On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age - Couverture rigide

Holsinger, Bruce

 
9780300260212: On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0300260210 ISBN 13 : 9780300260212
Editeur : Yale University Press, 2023

Synopsis

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.

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À propos de l?auteur

Bruce Holsinger is Linden Kent Memorial Professor at the University of Virginia, editor of New Literary History, and an award-winning author. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Yale University Press
Date d'édition
2023
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0300260210
ISBN 13 
9780300260212
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
448
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible