Laki: paper-making, printing, and the climate in eighteenth-century London"Making paper by hand—and printing on hand-made paper—are weather-sensitive. The wildly fluctuating weather of eighteenth-century London is most clearly seen in the frequent Frost Fairs and the years immediately following the eruption of Laki in 1783-84. Letters and printed sources will be cited to demonstrate the effects of these and other major weather events, and the problems and frustrations experienced by papermakers, printers and authors.
Thursday 7 May, 11:00, National Library
Paul M. Dover (Kennesaw State University, GA)
“The impacts of paper’s abundance, 1450-1650: an episode in coevolution”
The period 1450-1650 has been identified as the locus for a host of revolutionary transformations: ‘a print revolution’, a ‘communications revolution’, a ‘scientific revolution’, a ‘correspondence revolution’, and even a series of ‘knowledge revolutions’ associated with new media, the discovery and rediscovery of new sources of knowledge in ancient text and new worlds, and new epistemologies shaped by empirical outlooks. In my forthcoming book, The Information Revolution of Early Modern Europe: Worlds of Paper (Cambridge University Press), I argue that this multi-pronged narrative of change merges around a central concern: information and its management. It was paper that was the container and conduit for the lion’s share of Europe’s new information flows, and the handling of paper instruments became quotidian for a broad swathe of Europeans: this was the period that invented the notion of ‘paperwork.’ The responses to the accumulation of information on paper in this age were chiefly yet more processes on paper – as Markus Friedrich has put it: ‘in early modern Europe, control of knowledge not only meant control of paper, but also control by paper.’
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Library
Gunnar Marel Hinriksson (National and University Library of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"The paper thief: illegal paper trade in mid-seventeenth century Skálholt"
Among the letters of bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson (AM 268 fol.), we find a case involving one of the students at the Skálholt Latin school in Iceland, Jón Pálsson, who had sold stolen paper to his schoolmates around Christmas time 1652. Jón made good business by helping himself to the school’s paper supply right from the headmaster’s quarters, and in total 23 students bought the stolen paper he peddled. Because of this crime, Jón was expelled from the school and is mostly lost from history after that.
The headmaster, Gísli Einarsson, was a remarkable figure. He was a mathematician and astronomer and the first Icelander to study mathematics at university in Copenhagen and later the first to teach it at the Latin schools. Nothing survives of his own writings, but an account exists of his observation of the comet of 1652 – the comet that might have helped Jón Pálsson to steal the paper from Gísli’s quarters.
A list of students who bought the stolen paper and how much they bought is included in the testimony documented in the bishop’s letter journal, along with a description of the execution of the theft. In the talk I will discuss the details of this case, the amount of paper stolen and its estimated value and how the theft might have influenced the lives and carriers of those involved.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Library
Martina Hacke (University of Düsseldorf)
"Agents connecting the book markets of Basle, Paris and Lyons in late medieval times: the example of the agents of Johann Amerbach"
There was a central business relationship between the markets of Basle, Paris and Lyons in the late Middle Ages as a result of the distribution of book printing. This connection was maintained to a large extent by agents. They were employed by, for example, the well-known Basle-based publisher and printer Johann Amerbach (1430–1513).
Amerbach’s agents from the 1480s included Wolfgang Lachner (approx. 1460-1465–1518), Johann Wattenschnee (approx. 1485–no later than 1543) and Peter Mettlinger (*approx. 1440). In their capacity as agents they worked for Amerbach as sales representatives, middlemen and distributors. One of their tasks was to promote the sale of his books. To do this, they not only had to seek out the trade fairs in Paris and Lyons, where commission-based business took place, but also in Wattenschnee’s bookshops “At the sign of Basle” in both cities. Other tasks of Amerbach’s agents were to obtain manuscripts for him, as he needed them for his editions, for example, his major Augustine edition.
The agents of Amerbach were not working for him as their main jobs. They did this parallel to their own actual professional work, as printers, publishers or travelling booksellers (“Buchführer”). For that reason it was in their own interest to search out the book markets and important trade fairs of that era. The motivation for working as an agent for Amerbach was thus directly linked with their own work as merchants. The synergy produced in this way was a specific feature of the economy at that time in this professional sector.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Museum
Halldóra Kristinsdóttir (National and University Library of Iceland, Reykjavík)
Rannver Hannesson (National and University Library of Iceland, Reykjavík)
Jón Kristinn Einarsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"The Renaissance man of Reykjafjörður: a study of the seventeenth-century scribe Hannes Gunnlaugsson"
Hannes Gunnlaugsson was a farmer, student, an amateur doctor, and scribe in Reykjafjörður in the late 17th century. Born around 1640, Hannes was the son of Kristín Gísladóttir and Gunnlaugur Snorrason, a priest who owned a somewhat considerable amount of land. He graduated from Skálholtsskóli around 1660–1661. However, he was found guilty of adultery shortly after that and lost his ministerial rights. Hannes was vindicated by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson in 1667, but never became a priest.
There are nine extant manuscripts written, or decorated, by Hannes: ÍB 144 8vo, JS 27 fol., JS 149 4to, Lbs 228 fol., Lbs 812 4to, Lbs 2261 8vo, AM 148 8vo, NKS 1945 4to and SÁM 42 I–II. In addition to that are two manuscripts of which Hannes’ authorship is contested. Although not a very large corpus of manuscripts, this one is still relatively diverse. There is e.g. a judgement book, a chronicle, some genealogical tables, and two medical manuscripts. The size of the manuscripts is furthermore varied (folio, 4to and 8vo).
We propose to examine the watermarks in these manuscripts, mainly with four aims in mind; firstly, to date the manuscripts in question with more accuracy; secondly, to see if there is a connection between the manuscripts that have been affiliated with Hannes with certainty and those of which his authorship is contested; thirdly, given the variety of manuscript types, examine whether there is a connection between the type of paper used and the subject of the text; lastly, we aim to look for a connection between Hannes and other scribes active in his area in the 17th century. Apart from his genealogy and a sodomy violation, knowledge of Hannes is limited. We believe that a codicological examination of his manuscripts can add to our knowledge of the scribe Hannes Gunnlaugsson.
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Museum
Harpa Rún Ásmundsdóttir (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"From oral transmission and single sheets of paper to systematic collection of poetry"
The Icelandic poet Jón Jónatansson was born in 1829 in the Westfjords of Iceland. By the age of six he composed one of his first poems and continued composing poems and rímur throughout his life. Though he did not receive any formal education he learned to read and write and used that knowledge to write down his poetry and traded them occasionally for essential goods. He worked as a fisherman, had 15 children with his wife, Ingibjörg, was very poor and did not have a stable home for the most part of his life. He used his ability to write and compose poems to write commemorative poems upon request which, along with his rímur, earned him a status among his contemporaries. At an old age, around the year 1900, he started to write down his poetry systematically in addition to writing his autobiography in 1907.
In the lecture I will focus on the last twelve years of Jón’s life, from 1900–1912, but these years he spent his time writing down the majority of his preserved manuscripts. Influenced by the scribe Sighvatur Grímsson Borgfirðingur, he tried to collect all his material to write it down and store it all at the same place. By the time he died, he had only written down around 20% of his poetry, which is now preserved in manuscripts at the National Library of Iceland.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Museum
Neil Harris (University of Udine)
"Watermarks and descriptive protocols: Briquet reloaded"
It is common to go to paper and watermark conferences and here one particular name uttered without a jot of explanation. The great “He who shall only be named” of watermark scholarship. Of course, most of it is envy. What this one scholar achieved is insuperable and the greatness of his work is such that our best reaction is to pretend that it is the elephant in the room. We can see it but it is not really there. A new project however, Briquet Reloaded, is taking the man on. The idea is very simple. Identify in archives and libraries the watermarks he traced a century and more ago, go find them, photograph and describe them with modern methods, including the recovery of his original tracings in the archive at Geneva, and attach them to an online repertory. The experience has led to the elaboration of a new descriptive protocol, based on the recognition of moulds rather than just watermarks and above all the analysis of watermarks as twins.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Library
Nina Hesselberg-Wang (The National Library of Norway, Oslo)
Chiara Palandri (The National Library of Norway, Oslo/Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan)
"Missale Nidrosiense, 1519 - an archaeological approach"
The art of letterpress printing was introduced to the Norwegian book-production in 1519. It was the Archbishop Erik Valkendorf (ca. 1465 – 1522) of Nidaros (Trondheim) who initiated the printing of two books, Breviarium Nidrosiense and Missale Nidrosiense, on the purpose of standardizing the liturgy for the entire country. He commissioned the printing of the Missale to the Danish printer Poul Ræff. Missale Nidrosiense is regarded as one of the most exquisite Danish letterpress print before 1550. The books are part of Norway’s Documentary Heritage, and since 2012 listed among the Norwegian contributions to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.In 2019, the 500-years anniversary for the first Norwegian printed books was celebrated throughout the country.
