Please join us in the Chapin Gallery at 4pm on Friday November 1, 2024, to celebrate a new exhibit curated by Tasis Gemmill-Nexon (Class of 2026) with Anne Peale. Snacks and hot beverages will be provided!
This summer, Special Collections student employees Tasis Gemmill-Nexon and David Cooper-Boyce opened thousands of our early European books with fresh eyes: they were looking not for printed text, but for scraps of medieval manuscripts used to reinforce the bindings.
Binding waste is a critical but often overlooked source of information on medieval life as well as early modern economies and technologies. Once a manuscript had ceased to be useful for its textual content, it became useful for its material properties—durability and water resistance superior to those of paper.
Cut up and pasted into later books, the presence of these manuscripts in the Chapin Library has long gone undocumented. Tasis’s research has begun to illuminate the dates, authors, and places of origin of these scraps of parchment—scraps that in some cases are twice the age of the printed books they reinforce.
This summer Williams also joined the Digital Scriptorium, an online union catalog of premodern manuscript collections in North America, and we are now benefiting from the expertise of its cataloging team. We look forward to continuing the study of these previously hidden collections in the months and years ahead.