Sandars Lectures 2021: Lecture Three
Paper Futures

The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is one of the most prestigious honorary posts to which book historians, librarians and researchers can be appointed. Those elected deliver a series of lectures on their chosen subject.

This year’s third and final Sandars Lecture will explore the relevance and future of paper studies. The technological tension between parchment and paper is a common ground of debate amongst medieval book and archival historians. We can see similar considerations in the discussion around paper and new technologies. Rather than focusing on what can be perceived as tensions, imagining future technological scenarios offers renewed possibilities for collaborative thinking centred on the study of medieval paper. How can we bring the study of medieval paper into the future and how can two technologies, one of the past and one of the future, work together to enhance and share knowledge and tell new stories?

Dr Orietta Da Rold is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on medieval textual cultures and manuscript studies. She has recently published Paper in Medieval Britain: From Pulp to Fiction (CUP), which emerged from her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and edited the Cambridge Companion to British Manuscripts with Elaine Treharne. She is currently working on a project provisionally entitled ‘Paper in Time and Space’.

Recorded Thursday 11 November 2021 at Robinson College, Cambridge.

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