We wish to submit fresh results from our research concerning materiality aspects of one of the 1519-publications, the Missale Nidrosiense. Our research is based on three copies belonging to the National Library of Norway’s collection, and implements visual and multispectral analysis of the paper properties, watermarks, printing techniques for text and illustrations, including red and black printing inks. We have examined the bookbinding structures and their execution, the finishing decoration on the leather cover, in addition to the metal furniture. We have described the bindings’ attributes and physical features, and registered similarities and differences. Pigments and metal components are analysed with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF). The wooden boards have gone through dendrochronological analysis by computer tomography (CT) scanning.
We have chosen an archaeological approach to provide evidence in order to establish possible dating and origin, and our aim is to supplement the insight to the books’ biography.
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Library
Silvia Hufnagel (Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík)
"Paper trade and provenance in 15th and 16th century Iceland: an overview"
Paper was introduced to Iceland in the first half of the 15th century and had replaced parchment and wax tablets by the end of the 16th century. In the first part of this paper, I will present how the earliest paper was used in administration and for ephemeral texts, such as letters and drafts, where paper was produced and who the people were who introduced the new writing material to Iceland.
In the second part of the presentation, I will explore paper in 16th century Iceland. Based on watermark analysis, I will present where and when paper used for Icelandic charters, books and manuscripts was produced. An analysis of economic trade will provide information on the networks that were involved in paper trade. A specific focus will be on Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson (1541-1627), who required paper for three main purposes: as writing paper for the Latin school at Hólar, for his printing press, and for his official and private administrative business and correspondence.
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Museum
Indriði Svavar Sigurðsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"The mirror in miscellanies"
What can a single miscellany tell us about its writer and his or her worldview? That was the question I found myself asking after opening a random manuscript from the National Library of Iceland. Immediately, I was taken aback by the breadth of knowledge on display. Prose-Edda, human anatomy, botany, witchcraft, the workings of blimps and the dangers of smoking tobacco where some of the subjects handpicked by one man dictated by nothing other than his own interest.
I soon found out that this miscellany, simply titled Lbs 4452 4to in the Manuscript Department, originally belonged to an 19th century farmer named Árni H. Hannesson who, like many of his contemporaries, moved from his home in rural Snæfellsnes to the ever-growing Reykjavík in search of a better life. There he died a poor man around the turn of the century but not without leaving behind a large collection of manuscripts that are now part of the manuscripts in the National Library Archives. Most likely Árni would have been viewed as an outcast in his time, but now it is clear that he belonged to a wide group of lay-scholars working around Iceland. This was a large group of mostly self-educated and self-motivated peasants with deep desire for learning not being satisfied by formal institution for various reasons, instead operating by coping and collecting immense amount of handwritten text long after the advent of the printed medium.
A big part of the Icelandic literary practice was the collecting and writing of these so-called miscellanies. Not unlike “commonplace books”, miscellanies refer to manuscripts consisting of different texts varying by the owner. However, unlike commonplace books miscellanies received widespread use among Icelandic scribes. Nevertheless they have rarely been a subject of historical research. Instead, they are often seen simply as repeats, rewrites or incomplete versions of well-known texts picked at random without any rhyme or reason; a steppingstone in search for connections to other works in the accepted textural canon.
In this paper I argue, in line with Harold Love’s thesis of scribal publication, for approaching miscellanies as a published work with an author and a specific goal and purpose in mind. That way miscellanies could be seen as important egodocuments not a junkyard of detangled text but instead a mirror that reflects not only worldview of the scribe him or herself but also the world around them.
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Museum
Bernd Kulawik (independent scholar, Berlin)
"A network of watermarks, papers, scribes and draughtsmen, objects and their documentation: the forgotten Roman Accademia de lo Studio de l’Architettura (c. 1535–1555) and its legacy"
Jacopo Strada is usually known as a merchant of antiquities but hardly as an artist, and surely even less as an antiquarian. But between 1553–1555 he was a member of a Roman academy comprising persons from 20 professions, and had several draughtsmen working on his Magnum ac Novum Opus, a 30-volume collection of drawings after Roman coins accompanied by 11 volumes of descriptions. These and other volumes created by and for Strada mostly consist of Roman papers. But it is unlikely that all the drawings were made before Strada left Italy in 1557. E. g., he later ordered high-quality Italian paper in 1575 to print Serlio’s book VII in Frankfurt/Main. While it can be expected that papers used by Strada also were used for drawings documenting other ancient artifacts in Rome at the same time, it is surprising that these large sets of documentations were created with the same methodological approach and, obviously, in close, workload-sharing cooperation. They all were made for the academy mentioned by Strada which now can be identified with the Accademia del lo Studio de l’Architettura. This academy (not the Accademia della Virtù) prepared and partially realised an enormous (publishing) program described in a famous letter by the Siennese humanist Claudio Tolomei from 1542. It has been cited very often, but was thought to have not been realised. Together, all these documents and many important early prints on Roman architecture, art and culture, form the legacy of the — as far as it is known — first and largest interdisciplinary project in the history of the European Humanities, and presumably also the most momentous. Because many of the documents have been written by anonymous persons, the papers and watermarks can help to identify them as part of the project and as interrelated in complex network structures.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Library
Már Jónsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"A witch finder's archive in seventeenth century Iceland"
In the years 1654–1678, at least 18 Icelanders were burned for witchcraft, among them one woman. The main source for the local court proceedings in many of these cases is an enigmatic collection of verdicts that have either been removed from their original courtbooks or copied directly from them (Thott 2110 I 4to). The collection as such is composed of 88 leaves but additional 13 leaves contain verdicts of the provincial church court in Húnavatnssýsla in the years 1734–1739. It is not known when or how the manuscript came into the possession of the collector Otto Thott (1703–1785) in Copenhagen and in 1928 it was handed over to the Icelandic National Archives, where it is kept now. My working hypothesis is that the collection was put together by Þorleifur Kortsson (1615–1698), who during his years as judge at the Alþingi was an active participant in the extirpation of witchcraft in the country. In this talk, the material and textual composition of the collection will be described and both aspects put into context against the rich variety of legal manuscripts and documents still extant in Icelandic collections as well as abroad.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Library
Ermenegilda Rachel Mueller (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"Describing watermarks in TEI-conformant XML"
The majority of digital catalogues that include paper manuscripts and early printed books use TEI-conformant XML. TEI currently offers tools to describe the material support of such sources, among which a watermark element. However, these tools are not sufficient to
describe paper and watermarks at the level of detail that is needed for the identification of paper types. Moreover, they are not fit to represent information about paper and watermarks in a structured manner. The present contribution will introduce a TEI customization for the description of paper and watermarks based on the international standard for the description of paper, watermarks and paper molds in relational databases (IPHN 2.1.1, 2013). This customization enables the inclusion of detailed and structured information about paper in standard TEI descriptions of handwritten and early printed sources (msdescription module). It allows users to describe paper types and watermarks and enter information about paper makers and paper mills. Including this information in TEI descriptions of paper manuscripts and early printed books makes it more accessible to users of digital catalogues. Moreover, standardizes the representation of paper and watermarks data in TEI, so that they can be mined and compared with the contents of digital watermarks databases. It would not only benefit paper historians by allowing them to better localize paper and watermarks in catalogues, but also facilitate the use of watermarks for dating and contextualizing catalogue items.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Library
Sonja Neumann (Deutsches Museum, Munich)
"Rise of the machines: the development of industrial paper production in nineteenth century Europe"
The invention of the paper machine around 1800 was not a unique and exclusive incident, it was rather a French and English joint venture, which has evolved from Roberts first drafts and patented continuous papermaking machine model to the famous Foudrinier machine, built in London.The high quality of the machine-made paper was already praised in this early stadium.The characteristics of traditional handmade paper served also as a quality standard for the design of paper machinery, e.g. from 1825 on dandy rolls (wove and laid rolls) have been used to improve paper contouring, to close up the sheet, to smooth the top side surface – and later on to produce watermarks.The further development of industrial paper production can easily be described as a European enterprise, which has not only a great influence on the materiality and quality of paper but also on the formation of paper (machine) trade. In the first half of the 19th century England was the centre of paper machine construction, due to the advanced industrialization where patent regulations had been established and skilled technicians and mechanical engineers were to be found. But from the mid-19th century on Germany moves to the focal point of the European paper industry and thus also the use and preparation of wood as a substitute for rags.The focus of this paper will be on two aspects:On the technological process of paper machines with their different component parts and their impact on the materiality and quality of paper. In this respect, the extensive collection of the Paper History Reasearch Center at the Deutsches Museum Munich is also intended to serve as a basis for the study.
