Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fiction by Orietta Da Rold

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fiction by Orietta Da Rold Megan L. Cook Orietta Da Rold. Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fiction. Cam bridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 270. $99.99 cloth; $44.99 paper; $80.00 e-book. On April 13, 2019, a New York Times headline announced that "Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It's Coming Back." The article recounts how, since the requirement that cursive be taught to American schoolchildren was dropped in 2010, proponents have argued for its reinstatement, citing its use in historical documents and personal correspondence, its utility in note-taking, and its role in the development of cognitive and fine motor skills. These pro-cursive activists have had substantial success; as of 2022, more than twenty US states once again mandate that cursive be taught in elementary schools. The twenty-first-century story of cursive and the widespread adaptation of paper as a writing substrate in late medieval England might at first seem wholly separate phenomena. Yet it is clear that, to understand fully the function and value of either textual technology, one needs to understand the uses to which it is put, the symbolic value accorded it in the broader culture, and the conditions under which it might be accessed. Orietta Da Rold's excellent new study, Paper in Medieval England, demonstrates the [End Page 386] sometimes surprising ways that—much like modern-day cursive writing—paper's place in late medieval textual culture was varied, was situationally specific, and carried a wide range of potential connotations. Importantly, however, Da Rold also troubles the periodizing logic of the Times headline's implication that parchment, quills, and cursive are all equally obsolescent relics of a bygone age. Paper in Medieval England shows how paper sat alongside parchment in the workshops and saddlebags of scribes and merchants, valued for its affordability and portability even if its durability was sometimes questioned. This is not a story of one substrate's triumph over another, but one of affordance and mutual accommodation in ways that may not be immediately apparent without the sort of sustained attention to paper in its cultural context that Da Rold provides here. This attention yields compelling insights: one of Da Rold's most intriguing arguments is that paper and cursive script are mutually enhancing tools of communication. In a culture that increasingly valued quick writing and communication, they together allowed letters and other documents to be written and sent with new speed. This is just one of the ways in which this book sets out to "reject some of the most common mantras in paper history—low cost and low status—to tell more accurately the stories of paper across complex social and cultural scenarios" (21). To do so, Da Rold draws on multiple disciplines: economics, history, paleography, and codicology, as well as literary studies. At the core of her study is the "Mapping Medieval Paper in England" project, which catalogues hundreds of datable paper manuscripts from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. The substantial size of this corpus allows Da Rold to move decisively beyond the focus on a single manuscript or cluster of manuscripts that predominates in studies of early books, and to begin to chart larger patterns and trends in the use of paper in medieval England. The book's first chapter focuses on paper as a technology refined over time and as commodity that moved from Asia into Europe, finally becoming known and adopted for use in England during the thirteenth century. Da Rold shows that, while diplomatic correspondence on paper helped spread knowledge of the material throughout Europe, the most important vector in paper's availability in England was commercial links with Italy, particularly via the wool trade. Drawing on the "Mapping Medieval Paper" dataset to trace the presence of thirteenth-century paper in English archives, Da Rold argues that the most common early uses of paper were financial documents and correspondence, reflecting the basic fact that [End Page 387] "paper was associated with transportation and travel" (47). Instead of being disregarded as ephemeral, paper's...