WRBG January Virtual Book Discussion: On Parchment by Bruce Holsinger

Happy New Year WRBG!

Hello all,

We hope you’ve had a safe and happy holiday season, and we welcome you back for a new year of programming with the Washington Rare Book Group. As mentioned in our holiday letter, the January event is going to continue our newest tradition, the WRBG book discussion, with On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age by Bruce Holsinger.

Publisher’s Description: For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era’s surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the
leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom.

Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of “uterine vellum,” and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources—codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art—that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.

Bring your thoughts, comments, and questions! The virtual book discussion will be held on Friday, January 31st at noon via Zoom. Even though there is no cost for this event, please RSVP by January 30th so we can send you an email with login instructions prior to the event. The Zoom link will be emailed to registered participants in advance of the program.

We hope you will join us!
Amanda Zimmerman

Questions? Contact us!
washingtonrarebookgroup@gmail.com