Thursday 7 May, 11:00, National Library
Pádraig Ó Macháin (University College Cork)
"Paper and the format of Irish manuscripts"
In Irish tradition, vellum manuscripts dominate until c. 1600, when paper becomes all-pervasive as a manuscript material, and vellum disappears. The change was one from home-produced to prefabricated and imported. The format of surviving vellum manuscripts varies according to the such considerations as purpose (personal or patron's book), vellum quality and availability. The format of the paper manuscript, however, may be determined by the type of paper on the market at the time. This contribution will report on the results of an examination of a representative number of Irish manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries, with a view to establishing how the introduction of paper in regular sizes became one of the factors that influenced change in the format of Irish book.
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Library
Ilaria Pastrolin (École nationale des chartes, Paris)
"Let the paper talk: a descriptive protocol through Briquet"
“Every sheet of watermarked paper is in itself its own birth certificate. The difficulty is in deciphering it. Remember that every such sheet bears the imprint of the mould on which it was made. It is therefore a moulded object, like a medal or a coin, of which all the copies are alike” [Charles-Moïse Briquet, “De la valeur des filigranes de papier comme moyen de déterminer l’âge et la provenance de documents non datés”, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire et Archéologie de Genève, tome I, livre 2 (1892), pp. 192-202, reprinted in Briquet’s Opuscula. The Complete Works of Dr. C.M. Briquet without “Les filigranes”, Hilversum, the Paper Publications Society, 1955, pp. 235-240].For well over a century watermark studies have been dominated by a single name, Charles-Moïse Briquet (1839-1918), whose chef d’oeuvre “Les filigranes” (1907) reproduced 16,112 designs. In recent years Briquet has gone digital in the Briquet Online project, originally conceived by the LAMOP (Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris), now hosted on the “Bernstein. Memory of Paper” resource of the Austrian Academy for Sciences, which has systematically been adding other early repertories, as well as furnishing a collective search engine for other watermark websites. A new project, “Briquet Reloaded”, returns to the original watermarks traced by the great Swiss scholar in his extensive travels, in order to bring them into a digital environment, with two case studies relating to Lyon and Udine. Plans are in course to attach new descriptive entries to those already available in Briquet Online.From January 2020, as part of a doctorate at the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris, the archives in three other cities visited by Briquet – Paris, Treviso, and Venice - will be explored, with the purpose both of extending “Briquet Reloaded”, as well as experimenting a new descriptive protocol, which documents watermarks qualitatively and quantitatively, with an especial attention for long archive series. “Briquet Reloaded” intends to be a collective project, so we are interested in finding other scholars, able to work in cities visited by the Swiss filigranologist, who would be willing to contribute to this research.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Library
Krisztina Rábai (University of Szeged)
"From bull to boar: the beginnings of hand-made paper in East-Central Europe"
On the area under consideration, paper was used for the purposes of administration from the beginning of the 14th-century. Its dominance over parchment only dates from the second half of the century. This reflected the increasing paper-hunger of growing administrations. Furthermore, the spread of Guttenberg's invention, with its requirement for suitable and affordable paper, affected the establishment of paper mills in this part of Europe as well.
According to the small number of written sources -- which are frequently cited in the scientific literature of Central European paper history --, mostly Italian and German papermakers introduced the art of paper-making in the Bohemian lands, Moravia, Silesia and Polish territory during the last decade of the 15th, beginning of the 16th centuries. As a result of the lack of written sources and deficiency of detailed watermark research efforts to find the first paper products/watermarks of these mills have produced speculation and confusion.
My paper aims to summarise the research results and also to sketch some plans for shedding light on the very beginning of paper-making in East-Central Europe.
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Museum
Dana Sajdi (Boston College)
"Coif and tell: the barber historian of Damascus in the eighteenth century"
While barbers are considered loquacious in most cultures, one Shahab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr (fl. 1762), a practicing barber from Damascus, dared to go beyond banter to translate his speech into writing. And it was not any written speech, but the Damascene barber produced a chronicle, that is, a history book. History had customarily been the purview of professional scholars, who due to their knowledge of the religious sciences and Islamic law constituted a hegemonic group with state and civic functions. My presentation will examine Ibn Budayr’s life and work as an example of a new phenomenon that took place in the 18th century Levant (the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean), a phenomenon that I have called “nouveau literacy.”
