On parchment inheritance animals, archives, and the making of culture from Herodotus to the digital age

A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia "Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history."— Kirkus Reviews 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. "A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia "Richly detailed and illustrated...An engaging exploration of book history."-Kirkus Reviews 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."-- Publisher's description CONTENTS 7 A NOTE ON Texts, Translations, and Terminology 9 PROLOGUE 13 Part I The Medium and Its Making 25 Chapter one. THE BOOK OF THE DUN COW 25 Chapter two. HAIR, FLESH, SENSE 37 Chapter three. GRISTLE, STINK, SKIN 49 Chapter four. THE FLAYED FOLIO 76 Chapter five. UTERINE VELLUM AND THE PAGE UNBORN 117 Chapter six. QUESTIONS OF QUANTITY Membrane and Archival Scale 134 Part II. The Medium and Its Messages 159 Chapter seven. PARCHMENT INVENTIONS 159 Chapter eight. ST. AUGUSTINE’S (A) THEOLOGY OF PARCHMENT 177 Chapter nine. RIDDLED FLESH 191 Chapter ten. THE HUMAN BOOK AND THE BODY OF CHRIST 205 Chapter eleven. TORAH, TALMUD, TEFILLIN 235 Chapter twelve. SHAKESPEARE’S PARCHMENTS, IN LIFE AND DEATH 256 Part III. The Medium and Modernity 285 Chapter thirteen. BIOCODICOLOGY Book History and the Biomolecular Revolution 285 Chapter fourteen. ECOCODICOLOGY or, Is the Book a Byproduct? 300 Chapter fifteen. PARCHMENT ELEGIES 319 EPILOGUE Digital Vellum 353 NOTES 359 BIBLIOGRAPHY 381 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 417 PHOTO CREDITS 420 INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS 425 SUBJECT INDEX 428