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Museum
Maik Schmerbauch (Jesuits-University St. Georg, Frankfurt/German Archives, Berlin)
"Book collections of the libraries in Catholic parishes in eighteenth century Germany"
In post-medieval German Empire the processes of the Reformation with its religious wars caused an ongoing capability of the normal people to read and understand written text. Therefore the Catholic Church and its priests in the parishes in town and villages put the focus on written texts and books to promote the understanding of catholic religion and especially the personal faith by beginning to built up libraries in the parishes where the priests, monks and secular normal people could study religious books. This process surely took some time, but in many places in the eighteenth century libraries have been founded, mostly by funding of noble people, but also by scholars and ecclesiastical administration. In several cases the old latin book collections of the medieval theology have been transferred as an own separate collection of the library.
My paper, which is based on yet unknown and new records of archival collections of special selected german parishes, will discuss this process and each step which led to parish libraries in the seventeenth and eigtheenth century. It will present the stakeholders of the libraries and analyze the book collection which has been acquired for the library, e.g. biblical books, philosophical book or books of ecclesiastical history. Also important related issues like the visitors of the library, the language of books and the library management will be regarded.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Museum
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon (University of Iceland, Reykjavík)
"Magnús the Rapist: heterotopia – spaces of Otherness (No-place)"
Magnús Hj. Magnússon, an Icelandic “barefoot historian“, created a remarkable oeuvre of egodocuments. I seek an understanding both of how his story has been told, and how it can give us insight into such matters as gender relations and sexual life; the history of emotions in the 19th century. As these subjects are addressed, they are placed in the context of everyday life and the story of the poverty of this group, at the bottom of the social pyramid.
Magnús Hj. left his boyhood home at the farm of Hestur in 1892, at the age of 19. His possessions comprised a bundle of clothes, books, a portable writing desk, and sheets of writing. For the twenty years or so that remained to him, he lived a peripatetic existence in an unstinting struggle with poor health, together with a ceaseless quest for a space to pursue writing and scholarship in accord with his dreams.
Friday 8 May, 9:00, National Museum
Beeke Stegmann (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Research, Reykjavík)
"The origin of added paper in structurally altered manuscripts of the Arnamagnæan Collection"
The Icelandic professor and manuscript collector Árni Magnússon (1663–1730) put a substantial amount of effort into improving his manuscript collection. Among others, he structurally altered hundreds of the paper manuscripts from the 17th and early 18th centuries in his collection.1 During that process he used large amounts of paper as he copied overlapping text parts, added note slips with identifiers and information on the former context of the texts, and frequently stored unbound material in enclosing paper jackets. This talk investigates Árni’s supplies of paper by studying, among others, watermarks in the added leaves.
The material Árni used proofs to be of various origins. While the most common watermark is a coat of Amsterdam of yet unknown origin, other paper shows watermarks that can be traced back to Denmark and Norway. Additionally, a considerable number of leaves that he added to the manuscripts were reused – at times from the original material contained in the books he altered, at times from letters and waste paper he had at hand.
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Museum
Maria Stieglecker (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)
"Traveling books: Johannes of Speyer and his autographs"
As an example of the late Middle Ages, the story I would like to tell is more or less timeless and also could have taken place in later times. It is about Johannes of Speyer and the books that he wrote himself and took with him when he joined the convent of Melk Abbey. This story is one of those fortunate coincidences where we have enough information to show the correlation of the biography of objects with the biography of their producer and owner.
If we look at the watermarks of some of the manuscripts now kept in Melk’s famous monasterial library, we can follow the path paper can take from the place of use to the place of storage: during his time at the University of Heidelberg Johannes of Speyer copied texts, as was customary at the time, and brought these volumes to Melk Abbey. As a proponent of the Melk reform, we also know him as an author and translator who brought important reform texts into German so that the lay brothers could understand them as well.
The material aspect of these manuscripts, together with biographical references to the author and writer, gives us the opportunity to tell this little story of where and under which circumstances these manuscripts were written, travelled to their final destination, and received some stepbrothers.
The texts transported on various paper reflect the personal situation of the author and writer as well as his personal development. In addition, they correspond to the changes for the Benedictine Order that were so topical at the time.
This example is also used to discuss the possibilities of watermark analysis as well as various features of the Watermark Information-System (WZIS: www.wasserzeichen-online.de) and Watermarks of the Middle Ages (WZMA: www.wzma.at).
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Library
Anna Svensson (independent scholar, Stockholm)
"Plants in paper: revisiting the early herbarium as history of the book"
The extensive seventeenth and eighteenth-century Micheli-Targioni herbarium (the Botanical Section of the National History Museum, University of Florence) is a valuable botanical resource for the thousands of specimens it contains, dating from a crucial period in the history of the scientific study of plants. It is also, however, a fascinating example of what Anke te Heesen has termed paper technologies, including gluing, cutting, sewing, pinning, manuscript and print, binding and unbinding. As a collection of herbaria compiled by different people, it has been added to and rearranged: one volume has simply been cut up, with big chunks of the page removed with the plant; loose sheets containing holes (sewing needle or possibly pins) and faint plant imprints were once part of a herbarium. A manuscript catalogue by Pier Antonio Micheli (1679-1737) has since been unbound, but still retains fragments of plants once pressed between its pages. These examples provide an insight into the processes of collecting, preserving and ordering plants in the context of the library. Along with folded seed packets, correspondence, loose labels, experiments in botanical illustration, nature print, and printing new botanical genres, they demonstrate how successful the juxtaposition of plants and paper became.
This presentation draws on a wide range of early modern pressed plants in paper – both complete collections and loose plants, both bound and unbound – to demonstrate the hybridity, diversity, and experimentation of the paper worlds of pressed plants, which I argue were essential to the circulation of plants through and beyond the more static bound hortus siccus collection. This is part of an ongoing project on the early modern history of pressing plants as a form of marginalia, being sensitive to the ways in which the historian’s access to plant fragments and traces are mediated through botanists, conservators, antiquarians, librarians, digitisers and archivists.
Thursday 7 May, 15:00, National Museum
Viðar Hreinsson (Icelandic Museum of Natural History/Stefansson Arctic Institute, Reykjavík)
"Harsh nature in tattered manuscripts"
Environmental humanities and ecocriticism have become prominent over the last few decades. On a metaphorical level, manuscript culture can be regarded as organic growth, natural in the sense that it is a complex, decentralized process of reproduction, re-creation and eventual decay rather than exponential accumulation. The paper will touch upon these aspects of manuscript culture, as well as trajectories of litarary works through these organic processes – all the way to print, or not – by describing examples of neglected poetry on nature and environment:
In the early 19th century in particular, scribes and writers collected and processed huge amounts of poetry. Examples of these are Þorsteinn Þorsteinsson (1792–1863) and Gunnlaugur Jónsson (1786–1866) from the lay scribal community of Skagafjörður in the north of Iceland, and, especially, Páll Pálsson (1807–1877), nicknamed “The Student“ who volunteered for decades at the National Library of Iceland. These collections are of particular interest in that that they are representative of poetic traditions that never reached the nationalistic literary canon established in the late 19th – early 20th century. However, some of these poems were gathered in collections produced by ordinary people.
I have browsed the registers of 80 volumes of poetry collected and copied by Páll Pálsson. These include 50 volumes of 17th through 19th century manuscripts that he collected and bound, and 30 volumes of poems that he copied. Each volume has registers of titles, first lines and authors (when known). While going through these registers, I selected many poems that reflect aspects of, or approaches to, environment and nature. The paper will conclude with a brief analysis of one distinct branch of poetry. This covers perils, travels and descriptions of routes. This branch of poetry is particularly interesting as it provides first hand testimonies of often difficult struggles with forces of nature. A prominent example of this kind of poetry (and in fact available online: is a verse-letter by farmer and fisherman poet Hallvarður Hallsson (1723–1799), containing important local knowledge of geological events from the year 1744.
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Museum
Jedert Vodopivec Tomažič (Archives of the Republik of Slovenia, Ljubljana)
"Structure and paper of the Dalmatin Bible 1584"
The article aims to present the less known material appearance of the first Slovene translation of the entire (Dalmatin) Bible (1584) and the background of its origin connected with this through the help of archive sources, the literature and examinations carried out during the conservation-restoration work on the copy held at present by the Kranj Municipal Library.
In the light of the importance of this book and the damage it had sustained, the conservation-restoration work was certainly a considerable logistic and professional challenge. The main purpose of this intervention, which is described in more detail elsewhere, was to preserve as much as possible of the original state of the book and at the same time to investigate its structure, paper and other materials. After obtaining and checking this badly damaged copy, we decided to examine also 21 copies available to us, the archive sources, the literature and to carry out non-invasive analyses made possible by conservation-restoration work. The archive sources provided only one detail about the paper on which the Bible was printed, stated in the contract with the printer, where the size of the edition and the some data concerning the paper are recorded. From the data in the literature and an examination of the leaves of the dismantled damaged copy concerning the placement of the watermarks and the laid and chain lines we can be certain that the paper leaves were printed in folio placement and that the quires were composed of ternions. The laid and chain lines are visible on each leaf and a watermark on a good fifth of them. We noticed at least four different forms of the watermarks. From an inspection of 21 copies we established that all of them, except the copy in Olomouc, which is bound in a green coloured limp parchment binding, and those which were re-bound, basically have a structurally similar binding
Friday 8 May, 13:30, National Library
Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Libary, Washington D.C.)
"Reconsidering John Spilman’s paper legacy and the English white paper market"
Most of England’s white paper came from France in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. In an unsuccessful 1585 petition for a monopoly on paper-making, the printer Richard Tottel complained that the French continually sabotaged English paper-making efforts by flooding the market with French paper at a loss and exporting English rags into France. The problem of a lack of a domestic paper supply was finally solved by John Spilman, the queen’s jeweler, in 1588. Spilman established a writing paper mill in Dartford, Kent and was granted a patent for the exclusive production of white writing paper, a monopoly on linen rags and other scraps, and the right to prevent others from establishing similar mills without his license.
It has always been assumed that Spilman quickly abandoned making writing paper because he could not compete against imported grades, either in price or quality. An examination of surviving manuscripts with his watermark suggest otherwise. Spilman’s writing paper was highly regarded as early as 1590, when Mr. John Danett, a newly-appointed deputy muster master in Dublin requested that his boss, Sir Thomas Williams, send him a supply of John Spilman's paper from London, which is "very large and very good," compared to the “very dear & very Scant & very bad” paper in Dublin. The price for this paper was actually slightly cheaper than regular imported pot writing paper: 3.3 pence vs. 4 pence per quire.
Spilman was not the only paper entrepreuner in England at the time. Sir Thomas Holcroft’s unsuccessful 1605 petition to the king for a 21-year license to search imported paper in order to eliminate abuses accused importers of sending reams with fewer, and more defective, sheets, than was allowable. He calculated that if just one sheet were missing per quire in a thousand reams, that would result in forty reams, or 20,000 sheets, of missing paper. Holcroft promised that his proposal would improve upon “the great prejudice and inconveniences lighting upon your Majesties poor subjects by bad, torn, and naughty paper mingled with the good, As all Clerks, Printers & Scriveners do daily find in their own experience.” He accuses papermakers both “with in the land or with out,” with “strangers or Englishmen, as bear no due affection and duty” to the king, perhaps referring to Spilman or other, as yet unidentified, English papermakers.
This talk will explore the impact of Spilman’s paper mill on English paper awareness and connoisseurship, and suggest that his products were a source of national pride for people that were previously unaware of the technology of papermaking. It will also show that Spilman’s paper was much more ubiquitous than previously believed, falling somewhere between elite Venice paper and everyday French pot paper in terms of use.
Friday 8 May, 11:00, National Library
Xu Xiaojie (Toyo Bunko (The Oriental Library), Tokyo)
"Varieties of the printing paper used for the European publication in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries"
Since Gutenberg invented letterpress printing technology, the European publication culture has progressed quickly and many books have come to be published. Therefore, the demand for printing paper also increased rapidly. How have been supplied printing papers in Europe during the periods? Through analysis of paper manufacture material, it turned out that the procurement method of paper varies depending on the region.
It is said that paper was made from tattered cloth in Europe till around the end of the 18th century. However, the materials of the printing paper for publication using in the 16-18th century were different by the area. For example, the books published in some areas were using not tattered cloth but the papers made from straw. Not from the watermark, we would like to consider the printing paper of Europe but from the viewpoint of the material of paper, comparing with the paper of Asia.
In this investigation, we analyzed the paper used for European books printed in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries of the collection of TOYO BUNKO (The Oriental Library). As a method, we used the high-resolution digital microscope, a scientific and nondestructive technique.
Thursday 7 May, 11:00, National Library